Of all our less creditable emotions, pity may be the most corrosive. Pity is notoriously two-faced: in exact ratio to the measure of pity we bestow on some suffering creature, we experience a sudden and intoxicating rise in self-esteem. Pity – the wrong kind, anyway – erects a discreet personal promontory in our minds from which we gaze down upon a victim. Nobody’s proud of being envious. Pity, by contrast, incites to selfpuffery: How fine, how magnanimous, we abruptly find ourselves to be! Nowadays, of course, we prefer to use such terms as “compassion” or “empathy” to camouflage self-congratulation. However laudable and genuine pity in certain forms may be, a subtle mechanism of aggrandizement remains its most dangerous temptation.

Hold on! I hear you object: Didn’t Aristotle, who was right about pretty much everything that matters, declare that pity and terror were the aims of tragedy, and much to be desired for the purpose of catharsis? Isn’t pity good? Well, sometimes, but this only strengthens my point. For pity and terror to effect catharsis, there must be some salutary distance; at a tragedy we are witnesses to a spectacle. We are moved and even terrified by the sight of Oedipus with his eye-sockets gushing blood; we pity him, but don’t identify with him. The purgative effect is mediated by the strict perimeter of the proscenium; we sit above the action. To feel this in the presence of some actual sufferer, however, suggests smug heartlessness.

The Viennese writer Stefan Zweig’s “Beware of Pity” (Pushkin Press, 365 pages, $12.95) – his only novel, first published in 1939, under the title “Impatience of Heart” (“Ungeduld des Herzens”) – provokes such thoughts. This English translation, beautifully executed by Phyllis and Trevor Blewitt, appeared originally in 1982. Pushkin Press, whose sleek and elegant paperbacks are a pleasure to behold, has taken on the noble commitment of reissuing most of Zweig’s remarkable fiction. For this they deserve the praise of all lovers of great prose.

“Beware of Pity” is an utterly unsparing dissection of the corruptions of false pity. This might seem a strange theme for a book written in the 1930s, when even the most dubious forms of fellow feeling were in short supply. In the novel, the young Lieutenant Anton Hofmiller, stationed with his regiment in a provincial town on the eve of the Great War, finds himself steadily invaded by a kind of insidious fellow-feeling that paralyzes him and leads to tragedy. As the novel gathers momentum, we realize that Zweig is in fact exposing a pervasive self-deception that conceals its true impulses under a high-sounding name. In stripping away the lies with which we disguise our true desires from ourselves, Zweig lays bare the larger lies of the age; it was, in fact, the perfect novel for that “low, dishonest decade,” as Auden termed it.

Bored with garrison life and its monotonous protocols, the lieutenant is drawn into the glittering circle of the Kekesfalvas, an immensely wealthy family who own a castle where they entertain nightly on a lavish scale. For all their wealth, however, this is a family in agony. Edith, the 16-year-old daughter, has been afflicted by a paralysis of the spine and cannot walk without the help of clanking iron braces.

Zweig is masterful at depicting the deepening relationship between Lieutenant Hofmiller and Edith. The young officer is revolted by Edith’s handicap, but his revulsion steadily turns into an all-enveloping pity; for her part, Edith falls helplessly in love with her handsome visitor, a fact the reader realizes long before the lieutenant does.

Zweig’s description of the lieutenant’s enmeshment is harrowing. Though he fights against it, he cannot resist the feeling of godlike exaltation his pity for Edith and her father gives him. Edith is desperate for a cure; every attention from the lieutenant feeds her hope. He in turn becomes aware of the power he wields to cast her down or raise her up, along with her whole family, and revels in it:

On that evening I was God. But I did not look down coldly from an exalted throne upon my works and deeds. Kindly and mild, I sat there in the midst of my creatures, and perceived their countenances dimly as through the silvery mist of my clouds. On my left sat an old man. … I had removed death from him and he spoke in the voice of one resurrected. … On my right sat a young girl, and she had been a cripple. … But now the light of returning health shed its rays upon her. With the breath of my lips I had raised her up out of the hell of her fears.

The monstrous hubris that takes possession of the lieutenant exerts a morbid grip on the reader. Zweig’s narrative never falters. We feel ourselves drawn into the savage fluctuations of hope and dread, self-loathing, and vainglory, hard truth and comfortable falsehood, from the first page to the last. Zweig was an extraordinary storyteller and the novel teems with pungent vignettes of a score of secondary characters, each of whom is fully realized and unforgettable. Chief among these are the impressive Dr. Condor, who embodies a tough but loving pity, and Edith’s father, originally a Jewish rag-peddler who wrangled a title of nobility when he became a millionaire. Both men married their wives out of pity but came to love them devotedly; their stories form a counterfoil to the wretched lieutenant’s.

Born in 1881, Stefan Zweig was one of the most brilliant writers of an exceptionally rich period in Austrian literary history. A close contemporary of Schnitzler, Hofmannsthal, Musil, and Broch, he first became famous and successful through his short stories and biographies. As a biographer he has an eerie ability to get inside his subjects’ skins. In the distant days when I dreamed of becoming a novelist, I read his life of Balzac the way others read the Bible, the only lasting result of which, in my case, alas, was insomnia fuelled by a habit of inordinate coffee drinking (Balzac, Zweig tells us, drank 30 to 40 cups a night).

After the Nazis came to power, Zweig knew no peace; in 1934, he moved to London and took British citizenship. Soon he relocated to New York. Even this wasn’t far enough; he and his wife moved to Brazil. There, in 1942, the couple were found dead in their bed; they had made a suicide pact. The lucidity that distinguishes all his fiction, together with his hatred of self-delusion, must have made the “world of yesterday” (as he titled his memoir), and perhaps every imaginable version of the world, appear beyond recovery.