The struggle against madness. Hoelderlin. Kleist. Nietzsche.

Stefan Zweig is a classic of Austrian literature, the author of magnificent psychological novellas and biographies fictionalized, translated into all languages of the world. "The Struggle with the Daemon" is perhaps one of the most emotional, vivid, and poetic books by Zweig, in which portraits of three artists of the word who ended their lives in a "deadly intoxication of feelings" are given. "Not connected to their era, not understood by their generation, they flash like a meteorite, rushing into the night of their destiny. They themselves do not know their path, their mission, for their path is from boundlessness to boundlessness." By closely examining the lives and works of Hölderlin, Kleist, and Nietzsche, the author discovers something common in their fates: a fatal demonic essence that, endowing its wards with the magical gift of words, at the same time generates in them an irresistible urge towards self-destruction.