“The World of Yesterday” is the last book by Stefan Zweig, the confession-testament of the famous Austrian writer, created in the midst of World War II in exile. In addition to a broad panorama of the social and cultural life of Europe in the first half of the twentieth century, the reader will find in it the author’s reflections on the causes and background of the enormous human catastrophe, as well as, in spite of everything, sincere hope and faith in the final victory of reason, goodness and humanism.

The World of Yesterday, called a great book by Thomas Mann, took many years to reach German readers. The path of this book to the Russian reader turned out to be much more difficult and took a total of five decades. In this publication, for the first time in Russian, the autobiography of the translator Gennady Efimovich Kagan “Yesterday's World Today” is published, a fascinating story about life, strangely echoing the book by Stefan Zweig, on the translation of which Gennady Efimovich worked for many years and even more time tried to publish it on the territory USSR.