<DIV>It was in Vienna in 1913 that a young Stalin arrived on a mission that would launch him into the upper echelon of Russian revolutionaries. Here also the failed artist Adolf Hitler kept daubing watercolors and spouting tirades at fellow drifters in a flophouse. Vienna was internationally celebrated as the intellectually pulsating city of Freud and Jung, Kafka and Wittgenstein. And here, in the spring of 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to theAustro? Hungarian throne, had a troubled and fateful audience with Emperor Franz Joseph. A few months later, the bullet that killed the archduke<BR>would set off the Great War destined to kill ten million more.<BR><BR>With luminous prose that has twice made him a finalist for the National Book Award, Frederic Morton limns the opulent, elegant, incomparable sunset metropolis?Vienna on the brink of cataclysm.<BR></DIV>