(These artful new translations of nine of Arthur Schnitzle...)
These artful new translations of nine of Arthur Schnitzler's most important stories and novellas―including "Dream Story," on which Stanley Kubrick based his widely acclaimed film Eyes Wide Shut-reinforce the Viennese author's remarkable achievement as literary modernist, depth psychologist, and prose stylist. The psychologically complex and morally ambiguous tales of love and adultery, dream and reality, desire and death in Night Games prove Schnitzler to be fully the equal of his great contemporaries Kafka, Rilke, and Musil, and justify Freud's praise of his knowledge of depth psychology. The collection includes powerful early works such as "The Dead Are Silent" and "Geronimo and His Brother" as well as late masterpieces such as "Night Games" and "Dream Story." Schnitzler creates memorable characters and makes original and masterful use of inner monologue, "stream of consciousness," and unrealiable narrator-techniques that he was among the first, if not the first, to use-to explore the complexities of their inner lives even as he delineates their social world with elegance and wit. The results are comic, tragic, powerful, and psychologically compelling tales of love, sex, and death that often surprise. They are as fresh and relevant to us today, a century later, as when they were first written.
(A hilarious takedown of celebrity and false genius, never...)
A hilarious takedown of celebrity and false genius, never before available in the US. An NYRB Classics Original Eduard Saxberger is a quiet man who is getting on in years and has spent the better part of them working at a desk in an office. Once upon a time, however, he published a book of poetry, Wanderings, and one day when he returns from his usual walk he finds a young man waiting for him. “Are you,” he wants to know, “Saxberger the poet?” Is Saxberger Saxberger the poet? Was he ever a poet? A real poet? Saxberger hasn’t written a poem for years, but he begins to frequent the coffee shops of Vienna with his young admirer and his no less admiring circle of friends, and as he does he begins to yearn for a different life from the daily round followed by rounds of drinks and billiards with familiar buddies like Grossinger, the deli owner. And the ardent attentions of Fräulein Gasteiner, the tragedienne, are not entirely unwelcome. The Hope of Young Vienna is how the young artists style themselves, and they are arranging an event that will introduce them to the world. They insist that the distinguished author of Wanderings take part in it as well. Will he write something new for the occasion? Will he at last receive his due? Late Fame, an unpublished novella recently rediscovered in the papers of the great turn-of-the-century Austrian playwright and novelist Arthur Schnitzler, is a bittersweet parable of hope lost and found.
20th Century Dream Story (Penguin Modern Classics)
(This wonderful translation of Dream Story will allow a fr...)
This wonderful translation of Dream Story will allow a fresh generation of readers to enjoy this beautiful, heartless and baffling novella. Dream Story tells how through a simple sexual admission a husband and wife ware driven apart into rival worlds of erotic revenge.
(Dying, Flight into Darkness, and Fraulein Else reveal the...)
Dying, Flight into Darkness, and Fraulein Else reveal the depths of Schnitzler's psychological and moral understanding of life as well as the masterful storytelling techniques that immerse the reader into the very center of his characters' thoughts and emotions. The tales of Arthur Schnitzler―especially as rendered in Margret Schaefer's clear, uncluttered translations―are many suggestive, allusive, and dreamlike things. But they are most certainly not the work of a period writer. ―Chris Lehmann, Washington Post Book World
(A finely drawn portrayal of the disintegration of Austria...)
A finely drawn portrayal of the disintegration of Austrian liberal society under the impact of nationalism and anti-semitism, The Road into the Open (Der Weg ins Freie, 1908) is a remarkable novel by a major Austrian writer of the early twentieth century. Set in fin-de-siècle Austriathe cafés, salons, and musical concerts frequented by the Viennese eliteSchnitzler's perceptive exploration of the creative process and the private lives and public aspirations of urban Jewish intellectuals ranks with the highest achievements of Karl Kraus and Robert Musil. The novel's central character, Baron Georg von Wergenthin, is a handsome young composer whose troubled relations with women, musical collaborators, and representatives of the old social order make Schnitzler's book a revealing investigation of individual psychology and social allegory. In his comprehensive introduction, Russell Berman situates the book within the literary and political history of Central Europe and analyzes its relation to psychoanalysis, Marxism, musical aesthetics, and the legacy of European modernism. A finely drawn portrayal of the disintegration of Austrian liberal society under the impact of nationalism and anti-semitism, The Road into the Open (Der Weg ins Freie, 1908) is a remarkable novel by a major Austrian writer of the early twentieth century. Set in fin-de-siècle Austriathe cafés, salons, and musical concerts frequented by the Viennese eliteSchnitzler's perceptive exploration of the creative process and the private lives and public aspirations of urban Jewish intellectuals ranks with the highest achievements of Karl Kraus and Robert Musil. The novel's central character, Baron Georg von Wergenthin, is a handsome young composer whose troubled relations with women, musical collaborators, and representatives of the old social order make Schnitzler's book a revealing investigation of individual psychology and social allegory. In his comprehensive introduction, Russell Berman situates the book within the literary and political history of Central Europe and analyzes its relation to psychoanalysis, Marxism, musical aesthetics, and the legacy of European modernism.
Arthur Schnitzler was an Austrian author and dramatist.
Background
Arthur Schnitzler was born at Praterstrasse 16, Leopoldstadt, Vienna, capital of the Austrian Empire (as of 1867, part of the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary). He was the son of a prominent Hungarian laryngologist, Johann Schnitzler (1835–1893), and Luise Markbreiter (1838–1911), a daughter of the Viennese doctor Philipp Markbreiter. His parents were both from Jewish families.
Education
In 1879 Schnitzler began studying medicine at the University of Vienna and in 1885 he received his doctorate of medicine. He began work at Vienna's General Hospital (German: Allgemeines Krankenhaus der Stadt Wien), but ultimately abandoned the practice of medicine in favour of writing.
Career
From 1887 to 1894 he edited the medical journal, Internationale Klinische Rundschau, and his own articles dealt with psychotherapy. However, he was becoming more interested in the literary analysis of the human soul. Sigmund Freud once stated that Schnitzler’s poetic intuition led to some of the same discoveries as did his own painstaking research.
In the 1880s Schnitzler wrote poems and tales under a pseudonym Anatol, since he did not want to jeopardize his scientific reputation. The main character in a series of playlets, which were published in 1892, Anatol is Schnitzler’s symbol for youth. He may have faults but he also possesses glamor and wit. He may be unfaithful to his “sweet girls,” but he also has the magic gift of genuinely falling in love again and again for the first time. The female counterpart of this philanderer is the sweet maiden, a literary type created by Schnitzler. In the Anatol playlets she is treated frivolously as merely a source of adventure and pleasure. However, in Schnitzler’s first full-length plays, Marchen (1981), and Liebelei (1895 Dalliance, 1896) he presents love as viewed by woman. Love then assumes more serious aspects. What may be mere flirtation for the man is shown to be laden with deepest tragedy for the woman.
As the dramatist matured, his plays centered more often on the problems and ills of married life. In the plays Paracelsus (1897), Der einsame Weg, (1903; The Lonely Way, 1904), Zwischenspiel(1904; Intermezzo, 1915), and Das weite Land (1908; The Vast Domain, 1923) he probes deeply into emo¬tional sickness but offers no general solutions. He rather holds that each disturbance in the relations between human beings must be carefully studied and diagnosed before a specific remedy can be prescribed. The medicine that cures in one case may kill in another. Each human being is unique, and generalizing about human conduct is folly.
In the ten dialogues of Reigen completed in 1897 (Merry-Go-Round, 1953) but whose publication and staging were delayed for many years because the author correctly feared misinterpretation, he depicts with sardonic humor the roundelay of sexuality. In dispassionate, melancholy conversations, he sketches the pettiness, brutality, and absurdity of the sex experience when it is purely a physical expression devoid of love. He selects his characters from all social strata and depicts each of them as equally pitiable. The play aroused an enormous scandal when first performed in Berlin in 1920 but was ultimately a tremendous success as the French film La ronde, as well as in British theaters of the 1980s and on television.
Schnitzler’s confession of faith is contained in his autobiographic novel Der Weg ins Freie 1907; The Road to the Open, 1913). It is the faith of an extreme skeptic who has reached the point of doubting his own doubts. Freedom and understanding loom as his ideals until he comes to realize that excessive freedom leads to a disintegration of one’s personality, and that understanding, if carried too far acts as a paralyzing force. In this novel, as well as in Professor Bernhardi, he also grapples with Jewish issues, primarily Zionism and assimilation. He does not minimize the difficulties of Jewish existence as a minority in each nation, but neither does he accept the Zionist solution of his friend Theodor Herzl . Schnitzler holds that anti-Semitism will persist as long as the sense of difference remains deep-rooted between Jews and their neighbors and will operate against mass assimilation. Perhaps in a thousand years the “Jewish question” may cease to exist, but not in the immediate future. Meanwhile, it will be up to individual Jews to adjust themselves as best possible to their condition of Jewishness.
From the closing decade of the 19th century, Schnitzler was a central figure of Jungwien, the literary movement that opposed the naturalism of Berlin and Munich. This movement dominated Austrian letters until World War I. With the rise of expressionism, Schnitzler’s fame waned, even though he continued with dramatic masterpieces such as Komodie der Verfuhrung (“A Comedy of Seduction,” 1924) and Der Gang zum Weiher 'The Walk to the Lake,” 1927). It reached its lowest ebb during the Nazi years. Since the end of World War II, his reputation rose again and his works are recognized as classics of Austrian literature.
(A hilarious takedown of celebrity and false genius, never...)
Connections
On 26 August 1903, Schnitzler married Olga Gussmann (1882–1970), a 21-year-old aspiring actress and singer who came from a Jewish middle-class family. They had a son, Heinrich (1902–1982), born on 9 August 1902. In 1909 they had a daughter, Lili, who committed suicide in 1928. The Schnitzlers separated in 1921. Schnitzler died on 21 October 1931, in Vienna, of a brain hemorrhage. In 1938, following the Anschluss, his son Heinrich went to the United States and did not return to Austria until 1959; he is the father of the Austrian musician and conservationist Michael Schnitzler, born in 1944 in Berkeley, California, who moved to Vienna with his parents in 1959.