Background
Robert Musil was born on November 6, 1880, in Klagenfurt, Carinthia, Austria. He was the son of a professor of engineering.
( Robert Musil is ranked alongside Marcel Proust and Jame...)
Robert Musil is ranked alongside Marcel Proust and James Joyce for his monumental, unfinished novel, The Man Without Qualities. His Diaries, a distillation of forty-three years of material, are valuable in a number of ways: as a first-hand historical document of life in twentieth-century central Europe, as a kind of unwitting autobiography of a great novelist, and as a writer's notebook that details the moods of artistic adventure.Readers will gain keen insights into Musil's passage from scientist, to soldier, to novelist, in honest passages that reveal the man in all his humor, ambition, frustration, and transcendence.
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( 'between the life we live and the life we feel...there i...)
'between the life we live and the life we feel...there is the invisible border, like a narrow gate' Set in a boarding school in a remote area of the Habsburg Empire at the turn of the last century, The Confusions of Young Torless is an intense study of an adolescent's psychological development as he struggles to come to terms with his conflicting emotions. Through his relationship with two other boys Torless is led into sadistic and sexual encounters with a third pupil which both repel and fascinate him. Estranged from everyday life, Torless gradually learns to accept his experiences and describe them with analytical precision. The novel is based on the author's own experiences at an Austrian military academy. A school story with a difference, Torless extends the scope of fiction with its non-judgemental presentation of transgressive sexuality and violence. It is a profoundly disturbing exploration of a non-moral outlook on life and of dictatorial attitudes that prefigure the outbreak of the First World War and the rise of fascism. About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.
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(Robert Musil's Thought Flights vividly evokes the secrets...)
Robert Musil's Thought Flights vividly evokes the secrets, challenges, and mundanities of interwar life in cosmopolitan Vienna and Berlin. The texts presented here have been selected by translator Genese Grill from Musil's Nachlass and collected for the first time under the title Thought Flights. They include material originally published in journals, newspapers, and magazines - but not included in Musil's Posthumous Papers of a Living Author - as well as literary fragments and heretofore unpublished texts. Despite the temporal, geographical, and cultural distance between Musil's world and ours, our own time and troubles are all too recognizable in Musil's portrayals of the "age of money," of simulation, and of standardization. Thought Flights is a lament of contemporary complacency, optimism, and homogenization as well as a celebration of living words and original thought by one of the great Modernists of the 20th century. As an astonishing master of metaphor and self-described "Monsieur le Vivisecteur," Musil explores the psyches and lives of himself and his contemporaries with illuminating insight. The lucid, striking prose of his stories and vignettes, and the wise and witty commentary of his glosses, show Musil's response to innovations in technology, art, and politics, and his efforts to enact a strategy for both illuminating and ameliorating the crisis of language that haunted his contemporaries. Moving effortlessly from discussion of fashion to Kant's categorical imperative, le vivisecteur writes with humor, lyricism, and fervor in an open genre availing itself of poetic prose, philosophical essay, fictional narrative, and feuilletonistic lightness. Through unlikely combinations and metaphoric syntheses, Musil brings "beauty and excitement" into the world, and when things that are usually separate unite, thoughts "fly." With this publication, the now growing English-language corpus of the author of The Confusions of Young Torless, Five Women, and The Man without Qualities is expanded further. Other volumes of Musil's writings will be forthcoming from Contra Mundum Press over the next decade.
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Robert Musil was born on November 6, 1880, in Klagenfurt, Carinthia, Austria. He was the son of a professor of engineering.
Musil received his elementary education at military schools from 1892 to 1897. After serving for a period as an officer in the Austrian army, he began engineering studies, later changing to philosophy, logic, and experimental psychology. In 1908 he obtained a doctorate for his work on Ernst Mach from the University of Berlin.
Between 1911 and 1914 Musil served as librarian at the Technische Hochschule in Vienna. During this time he also was briefly an editor of Die neue Rundschau, a review. During World War I Musil was an officer in the Austrian army, and in the postwar period he was employed in the War Office and in various other government ministries. Between 1922 and 1938 Musil lived in Berlin and Vienna, supporting himself as a writer and through systematic contributions from interested friends. After the Anschluss, Musil went voluntarily into exile, living in Switzerland until his death.
Musil published his first novel, Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törless (Young Törless), in 1906. It is a story of troubled adolescence set in a military school modeled upon the one attended by both Musil and Rainer Maria Rilke. Musil's chief problem in the book was achieving an emotional equilibrium both within his characters and in their relationships to their fellow human beings. The book was immediately successful, and Musil next published Vereinigungen, two short stories, in 1911. In both of them-Die Vollendung der Liebe and Die Versuchung der stillen Veronika-unbearable reality is transformed by excessive imagination. The resulting heightening of the emotions brings about a spiritual, nonphysical union with the loved one. Both of Musil's dramas, Die Schwärmer (1921) and Vinzenz und die Freundin bedeutender Männer (1924), represent stepping-stones toward achievement of a more tangible equilibrium. In times of great emotional intensity, says Musil, limits vanish, and man can achieve identification and union with one's fellowman. The three short stories of Drei Frauen (1921 - 1924) posit and resolve the problems caused by logical, rational, and emotionally limited men in relationship to emotionally more complicated women. Monumental Achievement In a sense all of Musil's early work was a preparation for his great novel and masterpiece, Der Mann ohne Eigenochaften (The Man without Qualities), which he began. The first volume was issued in German in 1930, the second in 1933, and the third in 1942. He was working on the fourth at the time of his death. About 365 pages of this novel were published in English translation in 1953. They represent about one half of volume 1. Volumes 2 and 3 were also published in English translation. Musil's magnum opus is a novel of the life and history of pre-World War I Austria. Ulrich, the hero of the novel, is the man without qualities, that is to say, a man with unimpaired potential. Like his creator, he has been an officer, engineer, and mathematician. He is the secretary of a celebration, whose planning begins in 1913, for the 1918 anniversary of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The ironical implication is that the empire will have collapsed before the celebration is held. Ulrich takes a year's leave from his duties to attempt to discover the meaning of life. His scientific training enables him to look at life as a laboratory, and he regards emotional intensity as the only meaningful morality. He achieves balance and equilibrium after he meets his sister Agathe. As they analyze their emotional lives, they experience a state of mystical intensity based upon a rational interpretation, the highest degree of feeling.
(Robert Musil's Thought Flights vividly evokes the secrets...)
(Ulrich's life in pre-World War I Vienna is influenced by ...)
( Robert Musil is ranked alongside Marcel Proust and Jame...)
(This collection of exploratory pieces, short stories, and...)
( 'between the life we live and the life we feel...there i...)
Musil marries Martha Marcovaldi.