Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
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Leopold Ritter[1] von Sacher-Masoch (27 January, 1836 – 9 March, 1895) was an Austrian writer and journalist, who gained renown at his time for his stories of Galician life and romantic novels. The term masochism is derived from his name.
During his life, Sacher-Masoch was well-known as a man of letters, who was seen by some as a potential successor to Goethe and was often compared to Turgenev. He was a utopian thinker who espoused socialist and humanist ideals in his fiction and non-fiction. Most of his works remain untranslated in English; the novel Venus in Furs is his only book commonly available in English.
Contents
[edit] Biography
[edit] Galician Storyteller
Von Sacher-Masoch was born in Lemberg, the capital of the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, a province of the Austrian Empire (now Lviv, Ukraine), into the Roman Catholic family of an Austrian police director and Charlotte von Masoch. He started learning German at age 12. He studied law, history and mathematics at Graz University and after graduating from it moved back to Lemberg where he became a professor. His early, non-fictional publications dealt mostly with Austrian history. At the same time Masoch turned to the folklore and culture of his homeland, Galicia. Soon he abandoned lecturing and became a free man of letters. Within a decade his short stories and novels prevailed over his historical non-fiction works, though historic themes continued to imbue his fiction.
Masoch found a particular interest in depicting picturesque types of various ethnicities that inhabited Galicia. From the 1860s to the 1880s he published a number of volumes of Jewish Short Stories, Polish Short Stories, Galician Short Stories, German Court Stories and Russian Court Stories. His works were published in translations in Russia and France.
[edit] The Legacy of Cain
In 1869 Sacher-Masoch conceived a grandiose series of short stories under the collective title Legacy of Cain that would represent the author's aesthetic weltanschauung. The cycle opened with manifesto-like The Wanderer that brought out the misogynist theme that became peculiar to Masoch's writings. But of the six planned volumes only the first two were ever completed. By the middle of 1880s Masoch abandoned the idea of Legacy of Cain. Nevertheless the published volumes of the series included Masoch's most known stories and Venus in Furs (1869) of them is the most famous today. The short novel expressed Sacher-Masoch's fantasies and fetishes (especially for dominant women wearing fur). He did his best to live out his fantasies with his mistresses and wives.
[edit] Philosemitism and Feminism
He edited the Leipzig-based monthly literary magazine Auf der Höhe. Internationale Review (At the Pinnacle. International Review), which was published from October 1881 to September 1885. This was a progressive magazine aimed at tolerance and integration for Jews in Saxony, as well as emancipation of women with articles on women's education and suffrage.
In his later years, he worked against local antisemitism through an association for adult education called the Oberhessischer Verein für Volksbildung (OVV), founded in 1893 with his second wife, Hulda Meister.[2]
[edit] Private Life
On 8 December 1869 Sacher-Masoch and his mistress Fanny Pistor signed a contract making him her slave for the period of six months, with the stipulation that the Baroness wear furs as often as possible, especially when she was in a cruel mood. Sacher-Masoch took the alias of “Gregorâ€, a stereotypical male servant's name, and fitted out in disguise as the servant of the Baroness. The two traveled by train to Italy. As in Venus in Furs, he traveled in the third class compartment, while she had a seat in first class, arriving in Venice (Florence, in the novel), where they were not known, and would not arouse suspicion.[3]
He pressured his first wife, Aurora von Römelin, whom he married in 1873, into living out the experience of the book, against her preferences. He found his family life to be unexciting, and eventually got a divorce and married his assistant.
[edit] Later Years
In 1875 Masoch wrote The Ideals of Our Time, the author's attempt to give a portrait of German society during its Gründerzeit period.
In his late 50s, his mental health began to deteriorate, and he spent the last years of his life in psychiatric care. According to official reports, he died in Lindheim, Germany in 1895; however some claim that he actually died in an asylum in Mannheim in 1905.[4]
Sacher-Masoch is the great-great-uncle to British singer/actress Marianne Faithfull on her mother's side, the Viennese Baroness Eva Erisso.
[edit] Sacher-Masoch and Masochism
The term masochism was coined in 1886 by the Austrian psychiatrist Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing in his seminal work Psychopathia Sexualis:
During recent years facts have been advanced which prove that Sacher-Masoch was not only the poet of Masochism, but that he himself was afflicted with the anomaly. Although these proofs were communicated to me without restriction, I refrain from giving them to the public. I refute the accusation that 'I have coupled the name of a revered author with a perversion of the sexual instinct,' which has been made against me by some admirers of the author and by some critics of my book. As a man Sacher-Masoch cannot lose anything in the estimation of his cultured fellow-beings simply because he was afflicted with an anomaly of his sexual feelings. As an author he suffered severe injury so far as the influence and intrinsic merit of his work is concerned, for so long and whenever he eliminated his perversion from his literary efforts he was a gifted writer, and as such would have achieved real greatness had he been actuated by normally sexual feelings. In this respect he is a remarkable example of the powerful influence exercised by the vita sexualis be it in the good or evil sense over the formation and direction of man's mind.[5]
â€Sacher-Masoch was not pleased with Kraft-Ebbing's assertions. Nevertheless, details of Masoch's private life were obscure until Aurora von Römelin's memoirs were published in 1905 (under the pseudonym of Wanda von Sacher-Masoch).
[edit] Books
Selected bibliography of Masoch's fiction books: novels and collections of short stories. For detailed original bibliography, see the main article.
[edit] See also
