the man without qualities by robert musil

Finally, some of Musil’s short prose pieces, collected in Nachlass zu Lebzeiten (1936, Posthumous Papers of a Living Author), rival Kafka’s fables in their vertiginous humor and enigmatic creepiness.Īll of Musil’s works (the German edition of which runs to nine volumes) have their partisans and admirers. “The examples,” he dryly notes, “are pretty blatant.” As indeed they are. Particularly pertinent is its withering analysis of “the higher, pretentious form of stupidity”-the “real disease of culture,” in Musil’s opinion, which infiltrates even “the highest intellectual sphere” and has repercussions throughout society. “Uber die Dummheit” (“On Stupidity”), a lecture that Musil delivered in Vienna in 1937, deserves special mention for its signal contemporary relevance. Then there are Musil’s essays, some of which are masterpieces of ironic cultural commentary. Drei Frauen (1924, Three Women), a celebrated suite of three novellas, plumbs the relationship between eroticism (generally unhappy) and transcendence-one of Musil’s staple themes. Musil’s play Die Schwärmer (1921, The Enthusiasts) explores that favored modern topic, the collapse of traditional bourgeois ideals its taut language and intense dramatization won it the Kleist Prize in 1923 and eventually, a regular spot in the German theatrical repertory. (Later, in the 1930s and 1940s, Törless was hailed as a prescient allegory of the spiritual deformations of the Nazi era.) This brutal yet seductively introspective tale of adolescent cruelty and sexual exploitation at a German military boarding school was published to instant critical acclaim in 1906, when Musil was only twenty-six. He is admired by literati for a handful of astringent modernist fictions, especially for his first novel, Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törless ( The Bewilderments of the Schoolboy Törless).

The Austrian novelist Robert Musil (1880– 1942) occupies a peculiar position in the pantheon of great twentieth-century writers. Robert Musil, “Address at the Memorial Service for Rilke in Berlin” (1927) In the realm of the aesthetic … even imperfection and lack of completion have their value. Neither of them was, neither he nor she: their ideas and their conduct had long left no doubt of that but they were nihilists and activists, sometimes one and sometimes the other, whichever happened to come up. “Why, then, aren’t we realists?” Ulrich asked himself.

The man without qualities by robert musil