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Fairy Tale Companion:

Robert Musil

Musil, Robert (1880–1942), distinguished Austrian writer. Aside from the fairy tale‐novellas in his trilogy Drei Frauen (Three Women, 1924) which show his interest in the romantic tradition, Musil also incorporated fairy‐tale motifs into his collection of stories Nachlass zu Lebzeiten (Posthumous Papers while Alive, 1936). In his major work Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man without Qualities, 1930–43), Musil developed a mode of cognition in which the fairy tale functions as a preliminary stage to his Utopie des anderen Zustands (Utopia of the Other Condition).

Bibliography

  • Kümmerling‐Meibauer, Bettina, Die Kunstmärchen von Hofmannsthal, Musil und Döblin (1991).

— Bettina Kümmerling‐Meibauer

 
 

Musil, Robert, Edler von (Klagenfurt, 1880-1942, Geneva), who in his writing omitted the title gained by his father in 1917, was the son of an engineer, who eventually became a professor of his subject. Musil was sent to a cadet school, later discovered his mathematical and engineering abilities, and transferred to engineering studies at Brünn (Brno). For a short time (1902-3) a demonstrator at the Technical College (Technische Hochschule), Stuttgart, he studied mathematics, philosophy, and psychology at Berlin University, obtaining a doctorate in 1908, though he refrained from the pursuit of an academic career. In 1911 he took up a post as librarian at the Technical College in Vienna, which he abandoned in favour of an appointment to the editorial staff of Die neue Rundschau in Berlin. At the outbreak of the 1914-18 War he was called up for the Austrian army, serving chiefly on the Italian front, being decorated, and reaching the rank of captain. Evidence of Musil's response to the war is contained in the article Europäertum, Krieg, Deutschtum (1914); steeped in the traditions of imperial Austria, he emerged from the end of the war with an even greater consciousness of its heritage, in which he remained rooted throughout his life. From 1919 to 1922 he was a civil servant at the War Office, but lost this post as a result of the financial crisis, which also cost him his private income. In 1924 his parents died. For the remainder of his life Musil subsisted on his writings, and on journalistic work, which included contributions to the Prager Presse. From 1931 he lived in Berlin, moved in 1933 to Vienna, and in 1938 to Switzerland, staying in Zurich before settling in Geneva.

While still a student, Musil published the short novel Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß (1906), and in 1911 the two stories of Vereinigung, Die Vollendung der Liebe and Die Versuchung der stillen Veronika. During the 1920s he made his name with shorter works of fiction and two plays, Die Schwärmer (1921) and Vinzenz oder die Freundin bedeutender Männer (1923), which were performed in Berlin and Vienna. In 1924 he published a group of three stories, Grigia, Die Portugiesin, and Tonka, under the collective title Drei Frauen, and in 1927 a further ingenious and enigmatic tale, Die Amsel. Apart from his shorter writings, however, his real preoccupation was with the novel that became his life's work, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften; it is also the work through which interest in him was revived after the 1939-45 War. The first volume of this work (never completed, but constantly revised and replanned) appeared in 1930, and part of the second volume in 1933, the remainder being published posthumously in 1943. An extended version was edited by A. Frisé in 1952 (revised 1965). In it imperial Austria of 1913 found a brilliant analyst.

Musil's principal characters, including those of his plays, are obsessed by being different from others who typify the society to which they belong, and experience reality as a labyrinth of irrationality, for which Musil develops a complex symbolical style. At his best a writer of extraordinary discipline and intellectual capacity, he suffered from the awareness that he could not achieve in his novel the comprehensive vision for which he strove. He entitled a collection of 1936, during which time his health had already been affected, Nachlaß zu Lebzeiten. It includes essays written before the mid-1920s, Skizze der Erkenntnis des Dichters, Geist und Erfahrung, Die Nation als Ideal und als Wirklichkeit, Das hilflose Europa, and Symptomen-Theater.

Gesammelte Werke in Einzelausgaben (3 vols.), ed. A. Frisé, appeared in 1952-7 and contained his novel (vol. 1), Tagebücher, Aphorismen, Essays und Reden (vol. 2), and Prosa, Dramen, Späte Briefe (vol. 3); Theater. Kritisches und Theoretisches, ed. M.-L. Roth, appeared in 1965 A. Frisé edited Tagebücher (2 vols., 1976), Briefe (2 vols., 1981), and Gesammelte Werke (9 vols., 1978). Der literarische Nachlaß (CD-ROM), ed. K. Eibl and F. Aspetsberger, was issued in 1992.

 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Musil, Robert
('bĕrt mū'zĭl) , 1880–1942, Austrian novelist. His style, which has been compared to Proust's, is marked by subtle psychological analysis. This is evident in the novel Young Törless (1906, tr. 1955) and in his chief work, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (3 vol., 1930–42; tr. The Man without Qualities, 1953–60 and 1995), widely considered one of the masterpieces of 20th-century literature. Many of his stories have been translated and published in such posthumous collections as Tonka and Other Stories (tr. 1965) and Three Short Stories (1970).

Bibliography

See his diaries, ed. by M. Mirsky (tr. 1998); studies by B. Pike (1961, repr. 1971); L. Appiqnanesi (1973); P. Payne (2d rev. ed. 1989); and C. Rogowski (1994).

 
Wikipedia: Robert Musil


Robert Musil
Born: November 6 1880(1880--)
Klagenfurt, Austria
Died: April 15 1942 (aged 61)
Geneva, Switzerland
Occupation: Novelist
Nationality: Austrian
Writing period: 1905-1942
Genres: Literary fiction
Literary movement: modernism
Debut works: The Confusions of Young Törless

Robert Musil (November 6, 1880, Klagenfurt, AustriaApril 15, 1942, Geneva, Switzerland) was an Austrian writer. His unfinished long novel The Man Without Qualities (in German, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften) is generally considered to be one of the most important modernist novels.

The novel deals with the moral and intellectual decline of the Austro-Hungarian Empire through the eyes of the book's protagonist Ulrich, an ex-mathematician who has failed to engage with the world around him in a manner that would allow him to possess 'qualities'. It is set in Vienna on the eve of World War I. Musil served as an officer in the Austro-Hungarian army at the front between 1914 - 1918.

Biography

Musil was the son of Alfred Musil (1846-1924) and his wife Hermine (1853-1924), who lived together with an unrelated "uncle" Heinrich Reiter (b. 1856). The elder Musil was an engineer, appointed in 1891 to the chair of Mechanical Engineering at the German Technical University in Brno, and awarded a hereditary peerage in the Austro-Hungarian empire shortly before it collapsed. The younger Musil was a bit short, but strong and skilled at wrestling, and by his early teens already more than his parents could handle. Accordingly they sent him to military boarding school at Eisenstadt (1892-1894) and then Hranice, in that time also known as Mährisch Weißkirchen, (1894-1897). These school experiences are reflected in his first novel, Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törless (The Confusions of Young Törless).

After graduating as a cadet, Musil briefly studied at a military college in Vienna during the fall of 1897, but then switched to engineering, joining his father's department at Brno. During his college career he studied engineering by day, but at night read literature and philosophy, and went to the theater and art exhibits. Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Ernst Mach were particular interests of his college years. Musil finished his studies in three years, then in 1902-1903 served as an unpaid assistant to Professor Julius Carl von Bach, in Stuttgart. During this time he began work on Young Törless.

Even then, however, Musil was growing tired with engineering and the limited worldview of engineers, and rather than settle into an engineering career, he launched a new round of doctoral studies (1903-1908) in psychology and philosophy at the University of Berlin under the renowned Professor Carl Stumpf. In the midst of these studies, Young Törless, his first novel was published in 1906. Even before this, in 1905, Musil had met Martha Marcovaldi (January 21, 1874 - November 6, 1949) who was in subsequent years to become his wife. She had already been widowed and remarried, with two children, and was seven years older than Musil.

In 1909, Musil completed his doctorate and was offered a position by Professor Alexius Meinong, at the University of Graz, which he turned down to concentrate on literature. Over the next two years, he wrote and published two stories ("The Temptation of Quiet Veronica" and "The Perfecting of a Love") in a book entitled Vereinigungen (Unions) in 1911. During this same year, Martha's divorce was complete, and she and Musil married. Until this time, Musil had been supported by his family, but he now found employment first as a librarian in the Technical University of Vienna, and then in an editorial role with the Berlin Literary Journal, during which time he worked on a play entitled Die Schwärmer (The Enthusiasts), eventually published in 1921.

When World War I began, Musil joined the Army, first stationed in South Tyrol, and then away from danger at Austria's Supreme Army Command in Bolzano. In 1916 Musil came to Prague and met Franz Kafka whose work he highly esteemed, as he did the work of Bohemian poet Rainer Maria Rilke. After the war's end, and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Musil returned to a fulltime literary life in Vienna. He published a collection of short stories, Drei Frauen (Three Women), in 1924, and then in 1930 and 1932 the first two volumes of his masterpiece, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man Without Qualities).

In the early 20s Musil lived mostly in Berlin. In Vienna Musil was a frequent visitor of Eugenie Schwarzwald's salon (the model of Diotima in The Man Without Qualities). In 1932 The Robert Musil Society was founded in Berlin on the initiative of Thomas Mann. The same year Thomas Mann was asked to name an eminent contemporary novel and he cited exclusively The Man Without Qualities. In 1936 Musil had his first stroke.

The last years of Musil's life were dominated by Nazism and World War II. He saw early Nazism first-hand during 1931-1933 in a stay in Berlin, and later, when Austria became a part of the Third Reich in 1938, Musil left for exile in Switzerland, where he died of a stroke on April 15, 1942. Musil collapsed in the middle of his gymnastic exercises and is rumoured to have died with an expression of ironic amusement on his face. He was 61.

There were only eight people present at his funeral. His widow cast his ashes into the Rhône. Martha Musil died in 1949 in Rome.

After his death Musil's work was almost forgotten in German speaking countries. His writings started to reappear at the beginning of the 1950s. The first translation of The Man Without Qualities in English was also published around then. An improved translation, containing extensive selections from unpublished drafts, appeared in 1995.

Trivia

Thomas Mann (1875), Hermann Hesse (1877), Robert Walser (1878), Robert Musil (1880), Franz Kafka (1883), Hermann Broch (1886) were of the same literary generation. James Joyce was born in the same period, in 1882, and died a year before Musil, both in Switzerland.

The Man Without Qualities only brought Musil mediocre commercial success. Though he was nominated for the Nobel Prize, he felt he did not receive the recognition he deserved. He sometimes expressed annoyance at the success of more famous colleagues like Thomas Mann, or Hermann Broch, who admired his work deeply and, moved by his material poverty, tried to shield him against quotidian worries and encouraged him to further his literary work, even though Musil was initially critical of Mann.

In Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children, Bootie, perhaps the book's most important character, carries Musil's The Man Without Qualities with him at all times.

Bibliography

  • Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß (The Confusions of Young Torless, 1906), later made into a movie Der junge Törless
  • Vereinigungen (1911)
  • Die Schwärmer (1921)
  • Vinzenz und die Freundin bedeutender Männer (1924)
  • Drei Frauen (1924) (Three Women - a collection of five short stories)
  • Nachlaß zu Lebzeiten (1936) (Posthumous Papers of a Living Author - a collection of short prose pieces)
  • Über die Dummheit (1937)
  • Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man Without Qualities, 1930, 1933, 1943, published in two volumes)

External links


Persondata
NAME Musil, Robert
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION Austrian writer
DATE OF BIRTH November 6, 1880
PLACE OF BIRTH Klagenfurt, Austria
DATE OF DEATH April 15, 1942
PLACE OF DEATH Geneva, Switzerland

 
 

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Fairy Tale Companion. The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales. Copyright © 2000, 2002, 2005 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.  Read more
German Literature Companion. The Oxford Companion to German Literature. Copyright © 1976, 1986, 1997, 2005 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.  Read more
Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Robert Musil" Read more

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