Robert Musil

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Robert Musil
Born November 6, 1880(1880-11-06)
Klagenfurt, Austria
Died April 15, 1942 (aged 61)
Geneva, Switzerland
Occupation Novelist
Nationality Austrian
Writing period 1905-1942
Genres Literary fiction
Literary movement modernism
Influences

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


[edit] Biography

Musil was the son of Alfred Edler von 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 had a short stature, but was 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 his first novel, Young Törless, 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 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). 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.

The Man Without Qualities brought Musil only 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 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 according to legend 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.

[edit] Bibliography

Wikisource
Wikisource has original works written by or about:
  • Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß (The Confusions of Young Torless, 1906), later made into a movie Der junge Törless
  • Vereinigungen (1911) (Unions - a collection of two short stories)
  • Die Schwärmer (1921)
  • Vinzenz und die Freundin bedeutender Männer (1924)
  • Drei Frauen (1924) (Three Women - a collection of three 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)

[edit] 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