Information about Leopold Von Sacher Masoch

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.

Biography

Galician Storyteller

Von Sacher-Masoch was born in the capital of Galicia, Lemberg, Austrian Empire (now Lviv, Ukraine), into the familiy 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. In 1860s-1880s he published a number of volumes of Jewish Short Stories, Polish Short Stories, Galician Short Stories, German Court Stories, Russian Court Stories. His works were published in translations in Russia and France.

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 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.

Private Life

On 8 December, 1869 Leopold and his mistress Fanny Pistor signed a contract making Leopold von Sacher-Masoch the slave of Fanny Pistor Bogdanoff for the period of six months, with the stipulation, doubtlessly at Sacher-Masoch’s suggestion, that the Baroness wear furs as often as possible, especially when she was in a cruel mood. Sacher-Masoch took the alias of “Gregor,” 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.^[2]

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 wasn't excited about his family life, got a divorce and married his assistant.

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 Masoch spent the last years of his life in psychiatric help. 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.^[3]

Sacher-Masoch and Masochism

The term masochism was coined in 1886 by the Austrian psychiatrist von Krafft-Ebing in his seminal work Psychopathia Sexualis:

...I feel justified in calling this sexual anomaly "Masochism," because the author Sacher-Masoch frequently made this perversion, which up to his time was quite unknown to the scientific world as such, the substratum of his writings. I followed thereby the scientific formation of the term "Daltonism," from Dalton, the discoverer of colour-blindness. 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 this 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 sexual is be it in the good or evil sense over the formation and direction of man's mind.[4]

Sacher-Masoch was not pleased with this development. 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).

Books

Main article: Bibliography of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

Selected bibliography of Masoch's fiction books: novels and collections of short stories. For detailed original bibliography, see the main article.

• 1858 A Galician Story 1846.
• 1865 Kaunitz.
• 1867 The Last King of Hungary.
• 1870 The Divorced Woman.
• 1870 Legacy of Cain. Vol. 1: Love.
• 1872 Faux Ermine.
• 1873 Female Sultan.
• 1873 The Messalinas of Vienna.
• 1873-1874 Russian Court Stories: 4 Vols.
• 1873-1877 Viennese Court Stories: 2 Vols.
• 1875 The Ideals of Our Time.
• 1875 Galician Stories.
• 1877 The Man Without Prejustice.
• 1877 Legacy of Cain. Vol. 2: Property.
• 1878 The New Hiob.
• 1878 Jewish Stories.
• 1878 The Republic of Women's Enemies.
• 1879 Silhouettes.
• 1881 New Jewish Stories.
• 1883 The Godmother.
• 1886 Eternal Youth.
• 1886 Stories from Polish Ghetto.
• 1886 Little Mysteries of World History.
• 1887 Polish Stories.
• 1890 The Serpent in Paradise.
• 1891 The Lonesome.
• 1894 Love Stories.
• 1898 Entre nous.
• 1900 Catherina II.
• 1901 Afrikas Semiramis.
• 1907 Fierce Women.

Trivia

Sacher-Masoch is the great-uncle to British singer/actress Marianne Faithfull on her mother's side, the Viennese Baroness Eva Erisso.

See also

• Sadism and masochism in fiction
• Story of O

References

External links

• Works by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch at Project Gutenberg
• The complete text of Venus in Furs from Project Gutenberg
• The Bookbinder of Hort, part of an anthology, Stories by Foreign Authors
• The Letawitza
• Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
• Leopold von Sacher-Masoch article from Human Sexuality: An Encyclopedia