Leopold von Sacher-Masoch was born in Lemberg, Austrian Galicia, on
January 27, 1836. He studied jurisprudence at Prague and Graz, and in
1857 became a teacher at the latter university. He published several
historical works, but soon gave up his academic career to devote
himself wholly to literature. For a number of years he edited the
international review, _Auf der Höhe_, at Leipzig, but later removed to
Paris, for he was always strongly Francophile. His last years he spent
at Lindheim in Hesse, Germany, where he died on March 9, 1895. In 1873
he married Aurora von Rumelin, who wrote a number of novels under the
pseudonym of Wanda von Dunajew, which it is interesting to note is the
name of the heroine of _Venus in Furs_. Her sensational memoirs which
have been the cause of considerable controversy were published in 1906.
During his career as writer an endless number of works poured from
Sacher-Masoch’s pen. Many of these were works of ephemeral journalism,
and some of them unfortunately pure sensationalism, for economic
necessity forced him to turn his pen to unworthy ends.
There is, however, a residue among his works which has a distinct
literary and even greater psychological value. His principal literary
ambition was never completely fulfilled. It was a somewhat programmatic
plan to give a picture of contemporary life in all its various aspects
and interrelations under the general title of the _Heritage of Cain_.
This idea was probably derived from Balzac’s _Comedie Humaine_. The
whole was to be divided into six subdivisions with the general titles
_Love, Property, Money, The State, War,_ and _Death_. Each of these
divisions in its turn consisted of six novels, of which the last was
intended to summarize the author’s conclusions and to present his
solution for the problems set in the others.
This extensive plan remained unachieved, and only the first two parts,
_Love_ and _Property_, were completed. Of the other sections only
fragments remain. The present novel, _Venus in Furs_, forms the fifth
in the series, _Love_.
The best of Sacher-Masoch’s work is characterized by a swift narration
and a graphic representation of character and scene and a rich humor.
The latter has made many of his shorter stories dealing with his native
Galicia little masterpieces of local color.
There is, however, another element in his work which has caused his
name to become as eponym for an entire series of phenomena at one end
of the psycho-sexual scale. This gives his productions a peculiar
psychological value, though it cannot be denied also a morbid tinge
that makes them often repellent. However, it is well to remember that
nature is neither good nor bad, neither altruistic nor egoistic, and
that it operates through the human psyche as well as through crystals
and plants and animals with the same inexorable laws.
Sacher-Masoch was the poet of the anomaly now generally known as
_masochism_. By this is meant the desire on the part of the individual
affected of desiring himself completely and unconditionally subject to
the will of a person of the opposite sex, and being treated by this
person as by a master, to be humiliated, abused, and tormented, even to
the verge of death. This motive is treated in all its innumerable
variations. As a creative artist Sacher-Masoch was, of course, on the
quest for the absolute, and sometimes, when impulses in the human being
assume an abnormal or exaggerated form, there is just for a moment a
flash that gives a glimpse of the thing in itself.
If any defense were needed for the publication of work like
Sacher-Masoch’s it is well to remember that artists are the historians
of the human soul and one might recall the wise and tolerant
Montaigne’s essay _On the Duty of Historians_ where he says, “One may
cover over secret actions, but to be silent on what all the world
knows, and things which have had effects which are public and of so
much consequence is an inexcusable defect.”
And the curious interrelation between cruelty and sex, again and again,
creeps into literature. Sacher-Masoch has not created anything new in
this. He has simply taken an ancient motive and developed it frankly
and consciously, until, it seems, there is nothing further to say on
the subject. To the violent attacks which his books met he replied in a
polemical work, _Über den Wert der Kritik_.
It would be interesting to trace the masochistic tendency as it occurs
throughout literature, but no more can be done than just to allude to a
few instances. The theme recurs continually in the _Confessions_ of
Jean Jacques Rousseau; it explains the character of the chevalier in
Prévost’s _Manon l’Escault_. Scenes of this nature are found in Zola’s
_Nana_, in Thomas Otway’s _Venice Preserved_, in Albert Juhelle’s _Les
Pecheurs d’Hommes_, in Dostojevski. In disguised and unrecognized form
it constitutes the undercurrent of much of the sentimental literature
of the present day, though in most cases the authors as well as the
readers are unaware of the pathological elements out of which their
characters are built.
In all these strange and troubled waters of the human spirit one might
wish for something of the serene and simple attitude of the ancient
world. Laurent Tailhade has an admirable passage in his _Platres et
Marbres_, which is well worth reproducing in this connection:
“Toutefois, les Hellènes, dans, leurs cités de lumière, de douceur et
d’harmonie, avaient une indulgence qu’on peut nommer scientifique pour
les troubles amoureux de l’esprit. S’ils ne regardaient pas l’aliéné
comme en proie a la visitation d’un dieu (idée orientale et fataliste),
du moins ils savaient que l’amour est une sorte d’envoûtement, une
folie où se manifeste l’animosité des puissances cosmiques. Plus tard,
le christianisme enveloppa les âmes de ténèbres. Ce fut la grande nuit.
L’Église condamna tout ce qui lui parût neuf ou menaçant pour les
dogmes implaçable qui reduisaient le monde en esclavage.”
Among Sacher-Masoch’s works, _Venus in Furs_ is one of the most typical
and outstanding. In spite of melodramatic elements and other literary
faults, it is unquestionably a sincere work, written without any idea
of titillating morbid fancies. One feels that in the hero many
subjective elements have been incorporated, which are a disadvantage to
the work from the point of view of literature, but on the other hand
raise the book beyond the sphere of art, pure and simple, and make it
one of those appalling human documents which belong, part to science
and part to psychology. It is the confession of a deeply unhappy man
who could not master his personal tragedy of existence, and so sought
to unburden his soul in writing down the things he felt and
experienced. The reader who will approach the book from this angle and
who will honestly put aside moral prejudices and prepossessions will
come away from the perusal of this book with a deeper understanding of
this poor miserable soul of ours and a light will be cast into dark
places that lie latent in all of us.
Sacher-Masoch’s works have held an established position in European
letters for something like half a century, and the author himself was
made a chevalier of the Legion of Honor by the French Government in
1883, on the occasion of his literary jubilee. When several years ago
cheap reprints were brought out on the Continent and attempts were made
by various guardians of morality—they exist in all countries —to have
them suppressed, the judicial decisions were invariably against the
plaintiff and in favor of the publisher. Are Americans children that
they must be protected from books which any European school-boy can
purchase whenever he wishes? However, such seems to be the case, and
this translation, which has long been in preparation, consequently
appears in a limited edition printed for subscribers only. In another
connection Herbert Spencer once used these words: “The ultimate result
of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with
fools.” They have a very pointed application in the case of a work like
_Venus in Furs_.