Musil, Robert

(1880–1942)

   Educated in military academies and as an engineer who wrote a dissertation on the physicist Ernst Mach, Musil was one of Austria’s most important novelists and essayists in the first half of the 20th century. His first success, the novella Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törless (Young Törless, 1906), deals with adolescent encounters with sexuality and violence and the inadequacy of language for expressing the emotional and instinctive side of human existence.

   Musil’s sprawling masterpiece, Der Man ohne Eigenschaften (The Man without Qualities), was published posthumously in 1952, after appearing as fragments in 1930, 1933, and 1943. Only gradually incorporated into the German literary canon, it is a pitiless analysis of the weaknesses and delusions of cultural and social life in the last years of the Habsburg Empire and of modern societal conventions generally. The tension between reason and emotion, particularly its erotic side, plays a crucial role in the work as well. Though by 1930 he had won several literary awards in German literature, including the prestigious Kleist (1923) and Gerhart Hauptmann (1930) prizes, Musil died in poverty in Switzerland, to which he had immigrated in 1938.

   See also Literature.