Robert Musil

By Robert Musil & Klaus AmannTranslated by Genese Grill Literature and Politics presents Robert Musil's writings on the relationship between literature and politics from World War I through World War II and elucidates his personal struggle to bear witness during the Age of Totalitarianism. In essays, addresses, aphorisms, and unpublished notes on contemporary events, Musil charts the increasing dangers to artists and ethical thinkers of extreme ideological conscription, the subtle and not so subtle changes in public and political discourse, the epoch-making events and dire existential threats of his times. Musil acts as a cultural seismographer, interrogating causes and symptoms in himself and his world, as he moves between Nazi Germany and pre- and post-Anschluß Austria, ultimately escaping to Switzerland where he and his Jewish wife, Martha, lived in exile until his death in 1942. The writings question concepts of race, identity, and nation, and untangle the complex relationship between nation and artist and between the individual and the collective, celebrating the rich and irreducible nature of individual creative work as the bulwark of a free, ethical, and pluralistic society.Klaus Amann provides an invaluable introduction to Musil's political thought and his struggle, during the war years, to come to terms, to survive, and to find some way to bear witness. Amann recounts Musil's political trajectory, from fairly indifferent aesthete to socially-engaged supporter of the Weimar Republic and its liberal reforms, to critic of Nazi and Communist Totalitarianisms, and as prescient sceptic about the "cultural optimism" of the Soviet experiment. Musil's ultimate stance—as a thinker who radically resists taking final stances - is that politics endangers culture and humanity by dictating to artists how they should write, think, paint, compose, and by instrumentalizing art in the interest of ideology. Paperback562 pagesContra Mundum Press, 20235 x 1.25 x 8 inchesISBN 9781940625546Literature, History

Literature & Politics

By Robert Musil Traslated by Genese Grill Robert Musil's Thought Flights vividly evokes the secrets, challenges, and mundanities of interwar life in cosmopolitan Vienna and Berlin. The texts presented here have been selected by translator Genese Grill from Musil's Nachlass and collected for the first time under the title Thought Flights. They include material originally published in journals, newspapers, and magazines - but not included in Musil's Posthumous Papers of a Living Author - as well as literary fragments and heretofore unpublished texts. Despite the temporal, geographical, and cultural distance between Musil's world and ours, our own time and troubles are all too recognizable in Musil's portrayals of the "age of money," of simulation, and of standardization. Thought Flights is a lament of contemporary complacency, optimism, and homogenization as well as a celebration of living words and original thought by one of the great Modernists of the 20th century. As an astonishing master of metaphor and self-described "Monsieur le Vivisecteur," Musil explores the psyches and lives of himself and his contemporaries with illuminating insight. The lucid, striking prose of his stories and vignettes, and the wise and witty commentary of his glosses, show Musil's response to innovations in technology, art, and politics, and his efforts to enact a strategy for both illuminating and ameliorating the crisis of language that haunted his contemporaries. Moving effortlessly from discussion of fashion to Kant's categorical imperative, le vivisecteur writes with humor, lyricism, and fervor in an open genre availing itself of poetic prose, philosophical essay, fictional narrative, and feuilletonistic lightness. Through unlikely combinations and metaphoric syntheses, Musil brings "beauty and excitement" into the world, and when things that are usually separate unite, thoughts "fly." With this publication, the now growing English-language corpus of the author of The Confusions of Young Törless, Five Women, and The Man without Qualities is expanded further. Other volumes of Musil's writings will be forthcoming from Contra Mundum Press over the next decade.Paperback348 pagesContra Mundum Press, 20155 x 0.7 x 8 inchesISBN 9781940625102History, Essays, Literary Criticism

Thought Flights

By Robert MusilTranslated by Joel Agee Shortlisted for the 2020 Helen & Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize“Agathe represents a kind of concentrate of the quests and questions of its monumental source material: in it, as George Steiner once wrote about part three of the original novel, ‘what was previous a kaleidoscope narrows to a laser’. . . . Musil’s sentences are never less than elegant (a handsome precision reflected in Joel Agee’s translation).” —Julian Evans, The Daily Telegraph “Musil’s writing is so disciplined, his word choice so exact, that sentence follows sentence with a pointedness that seems to come naturally.”—J.M. Coetzee, The New York Review of Books “[A] valuable addition to modernist European literature.” —Kirkus Agathe is the sister of Ulrich, the restless and elusive “man without qualities” at the center of Robert Musil’s great, unfinished novel of the same name. For years Agathe and Ulrich have ignored each other, but when brother and sister find themselves reunited over the bier of their dead father, they are electrified. Each is the other’s spitting image, and Agathe, who has just separated from her husband, is even more defiant and inquiring than Ulrich. Beginning with a series of increasingly intense “holy conversations,” the two gradually enlarge the boundaries of sexuality, sensuality, identity, and understanding in pursuit of a new, true form of being that they are seeking to discover.Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities is perhaps the most profoundly exploratory and unsettling masterpiece of twentieth-century fiction. Agathe, or, The Forgotten Sister reveals with new clarity a particular dimension of this multidimensional book—the dimension that meant the most to Musil himself and that inspired some of his most searching writing. The outstanding translator Joel Agee captures the acuity, audacity, and unsettling poetry of a book that is meant to be nothing short of life-changing. Paperback400 pagesNYRB, 2019Originally published in 19435 x 0.9 x 8 inchesISBN 9781681373836Fiction

Agathe, or the Forgotten Sister

By Robert MusilTranslated by Mark Mirsky Robert Musil is ranked alongside Marcel Proust and James Joyce for his monumental, unfinished novel, The Man Without Qualities. His diaries, a distillation of forty-three years of material, are valuable in a number of ways: as a first-hand historical document of life in twentieth-century central Europe, as a kind of unwitting autobiography of a great novelist, and as a writer's notebook that details the moods of artistic adventure. Readers will gain keen insights into Musil's passage from scientist, to soldier, to novelist, in honest passages that reveal the man in all his humor, ambition, frustration, and transcendence.Paperback624 pagesBasic Books, 19997.5 x 1.4 x 9.2 inchesISBN 9780465016518Diaries, Memoirs

Musil Diaries

By Robert MusilTranslated by Mike Mitchell Set in a boarding school in a remote area of the Habsburg Empire at the turn of the last century, The Confusions of Young Törless is an intense study of an adolescent's psychological development as he struggles to come to terms with his conflicting emotions. Through his relationship with two other boys Törless is led into sadistic and sexual encounters with a third pupil which both repel and fascinate him. Estranged from everyday life, Törless gradually learns to accept his experiences and describe them with analytical precision. The novel is based on the author's own experiences at an Austrian military academy. A school story with a difference, Törless extends the scope of fiction with its non-judgmental presentation of transgressive sexuality and violence. It is a profoundly disturbing exploration of a non-moral outlook on life and of dictatorial attitudes that prefigure the outbreak of the First World War and the rise of fascism. Paperback208 pagesOxford University Press, 2014Originally Published in 19067.7 x 0.6 x 5.1 inchesISBN 9780199669400Fiction

The Confusions of Young Törless

By Robert MusilTranslated by Sophie Wilkins and Burton PikeSet in Vienna on the eve of World War I, this great novel of ideas tells the story of Ulrich, ex-soldier and scientist, seducer and skeptic, who finds himself drafted into the grandiose plans for the 70th jubilee of the Emperor Franz Josef. This new translation—published in two elegant volumes—is the first to present Musil's complete text, including material that remained unpublished during his lifetime. This intriguing landmark of modernism from Austrian writer Robert Musil has been newly translated from the German by Sophie Wilkins and re-edited in a textual overhaul. This new edition includes portions of the author's original manuscripts that have never been published before. Though an imposing edifice of writing, devotees of literary modernism and anyone interested in the decline of the Austrian empire must read this sweeping, comic take on life in pre-Great War Vienna.Paperback752 pagesRandom House Publishing, 1996Originally published in 19308 x 5 x 2 inches ISBN 9780679767879Historical Fiction

The Man Without Qualities, Vol.1: A Sort of Introduction and Pseudo Reality Prevails

By Christian Rogowski This study analyzes Musil's contribution to the praxis and poetics of drama by placing his dramatic efforts in the context of what Peter Szondi has described as the "crisis of modern drama." Musil's plays address such issues as the problem of dramatic mimesis and the question of whether there can be a modern form of tragic drama appropriate to the experience of modernity. Close readings of his texts explore how any drama prefigures the interaction between text/reader and performance/audience by means of self-referential devices. Such an investigation not only reveals a special facet of Musil's oeuvre, but also offers a contribution towards a theory of reading drama, a reading of the printed play as a prefiguration of an enacted event. Hardcover313 pagesAriadne Press, 19936 x 9 inchesISBN 9780929497594Literary Criticism, Drama

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Robert Musil

Literature & Politics

Thought Flights

Agathe, or the Forgotten Sister

Musil Diaries

The Confusions of Young Törless

The Man Without Qualities, Vol.1: A Sort of Introduction and Pseudo Reality Prevails

Implied Dramaturgy: Robert Musil and the Crisis of Modern Drama

Shop at Neue Robert Musil

Literature & Politics

Thought Flights

Agathe, or the Forgotten Sister

Musil Diaries

The Confusions of Young Törless

The Man Without Qualities, Vol.1: A Sort of Introduction and Pseudo Reality Prevails

Implied Dramaturgy: Robert Musil and the Crisis of Modern Drama

Shop at Neue
Robert Musil