Robert Musil

Family

Musil was born in Klagenfurt, Carinthia, the son of engineer Alfred Edler von Musil (1846, Timișoara – 1924) and his wife Hermine Bergauer (1853, Linz – 1924). The orientalist Alois Musil ("The Czech Lawrence") was his second cousin.

Soon after Robert's birth, the family moved to Chomutov in Bohemia, and in 1891 Musil's father was appointed to the chair of Mechanical Engineering at the German Technical University in Brno, and awarded a hereditary nobility in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was baptized Robert Mathias Musil and his name was officially Robert Mathias Edler von Musil from 22 October 1917, when his father received a hereditary title of nobility Edler, until 3 April 1919, when the use of noble titles was forbidden in Austria.

Early life

Musil was short in stature but strong and skilled at wrestling, and by his early teens, he proved to already be more than his parents could handle. They sent him to a military boarding school at Eisenstadt (1892–1894) and then Hranice (1894–1897). The school experiences are reflected in his first novel, Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törless (The Confusions of Young Törless).

Youth and Studies

After graduating as a cadet, Musil studied briefly at a military academy in Vienna during the fall of 1897 but then switched to mechanical engineering, joining his father's department at Technical University in Brno. During his university studies, he studied engineering by day, but at night read literature and philosophy, and went to the theatre and art exhibits. Friedrich Nietzsche, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Ernst Mach were particular interests of his university years. Musil finished his studies in three years and, in 1902–1903, served as an unpaid assistant to Professor Julius Carl von Bach, in Stuttgart. Meanwhile, he began work on Young Törless and invented "Musil'scher Farbkreisel", the Musil color top, a simple device for continuous producing mixed colours by additive colour -mixing with two differently colored rotating disks.

Musil's sexual life around the turn of the century, according to his own records, was mainly determined by experiences in relation to a prostitute, which he treated partly as an experimental self-experience. But he also felt a strong infatuation with the pianist and passionate mountaineer Valerie Hilpert, who assumed mystical features. In March 1902, Musil underwent treatment for syphilis for one and a half years with mercurial ointment. During this time, his several years of relationship with Hermine Dietz, the 'Tonka' of his own novel, published in 1923, began. Hermine's syphilitic miscarriage in 1906 and her death in 1907 may be due to contagion in Musil.

Musil grew tired of engineering and what he perceived as the limited world-view of engineers. 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 1905, Musil met his future wife, Martha Marcovaldi (née Heinemann, 21 January 1874 – 6 November 1949). She had already been widowed and remarried, with two children, and was seven years older than Musil. His first novel, Young Törless, was published in 1906.

Author

In 1909, Musil completed his doctorate and Professor Alexius Meinong offered him a position at the University of Graz, which he turned down to concentrate on writing of novels. Over the next two years, he wrote and published two stories ("The Temptation of Quiet Veronica" and "The Perfecting of a Love") collected in Vereinigungen (Unions) published in 1911. During the same year, Martha's divorce was completed, and Musil married her. As she was Jewish and Musil Roman Catholic, they both converted to Protestantism as a sign of their union.[1] [2] [3] Until then, 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, He also worked on a play entitled Die Schwärmer (The Enthusiasts), which was published in 1921.

When World War I began, Musil joined the Army and was stationed first in Tirol and then at Austria's Supreme Army Command in Bolzano. In 1916, Musil visited Prague and met Franz Kafka, whose work he held in high esteem. After the war's end, and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Musil returned to his literary career in Vienna. He published a collection of short stories, Drei Frauen (Three Women), in 1924. He also admired the Bohemian poet Rainer Maria Rilke at whose memorial service in 1926 in Berlin, Musil called "undervalued" for most of his life. He said that by the time of his death, Rilke had turned into "a delicate, well-matured liqueur suitable for grown-up ladies". However, his work is "too demanding" to be "considered relaxing".

In 1930 and 1933, he published his masterpiece, The Man Without Qualities (Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften), in two volumes consisting of three parts, from Berlin, running into 1,074 pages . Volume 1 (Part I: A Sort of Introduction, and Part II: The Like of It Now Happens) and 605-page unfinished Volume 2 (Part III: Into the Millennium (The Criminals)) . Part III did not include 20 chapters withdrawn from Volume 2 of 1933 in printer's galley proofs. 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 in Literature, he felt that 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 tried to shield him from economic difficulties and encouraged his writing even though Musil was initially critical of Mann.

In the early 1920s, Musil lived mostly in Berlin. In Vienna, Musil was a frequent visitor to Eugenie Schwarzwald's salon (the model for Diotima in The Man Without Qualities). In 1932, the Robert Musil Society was founded in Berlin on the initiative of Mann. In the same year, Mann was asked to name outstanding contemporary novels, and he cited only one, The Man Without Qualities. In 1936, Musil suffered his first stroke.

Later life

The last years of Musil's life were dominated by Nazism and World War II: the Nazis banned his books. He saw early Nazism first-hand while he was living in Berlin from 1931 to 1933. In 1938, when Austria became a part of the Third Reich, Musil and his Jewish wife, Martha, left for exile in Switzerland, where he died at the age of 61. Martha wrote to Franz Theodor Csokor that he had suffered a stroke.

Only eight people attended his cremation. Martha cast his ashes into the woods of Mont Salève. From 1933 to his death, Musil was working on Part III of The Man Without Qualities. In 1943 in Lausanne, Martha published a 462-page collection of material from his literary remains, including the 20 galley chapters withdrawn from Part III before Volume 2 appeared in 1933, as well as drafts of the final incomplete chapters and notes on the development and direction of the novel. She died in Rome in 1949.

Legacy

After his death Musil's work was almost forgotten. His writings began to reappear during the early 1950s. The first translation of The Man Without Qualities in English was published by Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins in 1953, 1954 and 1960. An updated translation by Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike, containing extensive selections from unpublished drafts, appeared in 1995. Musil's work has received more attention since that time, including the philosophical aspects of his novels. According to Milan Kundera, "No novelist is dearer to me." One of the most important philosophy journals, The Monist published a special issue on The Philosophy of Robert Musil in 2014, edited by Bence Nanay.

Timeline