MUSIL, ROBERT

MUSIL, ROBERT (1880–1942), Austrian novelist and essayist.

Robert Musil was one of the most important minds of the twentieth century. He is best known as a German novelist from the generation of Thomas Mann, Hermann Broch, and Franz Kafka, but his intellectual significance has sometimes been overlooked, partly because he was not an academic philosopher or social scientist. Musil's great achievements as a novelist and essayist came during the interwar years—the first two volumes of his most important novel, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man without Qualities) appeared in 1930 and 1932 respectively and most of his essays appeared after World War I—but he saw himself as representative of the experience of European intellectuals in the generation that reached maturity in the decade before the war.

Musil grew up in the smaller cities of Austria and Moravia, and he spent most of his adult life in Vienna and Berlin. He was powerfully influenced by modern physics and mathematics, but also by French aestheticism, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. His first novel, Young Törless (1906), was a story of adolescent crisis and conflict in an Austrian military academy, and his second volume of fiction (1911) brought together two novellas that were written from the perspectives of women. These fictional accounts of sexual experience departed from the conventions of German literature and established many of the psychological and epistemological themes of his later work. After completing his doctorate in Berlin with a dissertation on Ernst Mach, Musil turned away from an academic career in psychology and philosophy to pursue his interest in ethics as a writer. He married Martha Marcovaldi (née Heimann) in 1911 and worked as an editor for the prestigious Neue Rundschau (New review) in Berlin, where he experienced the internationalism of European intellectual life before 1914. Musil felt the intensity of August 1914 and went to war as an officer on the Italian front. During the last two decades of his life, his creative work was a reflection on the experience of nineteenth-century Europe and the possibilities it opened up for life in a modern, technological society.

Musil was an advocate of modern science and civilization and a critic of anti-rationalism and nationalism, but he also thought of himself as a German writer who had inherited the ethical and aesthetic concerns of Nietzsche. He drew on the tradition of the Enlightenment and modern science, but he wanted to apply these intellectual values to emotional life in new ways. He argued that Europe in the early twentieth century did not suffer from too much intellect and too little soul, as many of his contemporaries believed, but rather from too little understanding in matters of the soul (or the emotional life). His work aimed to bring thinking and feeling into more flexible relation to one another and to the demands of modern life, to contribute to the creation of a new culture and a spirituality commensurate with life in modern society. He believed that liberalism, socialism, and Christianity had all failed under the pressures of modern civilization and World War I, and he was an astute critic of the new political forms that emerged in the interwar years.

Musil spent most of his life writing a huge and never finished novel, which is set in Vienna in 1913. The Man without Qualities seems at first to be a historical novel about the old-fashioned problems of a multinational monarchy on the verge of disintegration. In fact, it is an intellectual adventure, an inquiry into the ideological and emotional problems of modernity, which has continued to gain in significance over the years, especially with the U.S. translations of Musil's works in the 1990s. The originality of Musil's approach to feelings and metaphor is apparent throughout the novel, but this dimension becomes more explicit in the second volume, as he concentrates on the relationship between the protagonist and his sister and their conversations about gender, ethics, and a heightened relation to experience.

Musil was one of the great clarifying minds of the twentieth century, who saw in the transformations of modernity and World War I new possibilities for living differently and creatively. He aimed at a constant refashioning of the way the world is viewed, but also wanted to recover the relation to experience, which he believed lay at the basis of world religions and ideologies.

See alsoBerlin; Mann, Thomas; Modernism; Nietzsche, Friedrich; Vienna.

bibliography

Musil, Robert von. Young Törless. Translated by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser. New York, 1955.

——. Selected Writings. Edited by Burton Pike. New York, 1986.

——. Precision and Soul: Essays and Addresses. Edited and translated by Burton Pike and David S. Luft. Chicago, 1990.

——. The Man without Qualities. Translated by Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike. Edited by Burton Pike. 2 vols. New York, 1995.

——. Diaries, 1899–1941. Translated by Philip Payne. Edited by Mark Mirsky. New York, 1998. Original German version of the diaries edited by Adolf Frisé. Offers fascinating pathways into Musil's ideas and his historical world.

Secondary Sources

Corino, Karl. Robert Musil: Eine Biographie. Reinbek, Germany, 2003.

Luft, David S. Robert Musil and the Crisis of European Culture, 1880–1942, Berkeley, Calif., 1980. Addresses Musil's intellectual development in relation to the broader context of central European intellectual and political life in the early twentieth century.

——. Eros and Inwardness: Weininger, Musil, Doderer. Chicago, 2003.

Rogowski, Christian. Distinguished Outsider: Robert Musil and His Critics. Columbia, S.C., 1994. Excellent overview.

David S. Luft