Venus in Furs
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
VENUS IN FURS
LEOPOLD VON SACHER-MASOCH was born in 1836 in Lemberg (today Lvov), in the province of Habsburg Galicia. His father was the police prefect of the city, and the family moved, within the Habsburg monarchy, to Prague in 1848 and to Graz in 1854. Sacher-Masoch attended the university in Graz, and though he had previously grown up in urban environments where Ukrainian, Polish, and Czech were spoken, his education made him a German writer. His earliest works were Habsburg histories, about the monarchy in the sixteenth century, during the reign of Charles V. In 1864 he wrote a novella, Don Juan von Kolomea, set in Habsburg Galicia, and in 1865 a historical novel about the eighteenth-century Habsburg chancellor Prince Kaunitz. In 1870 he published several novellas, conceived as part of a larger fictional work, The Testament of Cain; one of these was Venus in Furs, which earned him immediate notoriety for its unprecedented treatment of a man who passionately made himself the slave of the woman he loved. Later works of fiction included tales of the Viennese court, tales of the Russian court, Galician tales, and Jewish tales. His literary fascination with Jewish scenarios, especially in Galicia, led to the public misconception that he was himself Jewish. In 1872 he met Aurora Rümelin, who married him and assumed the name, as well as the erotic persona, of Wanda, the heroine of Venus in Furs. They had several children together, and an unusual married life—which she later recounted in her memoirs—focused on the fulfillment of his unconventional romantic obsessions. Sacher-Masoch emigrated from the Habsburg monarchy in 1881, having been sentenced to eight days in prison after a legal dispute with a publisher. Thereafter he lived in Germany, though he was unsympathetic to the spirit of imperial German nationalism, and perhaps received better appreciation from the literary public in France, where he was awarded the cross of the Legion of Honor in 1883. In 1890 Richard von Krafft-Ebing introduced “masochism” as a clinical category in his Psychopathia Sexualis. When Sacher-Masoch died in 1895, his works of fiction, and especially Venus in Furs, were already widely recognized as giving literary expression to a not uncommon, but previously little discussed, complex of romantic and sexual fantasies.
LARRY WOLFF is professor of European history at Boston College. He is the author of The Vatican and Poland in the Age of the Partitions, of Postcards from the End of the World: Child Abuse in Freud’s Vienna, of Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment, and of a forthcoming book, Venice and the Slavs.
JOACHIM NEUGROSCHEL has translated numerous books from French, German, Italian, Russian, and Yiddish. He has won three PEN translation awards and the French-American translation prize. He has also translated Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, and Alexandre Dumas for Penguin Classics.
LEOPOLD VON
SACHER-MASOCH
Venus in Furs
Translated by
JOACHIM NEUGROSCHEL
With an Introduction by
LARRY WOLFF
and Notes by
JOACHIM NEUGROSCHEL
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This translation first published in Penguin Books 2000
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Translation copyright © Joachim Neugroschel, 2000
Introduction and notes copyright © Larry Wolff, 2000
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Sacher-Masoch, Leopold, Ritter von, 1835–1895.
[Venus im Pelz. English]
Venus in furs / Leopold von Sacher-Masoch; translated from the German by Joachim Neugroschel; with an introduction by Larry Wolff and notes by Joachim Neugroschel.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN: 978-1-101-64018-0
I. Neugroschel, Joachim. II. Wolff, Larry. III. Title.
PT2461.S3V3513?2000
833’.8—dc21 99-055346
Printed in the United States of America
Set in Stempel Garamond
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CONTENTS
Introduction
Suggestions for Further Reading
VENUS IN FURS
Appendix: Two Contracts Signed by Sacher-Masoch
Explanatory Notes
INTRODUCTION
“MY MOST CHERISHED FANTASY”
“I feel justified in calling this sexual anomaly ‘Masochism,’ “wrote Richard von Krafft-Ebing, creating a new clinical category for his Psychopathia Sexualis, “because the author Sacher-Masoch frequently made this perversion, which up to his time was quite unknown to the scientific world as such, the substratum of his writings.” Krafft-Ebing, who introduced the term in 1890, was not merely borrowing the name of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch as a convenient label; rather, the case histories in the many editions of Psychopathia Sexualis indicated that Sacher-Masoch, through his published writings and even through personal contacts, had already long exercised a sort of cult appeal upon people who recognized their own sexual inclinations in his literary work. Case 114 from the 8th edition of 1893 described a man who longed to be “the slave of the beloved, referring for this purpose to Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs.” Case 57 from the 12th edition of 1903 told of a man who first began to fantasize about slavery and flagellation when he read Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a boy; later he wondered whether he could hope to find “sadistically constituted women like Sacher-Masoch’s heroines,” and whether it would be possible to find sexual satisfaction, “if there were such women, and I had the fortune (!) to find one.” Case 68 told of a young artist who was most sexually aroused when faced with female anger, and who “thought that only a woman like the heroines of Sacher-Masoch’s romances could charm him.” Case 80 described a man with a special interest in licking women’s feet, who actually corresponded with Sacher-Masoch, and received guidance from the master:
One of these letters, dated 1888, shows as a heading the picture of a luxuriant woman, with imperial bearing, only half covered with furs and holding a riding-whip as if ready to strike. Sacher-Masoch c
ontends that “the passion to play the slave” is widespread, especially among the Germans and Russians. In this letter, the history of a noble Russian is related who loved to be tied and whipped by several beautiful women. One day he found his ideal in a pretty young French woman and took her to his home. 1
Sacher-Masoch was clearly ready to respond to his fans and appear as the leader of the masochistic movement with specially designed stationery to show his stripes. Rather like Krafft-Ebing, Sacher-Masoch also seemed to collect cases to demonstrate that his inclinations were widespread, no individual eccentricity but a common complex. Finally, in response to a select public of men who wondered whether they too might be fortunate enough to find women with whips who resembled his literary heroines, Sacher-Masoch affirmed the existence of the female “ideal,” like the pretty young French woman ready to be taken home. This was the ideal that he himself had most vividly depicted for the reading public in his masochistic masterpiece, Venus in Furs.
“You’ve aroused my most cherished fantasy,” says Severin, the hero of the novel, and he specifies the fundamental features of the fantasy:
“To be the slave of a woman, a beautiful woman, whom I love, whom I worship—!”
“And who mistreats you for it,” Wanda broke in, laughing.
“Yes, who ties me up and whips me, who kicks me when she belongs to another man.”
“And who, after driving you insane with jealousy and forcing you to face your successful rival, goes so far in her exuberance that she turns you over to him and abandons you to his brutality. Why not? Do you like the final tableau any less?”
I gave Wanda a terrified look. “You’re exceeding my dreams.”
“Yes, we women are inventive,” she said. “Be careful. When you find your ideal, she might easily treat you more cruelly than you like.”
“I’m afraid I’ve already found my ideal!” I cried and pressed my hot face into her lap.2
Venus in Furs presents a protagonist in single-minded pursuit of the realization of his fantasies, and the sympathetically perverse part of the public responded precisely to those fantasies and the fictional delineation of an ideal partner. Published in 1870, Venus in Furs promptly attracted to Sacher-Masoch not only some general notoriety but also the most important fan letter of his life. Aurora Rümelin, a young woman in Graz, where Sacher-Masoch then lived, read the novel and wrote to him, composing the letter together with an older female friend. “She sat down and wrote a letter so shameless I did not believe she would actually mail it—much less receive a response,” recalled Rümelin, but Sacher-Masoch replied immediately, reporting that he had read the letter “with rapture.”3 The letter to Sacher-Masoch had been signed “Wanda von Dunajew,” the name of the heartless heroine of Venus in Furs, and Aurora Rümelin, who eventually met and married Sacher-Masoch, adopted the name as her own and tried to live up to the ideal it expressed. Her memoirs, published as the Confessions of Wanda von Sacher-Masoch, after his death, constituted a sort of astonishing housewife’s lament, a harried account of trying to raise the children and make ends meet, while keeping in mind that at the end of a long day she still had to put on her furs, pick up her whips, and become her husband’s merciless ideal.
Sacher-Masoch’s initial rapture at receiving a letter from “Wanda von Dunajew” was intensified by his conviction that the correspondent was a Russian princess. For the furred figure of Wanda in Venus in Furs, the personification of voluptuous cruelty, was a specifically Slavic fantasy. Among the notoriously powerful women whose names are invoked in the novel, from Messalina and Delilah to Manon Lescaut and Madame Pompadour, none is mentioned more frequently or emphatically than Catherine the Great. When Wanda would appear, “in her white satin robe and in her red, ermine-trimmed kazabaika,” with powdered hair and a diamond tiara, Severin found that “she reminded me intensely of Catherine the Great.”4 Catherine was a figure of great interest to Sacher-Masoch, who put her into his fiction in the Tales of the Russian Court, published soon after Venus in Furs. For instance, at the beginning of the novella Diderot in St. Petersburg, Catherine is bored, and idly wishes there could be some conspiracy against her so that she could punish the rebels with the whip and decapitate the leaders; eventually, though without her knowing, the philosopher Diderot is sewn into a monkey’s skin, mistaken for a great ape, and trained by the whip to perform entertaining tricks at the Russian court. It was, of course, the absolute power of the Russian tsarina that seemed so fascinating to Sacher-Masoch, just as in the eighteenth century she attracted the literary interest of the Marquis de Sade, who made her the mistress of the orgy, whip in hand, in the History of Juliette.
In Venus in Furs Wanda’s costumes, with their fur trimmings and accessories, repeatedly bring Catherine to mind in the rapturous enthusiasm of Severin:
A new, fantastic attire: Russian ankle-boots of violet, ermine-trimmed velvet; a gown of the same material, decorated with narrow stripes and gathered up with cockades of the identical fur; a short, close-fitting paletot similarly lined and padded with ermine; a high ermine cap à la Catherine the Great …5
Fantasies of Catherine, of Russia, and more generally of Eastern Europe thus appear as the crucial fur lining to the fundamental fantasies of slavery, flagellation, and abasement. One day Wanda takes Severin shopping in the local bazaar:
There she looked at whips, long whips with short handles, the kind used on dogs.
“These should do the job,” said the vendor.
“No, they’re much too small,” replied Wanda, casting a sidelong glance at me. “I need a big—”
“For a bulldog no doubt?” asked the merchant.
“Yes,” she cried, “the sort of whip that was used on rebellious slaves in Russia.”6
Thus Sacher-Masoch manipulated the instruments and images of Russian barbarism to enhance his fantasies of romantic cruelty and sexual slavery. This aspect of his work was readily apparent to contemporary reviewers, and Venus in Furs, upon its publication in 1870, was denounced accordingly in the Neue Freie Presse, the great German liberal newspaper of Vienna. Sacher-Masoch was censured as a dangerous artistic agent of “communism” and Russian nihilism.
Whoever loves liberty and his country must fight with all his force against every attempt to import into Germany these nihilistic views…. If he [Sacher-Masoch] continues to play the nihilist, I would advise him not only to think in Russian but also to write in Russian, for in Germany there will be as little place for him and his works as for Russian barbarism, in the name of which his Wanda von Dunajew whips her lovers.7
Indeed, Sacher-Masoch did make use of Russian details and, even more, played upon contemporary fears and fantasies about Russia, in order to introduce an explosive deviation from the conventional romantic forms of bourgeois Victorian society in nineteenth-century Europe. Yet Sacher-Masoch insisted that his own predilections were widespread among Germans as well as Russians. One of Krafft-Ebing’s informants, around the turn of the century, reported on the presumed prevalence of such perversion, citing “the fact that every experienced prostitute keeps some suitable instrument (usually a whip) for flagellation,” and noting that “all prostitutes agree that there are many men who like to play ‘slave’—i.e., like to be so called, and have themselves scolded and trod upon and beaten.” The conclusion was alarming: “The number of masochists is larger than has yet been dreamed.”8 Evidently, the reviewer of Venus in Furs, who denounced the novella in 1870 for its insidious communism and nihilism, already had some inkling that the specter haunting Europe might be the specter of masochism.
“THE MAGNIFICENT NATURE OF THE CARPATHIANS”
Sacher-Masoch was born in 1836 in the Galician city of Lemberg, today Lviv in Ukraine, and very near the nineteenth-century border between the Habsburg and the Russian empires. Under the Polish name of Lwów it had belonged to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, until annexed in 1772 by Austria in the first partition of Poland; the city then became the administrative center of the Habsburg pro
vince of Galicia. Sacher-Masoch was the son of a Habsburg police official of German Bohemian descent, who conserved law and order in Lemberg on behalf of the Metternich administration in Vienna. At that time the city, numbering around 50,000 inhabitants, was still predominantly Polish in population, though in addition to Austrian imperial officials, there were also increasingly important urban minorities, the Jews as well as the Ruthenians or Ukrainians, for whom the town was just becoming a center of emerging national culture. The 1830s was precisely the period when a small circle of young priests in the Uniate or Greek Catholic seminary in Lemberg began to urge the literary importance of the Ukrainian language. Habsburg officials, like Sacher-Masoch’s father, were prepared to give limited encouragement to Ukrainian nationalism as a counterbalance to the conspiratorial national engagement of the Poles, who aspired to the restoration of an independent Poland, including Galicia.
Sacher-Masoch himself, though he lived in Galicia only until the age of twelve, maintained a lifelong fascination and sympathy with the peoples of the province, especially the Jews and the Ruthenians. He was particularly intrigued by the Hassidic movement, which was exceptionally important among Jews in Galicia, and he wrote about them with such philo-Semitic sympathy in his Jewish tales that he was widely suspected of being a Jew himself, as well as a nihilist and a communist. He described the women at the court of a Hassidic leader, the Zaddik of Sadogora, and could not resist focusing fetishistically on their furs:
The Zaddik’s wife and daughters-in-law, his daughters and his nieces, were assembled. I felt as if I had been transported into the harem of the Sultan in Constantinople. All these women were beautiful, or at least pretty; both astonished and amused, they all looked at us with their big black-velvet eyes; they were all dressed in silk morning-gowns and long caftans made of silk or velvet and trimmed and lined with expensive furs. One could see all colors and kinds of furs: yellow and pink silk, green, red, and blue velvet, squirrel, ermine, marten, and sable.9
