Venus in Furs
Venus in Furs (German: Venus im Pelz) is a novella by the Austrian author Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, and the best known of his works. The novel was to be part of an epic series that Sacher-Masoch envisioned called Legacy of Cain (Das Vermächtniß Kains). Venus in Furs was part of Love (Die Liebe), the first volume of the series. It was published in 1870.
Novel
The novel draws themes, like
Plot summary
The framing story concerns a man who dreams of speaking to Venus about love while she wears furs. The unnamed narrator tells his dreams to a friend, Severin, who tells him how to break himself of his fascination with cruel women by reading a manuscript, Memoirs of a Suprasensual Man.
This manuscript tells of a man, Severin von Kusiemski, who is so infatuated with a woman, Wanda von Dunajew, that he asks to be her
Severin describes his feelings during these experiences as suprasensuality. Severin and Wanda travel to Florence. Along the way, Severin takes the generic Russian servant's name of "Gregor" and the role of Wanda's servant. In Florence, Wanda treats him brutally as a servant, and recruits a trio of African women to dominate him.
The relationship arrives at a crisis when Wanda meets a man to whom she would like to submit, a Byronic hero known as Alexis Papadopolis. At the end of the book, Severin, humiliated by Wanda's new lover, loses the desire to submit.
Once the narrator has finished reading the manuscript, he asks Severin what the moral of the story is. Severin responds:
That woman, as nature has created her, and man at present is educating her, is man's enemy. She can only be his slave or his despot, but never his companion. This she can become only when she has the same rights as he and is his equal in education and work.
Interpretations
In 1905 Sigmund Freud's Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality posited a dialectic between the thinking of Masoch's and that of Marquis de Sade's creating the term Sadomasochism and explaining that "a person who feels pleasure in producing pain in someone else in a sexual relationship is also capable of enjoying as pleasure any pain which he may himself derived from sexual relation."[3] Then in the intellectual ferment of Post World War II theorists like
Editions
- Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus im Pelz. In: Das Vermächtniß Kains – Erster Theil: Die Liebe. Stuttgart: Cotta, 1870, pp. 121–368.
- Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs. In: Masochism. Zone Books, 1999.
- Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs (Audiobook) released 2021 read by Zachary Johnson and Verla Bond
References
- JSTOR 3251736. Retrieved 9 December 2022.
- ^ Max Kaiser (2005). "Sacher-Masoch, Leopold Franz Johann Ferdinand Maria (bis 1838 Sacher Ritter von Kronenthal, Pseudonym Charlotte Arand, Zoë von Rodenbach)". Neue Deutsche Biographie. Vol. 22. pp. 325–327. Retrieved 9 December 2022.
- ISBN 1784783587.
External links
- Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Venus in Furs at Project Gutenberg
- Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Venus im Pelz (in German)
- Venus in Furs public domain audiobook at LibriVox