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VENUS IN FURS ***

Produced by Avinash Kothare, Tom Allen, Tiffany Vergon, Charles Aldarondo, Charles Franks and PG Distributed Proofreaders

VENUS IN FURS

Of this book, intended for private circulation, only 1225 copies have been printed, and type afterward distributed.

VENUS IN FURS

By

LEOPOLD VON SACHER-MASOCH

Translated from the German

By

FERNANDA SAVAGE

INTRODUCTION

Leopold von Sacher-Masoch was born in Lemberg, Austrian Galicia, on January 27, 1836. He studied jurisprudence at Prague and Graz, and in 1857 became a teacher at the latter university. He published several historical works, but soon gave up his academic career to devote himself wholly to literature. For a number of years he edited the international review, _Auf der Hohe_, at Leipzig, but later removed to Paris, for he was always strongly Francophile. His last years he spent at Lindheim in Hesse, Germany, where he died on March 9, 1895. In 1873 he married Aurora von Rumelin, who wrote a number of novels under the pseudonym of Wanda von Dunajew, which it is interesting to note is the name of the heroine of _Venus in Furs_. Her sensational memoirs which have been the cause of considerable controversy were published in 1906.

During his career as writer an endless number of works poured from Sacher-Masoch's pen. Many of these were works of ephemeral journalism, and some of them unfortunately pure sensationalism, for economic necessity forced him to turn his pen to unworthy ends.

There is, however, a residue among his works which has a distinct literary and even greater psychological value. His principal literary ambition was never completely fulfilled. It was a somewhat programmatic plan to give a picture of contemporary life in all its various aspects and interrelations under the general title of the _Heritage of Cain_. This idea was probably derived from Balzac's _Comedie Humaine_. The whole was to be divided into six subdivisions with the general titles _Love, Property, Money, The State, War,_ and _Death_. Each of these divisions in its turn consisted of six novels, of which the last was intended to summarize the author's conclusions and to present his solution for the problems set in the others.

This extensive plan remained unachieved, and only the first two parts, _Love_ and _Property_, were completed. Of the other sections only fragments remain. The present novel, _Venus in Furs_, forms the fifth in the series, _Love_.

The best of Sacher-Masoch's work is characterized by a swift narration and a graphic representation of character and scene and a rich humor. The latter has made many of his shorter stories dealing with his native Galicia little masterpieces of local color.

There is, however, another element in his work which has caused his name to become as eponym for an entire series of phenomena at one end of the psycho-sexual scale. This gives his productions a peculiar psychological value, though it cannot be denied also a morbid tinge that makes them often repellent. However, it is well to remember that nature is neither good nor bad, neither altruistic nor egoistic, and that it operates through the human psyche as well as through crystals and plants and animals with the same inexorable laws.

Sacher-Masoch was the poet of the anomaly now generally known as _masochism_. By this is meant the desire on the part of the individual affected of desiring himself completely and unconditionally subject to the will of a person of the opposite sex, and being treated by this person as by a master, to be humiliated, abused, and tormented, even to the verge of death. This motive is treated in all its innumerable variations. As a creative artist Sacher-Masoch was, of course, on the quest for the absolute, and sometimes, when impulses in the human being assume an abnormal or exaggerated form, there is just for a moment a flash that gives a glimpse of the thing in itself.