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The First Masochist: A Biography of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
"He was born in 1836, in Lemberg, Galicia. His father was the chief of Police, his mother a noblewoman. A nervous and excitable child, he was once badly thrashed by an aunt he adored, & though he later recalled the pain as terrible, he was enraptured by it. Thus the beginning."
This is the first biography in English of von Sacher-Masoch, author of the notorious 'Venus in Firs', &, like Sade & Kafka, a name for a process.
Includes a bibliography & index.
This is the first biography in English of von Sacher-Masoch, author of the notorious 'Venus in Firs', &, like Sade & Kafka, a name for a process.
Includes a bibliography & index.
- GenresBiography
220 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1967
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November 15, 2020
I probably first encountered the subject of this biography during high school via the relevant song of the first Velvet Underground record. Then, later, Sacher-Masoch, his most famous novel, 'Venus in Furs', and the condition named after him came up repeatedly in Freud, particularly in reference to his Thanatos theory. I picked up this book years, even decades, ago while still intently studying psychoanalytic theory and continental depth psychology.
It took finding Ralph Ginzburg's slight 'An Unhurried View of Erotica' recently to bring the Sacher-Masoch book back to mind. I checked out his pages in Wikipedia and in Goodreads, found he had written a heck of a lot more than 'Venus in Furs' and became intrigued.
As it turns out, Count Sacher-Masoch was one of the foremost European authors of the late nineteenth century, highly regarded by other authors and popular with both the intelligentsia and the general reading public. His peculiar interest in being dominated and abused by women--preferably large, muscular naked women draped with furs--wielding whips and riding crops, a common theme in his fictions, was not apparently off-putting to his Victorian readership. Quite the contrary. This, his pacifism, radical feminism, socialism and affinity for the Jews of Eastern Europe make him a remarkable study indeed.
Cleugh writes a cleverly amusing, yet sympathetic, biography of this odd fellow, a biography which seems to fully cover his output of novels, stories, histories, essays and plays while detailing the progress of his personal life from his birth in 1836 until his death in 1895. Yet, despite the attention to detail, the whole picture of the man is not well conveyed. I left with little more sense of how he could be the way he was, erotically speaking, than I started with. So, too, the curious fascination of the better classes of the late 19th century with sado-masochism and with authors who seriously promoted it also remains somewhat mysterious.
--Or perhaps not mysterious at all, as I'd entered the enterprise with the general sense that masochism affords those brought up to think of sex as dirty with the double benefit of being punished while they are fulfilling their desires. ...but this can't be all, can it?
It took finding Ralph Ginzburg's slight 'An Unhurried View of Erotica' recently to bring the Sacher-Masoch book back to mind. I checked out his pages in Wikipedia and in Goodreads, found he had written a heck of a lot more than 'Venus in Furs' and became intrigued.
As it turns out, Count Sacher-Masoch was one of the foremost European authors of the late nineteenth century, highly regarded by other authors and popular with both the intelligentsia and the general reading public. His peculiar interest in being dominated and abused by women--preferably large, muscular naked women draped with furs--wielding whips and riding crops, a common theme in his fictions, was not apparently off-putting to his Victorian readership. Quite the contrary. This, his pacifism, radical feminism, socialism and affinity for the Jews of Eastern Europe make him a remarkable study indeed.
Cleugh writes a cleverly amusing, yet sympathetic, biography of this odd fellow, a biography which seems to fully cover his output of novels, stories, histories, essays and plays while detailing the progress of his personal life from his birth in 1836 until his death in 1895. Yet, despite the attention to detail, the whole picture of the man is not well conveyed. I left with little more sense of how he could be the way he was, erotically speaking, than I started with. So, too, the curious fascination of the better classes of the late 19th century with sado-masochism and with authors who seriously promoted it also remains somewhat mysterious.
--Or perhaps not mysterious at all, as I'd entered the enterprise with the general sense that masochism affords those brought up to think of sex as dirty with the double benefit of being punished while they are fulfilling their desires. ...but this can't be all, can it?
Displaying 1 of 1 review