Venus in Furs Read online

  It would be all too easy to imagine how Sacher-Masoch might have invested this scene with his characteristic romantic fantasies, envisioning a rabbinical harem for masochistic Hassids, but in the tale itself he restrained his literary instincts and impulses. In Venus in Furs the Jews of Galicia appear in strictly secondary roles, never in furs; it is a Jewish dealer who sells Severin a photograph of Titian’s Venus with Mirror, and another who sells him secondhand books, apparently including the memoirs of Casanova. When Severin leaves Galicia in a third-class railway compartment, playing the part of Wanda’s servant, he must suffer the smell of onions in the company of Polish peasants and Jewish peddlers. Sacher-Masoch gives free rein to his fantasies in Venus in Furs, but his literary representation of Galicia is ethnographically precise.

  Though he emphatically denied being a Jew, Sacher-Masoch proudly claimed to be of noble Ruthenian descent, on his mother’s Masoch side of the family. This may or may not have been true, for his Masoch grandfather was born in the Habsburg Banat of Temesvar, part of modern Romania, and may himself have been of Czech or Slovak descent. Sacher-Masoch’s national identity, however, like his sexual identity, was very much conditioned by his imagination, and so he imagined his Masoch ancestors to be Ruthenians, as he also liked to suppose that the Sacher family came originally from Habsburg Spain. “The name Sacher which people have so often taken for a Jewish name, is in reality of Oriental origin,” he noted, insisting on an exotic descent from Spanish Moors. “People have already taken me for almost everything,” he wrote, “for a Jew, a Hungarian, a Bohemian, and even for a woman.”10 A confused and complex identity was by no means unusual in a family whose ultimate allegiance lay with the Habsburg dynasty in a multinational empire. Sacher-Masoch himself was always patriotically committed to the Habsburgs, and explored the history of the dynasty in his works, ranging from the reign of Charles V to that of Maria Theresa. In 1880 Sacher-Masoch, so punctilious in his bizarre contracts of sexual slavery, was fighting with his publisher over business contracts, and the author was condemned to eight days in prison. He sent his wife, Wanda, to plead for him face-to-face with the Emperor Franz Joseph in Vienna, who declined to cancel the sentence. The following year Sacher-Masoch, in spite of his private enthusiasm for being bound, beaten, and abased, went into exile in Germany rather than go to prison in the Habsburg monarchy.

  Sacher-Masoch’s identity as a Slavic Ruthenian came not only from supposed descent, but also from an intense connection to the Galician village girl who became his wet nurse in his infancy:

  With her milk I sucked in the love of the Russian people, of my province, of my homeland…. Through my nurse Russian became the first language that I commanded, though in my parents’ house Polish, German, and French were primarily spoken. And it was she who told me the wondrously beautiful Russian fairy tales, or sang, while rocking me, those Little Russian folk songs that stamped themselves upon my existence, my emotional world, and also all my later works.11

  Thus he considered himself a Slav by origin, without actually distinguishing clearly between Ruthenian and Little Russian on the one hand, which would denominate modern Ukrainian, and Russian on the other hand, which would certainly have been alien to the province of Galicia and his Habsburg homeland. By the same token, the presumptively “Russian” identity of Wanda von Dunajew in Venus in Furs should perhaps be considered more generally suggestive of the Slavs of Eastern Europe. After all, even Catherine the Great, whom Wanda thrillingly resembled, was not actually Russian by birth, but a German princess who adopted a Russian identity.

  Sacher-Masoch, though he was to make his career as a writer in German, did not actually begin his proper German education until his father was transferred to Prague in 1848; the young man eventually completed his studies at the university in Graz. Prague was a Czech and German city in the nineteenth century, and Graz, in Austrian Styria, was very close to Habsburg Slovenia. In short, the mingling of German and Slavic populations in the Habsburg monarchy in the nineteenth century was such that Sacher-Masoch could plausibly subscribe to a confusion of German and Slavic identities. Venus in Furs, though written in German, presented the Galician flagellant Severin von Kusiemski, also unspecifically Slavic, as a familiar figure from the author’s native province. In the 1860s Sacher-Masoch had corresponded with the Ruthenian political leader Mykhail Kuzemsky.

  In Venus in Furs Severin is identified as “a Galician nobleman and landowner,” and his possession of estates makes it more likely that he would be Polish than Ruthenian, for, generally, the Poles of Galicia were the noble landowners, while the Ruthenians tended to be peasants working the land. Wanda is introduced as “a widow from Lwów,” and Severin meets her at a resort in the Carpathian mountains, near the border between the Habsburg and the Russian empires. Excited at the possibility of becoming Wanda’s slave, Severin walks in the mountains: “hoping to numb my passion, my yearning in the magnificent nature of the Carpathians.”12 The fantasies of Sacher-Masoch in Venus in Furs were conditioned by the ethnography and the geography of Habsburg Galicia, and that setting recurs not only in the Jewish tales, but also in a collection of specifically Galician tales. Another novella told the tale of Don Juan von Kolomea, today Kolomyia in Ukraine. Sacher-Masoch was very much a writer of his Habsburg homeland, but his was not the metropolitan literary landscape of Vienna; rather he defined his perspective from the remote and mountainous margins of the monarchy, where his literary fantasy played all the more freely. This same Galician terrain was revisited much later in the final fictional monument to the Habsburg monarchy, Radetzky March, by Joseph Roth, who was born in Galicia, not far from Lemberg, in the year before Sacher-Masoch’s death.

  In Venus in Furs Sacher-Masoch sets up an opposition between the northern land of Galicia and the southern Mediterranean domain of Venus. On the opening page of the novella, the marble statue Venus appears in a dream, comically sneezing from the cold of the northern climate: “The sublime being had wrapped her marble body in a huge fur and, shivering, had curled up like a cat.” Later Severin explains that coldness is not only meteorological but also a moral and metaphorical matter, inasmuch as pagan Venus requires a fur to warm her in “the icy Christian world” of the north.13 When Wanda and Severin leave Galicia together, they head for the south, to discover the pagan heritage and classical climate of Italy, though she nevertheless must pack up all her northern furs to travel, and he must carry them as her servant. Poland and Russia, up until the eighteenth century, always figured in European geography as lands of the north; thereafter, they began to be reclassified according to the cultural cartography of the Enlightenment, and came to be viewed together in accordance with the emerging modern idea of Eastern Europe. A distinction began to be made between Western Europe and Eastern Europe, the latter perceived as the more exotic and less civilized part of the continent. Furthermore, Eastern Europe was conceived as a domain of slavery, because of the supposed despotism of government, whether in the Russian or Ottoman empires, and also on account of the harsh conditions of serfdom, whether on the Polish or Russian estates. The disapproval that developed in Western Europe sometimes produced the opinion that in Eastern Europe people actually preferred to live in servitude, and when the Marquis de Custine published his celebrated account of traveling in Russia in 1839, he did not hesitate to pronounce the Russians to be “drunk with slavery.”14 Such perspectives must have conditioned the reception of Venus in Furs by nineteenth-century readers, who would have interpreted Severin’s ecstatic sexual slavery in the context of his origin in Galicia. Sacher-Masoch’s first biographer, Carl Felix von Schlichtegroll, writing in 1901, described Galicia as “melancholy, strange, half-wild, half-overcultivated.” The most recent biographer, Bernard Michel, writing in 1989, argues that Galician scenarios were essential to Sacher-Masoch, because, when set “in a remote land, considered exotic and therefore backward,” the author’s extraordinary fantasies “became conceivable” to the public.15 Thus, Sacher-Masoch, writing in German, was
offering his readers a scenario of Slavic exoticism, which could be received in the context of contemporary prejudices concerning the barbarism of Eastern Europe. Sacher-Masoch himself was susceptible to the exoticism of his own native Galicia, as indicated by the imaginative maneuver that made the Hassidic ladies of Sadogora appear as a sort of Turkish harem.

  In considering Severin’s eagerness to become a slave, one must keep in mind that there was indeed actual slavery in the world during Sacher-Masoch’s lifetime. When Venus in Furs was published in 1870, black slaves in the United States had only recently been freed by the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 and the Thirteenth Amendment of 1865, while the serfs of Russia had been liberated from their conditions of bondage in 1861. In the Habsburg monarchy itself, including Galicia, serfdom had not been fully abolished until 1848. The novella is imbued with a perverse nostalgia for slavery, and Wanda becomes “melancholy” at the thought that “slavery doesn’t exist in our country.” Severin replies: “Then let’s go to a country where it still exists, to the Orient, to Turkey.” Wanda soon reconsiders, and proposes that they go to Italy instead: “What good is having a slave where everyone has slaves? I want to be alone in having a slave.” Once settled in Florence, she turns out to have not only a Slavic slave in Severin, but, mysteriously, others as well: “Three young, slender African women came in—carved out of ebony, as it were, and clad entirely in red satin. Each woman was clutching a rope.” At Wanda’s command, they bind Severin in preparation for a whipping, and then vanish suddenly “as if the earth had swallowed them up.” Their nearly supernatural entrance and exit suggest the freedom of fantasy with which Sacher-Masoch develops the theme and variations of slavery. Severin’s contract with Wanda specifies, “Not only may Frau von Dunajew punish her slave as she sees fit for the slightest oversight or offense, but she also has the right to mistreat him at whim or merely as a pastime, however it happens to please her, and she even has the right to kill him if she so wishes. In short: he is her absolute property.”16 His legal subjection to her, however extraordinary as an act of enthusiastic self-annihilation, stipulated conditions that were not altogether alien to European and American society up until the middle of the nineteenth century.

  When Sacher-Masoch was ten years old, in 1846, Galicia experienced an episode of social conflict of such traumatic intensity that it haunted the Polish national consciousness for the rest of the century, and also left a powerful impression on the son of the Lemberg police prefect. The outbreak of a Polish national insurrection in the free city of Cracow sparked conspiratorial activity in Galicia, and the Habsburg attempts to preserve their authority in the province involved countenancing, if not actually encouraging, a jacquerie that led to the ferocious massacre of the insurrectionary noble landowners. Thus the peasants of Galicia served the purposes of Habsburg rule, proving that their hatred of the local landowners far outweighed any sense of Polish national solidarity. The principal peasant leader, Jakub Szela, infamous in Polish national memory, was politely received in the Sacher-Masoch home in Lemberg after the massacre, and became a lifelong figure of fascination for the author. Thus, from childhood, Sacher-Masoch had to confront the violent social tensions that invested the circumstances of Habsburg loyalty in Galicia, and in 1846 he received a glimpse of what it might mean to overturn temporarily the relations between nobles and peasants, the powerful and the powerless. The actual class tensions of the nineteenth century conditioned the fantastic inversions by which a nobleman like Severin von Kusiemski, or Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, played with the possibility of absolute subjection.

  “YOU’VE CORRUPTED MY IMAGINATION”

  “During recent years facts have been advanced which prove that Sacher-Masoch was not only the poet of Masochism, but that he himself was afflicted with this anomaly,” observed Krafft-Ebing in the 12th edition of Psychopathia Sexualis. Indeed, after Sacher-Masoch’s death in 1895, there followed several revealing publications concerning his life, including that of Schlichtegroll in 1901, which made use of material from the author’s private diary that has since been lost. Wanda published her Confessions in 1906, still angry at having been abandoned by Sacher-Masoch for a different domineering woman, and also displeased with Schlichtegroll’s portrayal of her marriage. From sources such as these, one might conclude that the fantastic fiction of Venus in Furs was a barely embroidered history of the author’s private life. In fact, it is important to keep in mind that the role of fantasy in both Sacher-Masoch’s life and his literary work is so exceptionally pervasive that the distinction between fact and fiction is curiously problematic. Krafft-Ebing attempted to address the problem in a spirit of somewhat misplaced liberalism:

  As a man Sacher-Masoch can not lose anything in the estimation of his cultured fellow beings simply because he was afflicted with an anomaly of his sexual feelings. As an author he suffered severe injury so far as the influence and intrinsic merit of his work is concerned, for so long and whenever he eliminated his perversion from his literary efforts, he was a gifted writer, and as such would have achieved real greatness had he been actuated by normally sexual feelings.17

  Krafft-Ebing evidently believed that the masochism of Sacher-Masoch severely vitiated his artistic work, despite being aware that the proposed elimination would have cost the author a part of his public. As Krafft-Ebing was the first to recognize, “Many perverts refer to this author as having given typical descriptions of their psychical conditions.”18 The professor of sexual pathology did not consider the possibility that what made a work like Venus in Furs a masterpiece might be precisely the author’s working of his atypical romantic inclinations into a perversely persuasive, elegantly elaborate, psychically seductive literary fantasy.

  Biographical research reveals that the relationship of Severin with Wanda was closely modeled on Sacher-Masoch’s recently concluded connection with a young widow named Fanny von Pistor. He traveled with her to Italy, acting as her servant under the name of Gregor, in Polish livery, taking the third-class compartment in the train, while she, in first class, assumed the Slavic name of the “Princess Bogdanoff.” In 1869 Sacher-Masoch signed a contract of slavery with Fanny von Pistor, with many of the same clauses that appeared the following year in the fictional contract, including the provision that the lady “promises to wear fur as often as practical and especially when being cruel.” A photograph from that year shows her in furs, and him on his knees before her. Yet, if his life provided material for his novel, Venus in Furs, in turn, was reenacted in his life, and he went on to sign a contract of slavery with his own wife: “I commit myself on my word of honor to be the slave of Frau Wanda von Dunajew, in exact accordance with her demands, and to submit unresistingly to everything that she imposes on me.”19 The name “Wanda von Dunajew” was his own fictional invention, then adopted by his wife, and it was therefore difficult to determine whether his marriage entered into his fiction or his fiction became a part of his marriage.

  Supposedly, the crushing conclusion of the novella, the brutal encounter with Wanda’s Greek lover, had no basis in biographical experience. In fiction, this ultimate humiliation became the “cure” for Severin’s masochism; in fact, Sacher-Masoch achieved no such cure, and spent the rest of his life in pursuit of both Venus and her male counterpart, the Apollonian Greek. Wanda, his wife, claimed to have only reluctantly acceded to her husband’s exhortations to throw herself at other men. Just recovering from childbirth in Graz in 1875, she was distressed to find Sacher-Masoch in great excitement about a personal advertisement for romantic companionship placed by a gentleman in the Viennese press. “Wanda, we have found the Greek!” he cried, and when a photograph arrived showing “a handsome young man in Oriental costume,” Sacher-Masoch was “electrified,” and kept shouting, “The Greek! The Greek!” He could hardly wait for her to recover from her delivery so that she could go and seek out the stranger, and meanwhile commissioned for her a new cloak “not only trimmed but entirely lined with fur.” Wanda complained that “it was
extremely heavy—even when I was strong and in good health I could not stand to wear furs like this for long—they hurt my shoulders.”20 Venus in Furs leaves little room for doubt that the figure of the Greek reflected the homosexual aspect of Severin’s fantasies:

  He was a handsome man, by God. No, more: he was a man such as I had never seen in the flesh. He stands in the Belvedere, hewn in marble, with the same slender and yet iron muscles, the same face, the same rippling curls. And what actually made him so peculiarly beautiful was that he wore no beard; and had his pelvis been less narrow, he might have been mistaken for a woman in male disguise … and that strange line around his mouth, the leonine lips that revealed a bit of the teeth and momentarily gave the face a touch of cruelty—

  Apollo flaying Marsyas….

  Now I understood male Eros and admired Socrates for remaining virtuous with Alcibiades.21

  The supposed cure which Severin undergoes at the hands of the Greek should perhaps be considered, in part, as Sacher-Masoch’s reluctance to pursue further the homosexual implications of the encounter. In the author’s life the pursuit of “the Greek” was always encountering obstacles, even in the case of an ardent male admirer who appeared under the name of “Anatole,” and who may or may not have been mad King Ludwig of Bavaria. Just as Sacher-Masoch felt compelled to deny any personal allegiance to Judaism, so also an unacknowledged sympathy with homosexuality marked another psychic site that he obviously found ambivalently compelling.

  In Venus in Furs Sacher-Masoch artistically represents the frenzied romantic fantasies of Severin in relation to the classical deities of Venus and Apollo, each invoked in marble form as the Medici Venus and the Belvedere Apollo, each incarnated in the flesh in Wanda and the Greek. The statue of Venus, from her first sneezes, seems to rule with cruel purpose over the human emotional landscape, and Apollo turns out to be no less dangerous to his devotees. It would be possible to look for Sacher-Masoch’s literary lineage in the classically inspired spirits of the eighteenth century, like Winckelmann, who sought the underlying principles of Greek sculpture in the “sublimely superhuman” form of the Apollo Belvedere, and Goethe, who, during his Italian Journey, contemplated the concept of beauty in the contours of the same statue.22 More immediately, Sacher-Masoch followed the traces of nineteenth-century Romantic writers like Joseph von Eichendorff, whose story “The Marble Statue” brought Venus dangerously to life at the site of an ancient pagan temple, or Prosper Mérimée, whose “Venus of Ille” involved a statue menacing enough to commit murder when a man misvalued her divine elevation. Sacher-Masoch might also have thought of the thrall of Venus over Tannhäuser in Wagner’s opera of the 1840s. There was even a curious convergence of interests with Nietzsche, whose Birth of Tragedy in 1872 articulated the conflict between Apollonian and Dionysian principles in ancient drama; interestingly, Wanda, as a votary of Venus, advocated pagan sensuality against the ascetic spirit of Christianity, offering an intimation of the themes that Nietzsche would later explore in the Genealogy of Morals. Indeed, Severin’s identification of himself as a “suprasensualist” might be viewed in relation to the supermanly qualities that interested Nietzsche.