Novel
Venus in Furs
Venus im Pelz
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch · 1870
Opening lines
Ich hatte liebenswürdige Gesellschaft.
Mir gegenüber an dem massiven Renaissancekamin saß Venus, aber nicht etwa eine Dame der Halbwelt, die unter diesem Namen Krieg führte gegen das feindliche Geschlecht, gleich Mademoiselle Cleopatra, sondern die wahrhafte Liebesgöttin.
I had charming company.
Opposite me, by the massive Renaissance fireplace, sat Venus, not some lady of the demi-monde waging war under that name on the enemy sex, like Mademoiselle Cleopatra, but the true goddess of love.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
A narrator confides to his friend Severin a dream in which Venus, draped in furs, spoke to him of love; Severin hands him in reply the manuscript of his own story. In an inn in the Carpathians, the young nobleman falls in love there with a young widow, Wanda von Dunajew, and begs her to treat him as a slave. She hesitates, then takes a liking to it, has him sign a contract that delivers him to her and takes him to Florence under the name of Gregor's servant.
Context
The story appeared from Cotta in the spring of 1870, in the first volume, devoted to love, of a cycle in six parts that was meant to embrace the whole of human existence and was never completed. It has the character of a confession: the author had concluded a contract of submission with Fanny Pistor, the model for the heroine, and his wife Aurora Rümelin, whom he married in 1873, had herself called Wanda. The text contains no sexual description; it was nevertheless placed on the index in West Germany in 1958.
Who it is for
A short framed novel, where everything is played out in speech and in writing. Whoever expects a licentious book will find a text almost without scenes.
Prizes and reception
The best-known of its author's books; Krafft-Ebing took from it the word masochism in his Psychopathia sexualis.
Sources for this page 13
The pages consulted to check this page.