First Edition of Musil's unfinished masterpiece

Musil, Robert. Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften.

€ 6,000.00

First edition in three volumes of the work which is unequivocally Musil's masterpiece, and a cornerstone of modernist literature. Robert Musil (1880-1942), an Austrian novelist trained as an engineer and a philosopher, died before he was able to complete Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. Its third volume was published from his papers by his widow, Martha Musil, in the midst of the Second World War.

Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften roams through the Austro-Hungarian fin de siècle, portraying a sprawling cast of characters from all walks of Viennese life, from society wives to murderers of prostitutes. The book stands alongside the likes of Hermann Broch's The Sleepwalkers, Karl Kraus' The Last Days of Mankind, or Stefan Zweig's The World of Yesterday as an ironic and critical portrait of the rising tides of tension and imperial nationalism, and a lost sense of masculine identity among the generation leading up to World War I.

While Musil was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, his work never generated the interest (or indeed, income) Musil desired; it was only in the 1950s that Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften became lauded on an international stage. It is considered in turn a literary triumph, a work of Musil's particular theories of philosophy, and even an historical record of the fading days of empire in Europe.