HE WAS born in Galicia, in his younger years presumably went to school, turned himself into a writer and one not without success, but in turn made his wife miserable.
Not exactly blessed with an excess of education, he composed novellas such as Miss Director.
In Venus in Furs, the most famous of his once widely read books, the enthusiast distinguished himself by carrying boxes.
He looks nice, alas too much in love, thus rich in weakness, poor in energy.
With much agility he assists his beloved—who, with the most becharmed smile on her lips, esteems another to the extent she despises her helpmate—into a first-class carriage, and betakes himself with unfeigned delight to a lesser compartment.
Such and similar experiences our author dishes up for us, obviously with too much pleasure. His fate is to be mocked by his own style.
Once I read a detective story by him on the floor of a nicely furnished room fitted with alcoves, comfortably stretching out my legs.
Furthermore, I have to thank him for knowledge of a youth who, naively punished for a naive mistake, tasted the whiplash of the lady of the manor, fully knowing how to enjoy this benevolence.
That this occurred in the Carpathians excuses it.
This portrayer of Eastern characteristics found willing readers precisely in the standardized West, which hardly surprises us, since savage beings impress tamed ones.
Where else but in him did I find taverns impregnated by greenly shimmering schnapps air? Who else but he allows me, even today, to think about bear fights and so on?
Maybe I should never have read him, but I gladly confess it. With a little goodwill, we can successfully rid ourselves of troublesome acquaintances. Doesn’t one influence in life happily replace another?
He let one of his heroes be thoroughly pummeled, perhaps only too gently, by countrywomen wearing red leather boots that indeed clattered bravely on the pavement.
I would have let them be harder on the simpleton who, in his highly single-minded soul, rejoiced in a most inimitable manner about the diminishment of his right to live.
The lady who vanquished him found him so insipid she had no choice but to renounce him. The way she did this turned out badly for him.
While he suffered because of her, she had tea served and listened in all tranquillity to Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata.”
She longed, incidentally, to be away from the castle, where she had begun to take over duties like, for example, slapping her maids. Her noble being suffered in such a milieu.
He who wrote such things would have liked to have been, to his and the reader’s advantage, someone else, but this just wasn’t granted him.
Nonetheless, he made himself famous, from which circumstance these lines derive.
(1925)
Translated with Annette Wiesner