Late Fame

Arthur Schnitzler

ஆக. 2017 · New York Review of Books

இந்த மின்புத்தகத்தைப் பற்றி

A hilarious takedown of celebrity and false genius, never before available in the US.

An NYRB Classics Original


Eduard Saxberger is a quiet man who is getting on in years and has spent the better part of them working at a desk in an office. Once upon a time, however, he published a book of poetry, Wanderings, and one day when he returns from his usual walk he finds a young man waiting for him. “Are you,” he wants to know, “Saxberger the poet?”

Is Saxberger Saxberger the poet? Was he ever a poet? A real poet? Saxberger hasn’t written a poem for years, but he begins to frequent the coffee shops of Vienna with his young admirer and his no less admiring circle of friends, and as he does he begins to yearn for a different life from the daily round followed by rounds of drinks and billiards with familiar buddies like Grossinger, the deli owner. And the ardent attentions of Fräulein Gasteiner, the tragedienne, are not entirely unwelcome.

The Hope of Young Vienna is how the young artists style themselves, and they are arranging an event that will introduce them to the world. They insist that the distinguished author of Wanderings take part in it as well. Will he write something new for the occasion? Will he at last receive his due?

Late Fame, an unpublished novella recently rediscovered in the papers of the great turn-of-the-century Austrian playwright and novelist Arthur Schnitzler, is a bittersweet parable of hope lost and found.

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Arthur Schnitzler (1862–1931) was born in Vienna to a well-to-do Austrian Jewish family. His father was a prominent laryngologist, and Arthur followed him into the profession, obtaining his doctorate of medicine and working at Vienna’s General Hospital until he stopped practicing to pursue writing full time. His first play, Anatol (1893), was a success. Other early works include Reigen (1897), which was adapted into Max Ophüls’s 1950 film, La Ronde; and Lieutenant Gustl (1900), a military satire denounced by anti-Semites who successfully lobbied for Schnitzler to be discharged from his position as a reserve officer in the medical corps of the Austro-Hungarian army. In 1903, he married Olga Gussmann, and the couple had a son and a daughter. Schnitzler wrote dozens of novels, novellas, and plays, including The Road into the Open (1908); Fräulein Else (1924); and Traumnovelle (1926), which Stanley Kubrick adapted into Eyes Wide Shut. Schnitzler and Gussmann were divorced in 1921. In 1928, their daughter, Lili, committed suicide; Schnitzler died following a stroke three years later.

Alexander Starritt is a writer, translator, and journalist who lives in London. His writing has been shortlisted for the Paris Literary Prize and he has contributed articles to The Times Literary Supplement, The Spectator, and The Mail on Sunday.

Wilhelm Hemecker teaches in the Department of European and Comparative Literature and Language Studies at the University of Vienna.

David Österle is a researcher and assistant to the director at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for the History and Theory of Biography in Vienna.