Venus in Furs
Venus in Furs (German: Venus im Pelz), is the most famous work of the Austrian author Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, and a part of 'Love' in the first volume of the series of 'Das Verm�chtnis Kains' or Legacy of Kains sometimes translated as Heritage of Cain which was published in 1870. The plan of the author was to group various novellas into 6 volumes, each of which was titled according to its central theme viz.: "Love", "Property", "State", "War", "Work", and "Death". The first volume, "Love", was completed in 1870 and it begins with the prologue short story The Wanderer in which a hunter off in the dense forest meets a strannik (wandering ascetic), whose passionate speech reveals his philosophy where Cain is responsible for having unleashed into the world the six "evils" that title each volume of the cycle. The only other volume, "Property", was published in 1877. The novel draws themes, like female dominance and sadomasochism, and character inspiration heavily from the author's own life. Wanda von Dunajew, the novel's central female character, was modeled after Fanny Pistor, who was an emerging literary writer. The two met when Pistor contacted Sacher-Masoch, under assumed name and fictitious title of Baroness Bogdanoff, for suggestions on improving her writing to make it suitable for publication.Von Sacher-Masoch was born in the city of Lemberg (now Lviv, Ukraine), the capital of the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, at the time a province of the Austrian Empire, into the Roman Catholic family of an Austrian civil servant, Leopold Johann Nepomuk Ritter von Sacher, and Charlotte von Masoch, a Ukrainian noblewoman. He later combined his surname with his wife's 'von Masoch', at the request of her family (she was the last of the line). Von Sacher served as a Commissioner of the Imperial Police Forces in Lemberg, and he was recognised with a new title of nobility as Sacher-Masoch awarded by the Austrian Emperor.Leopold studied law, history and mathematics at Graz University, and after graduating moved back to Lemberg where he became a professor. His early, non-fictional publications dealt mostly with Austrian history. At the same time, Masoch turned to the folklore and culture of his homeland, Galicia. Soon he abandoned lecturing and became a free man of letters. Within a decade his short stories and novels prevailed over his historical non-fiction works, though historical themes continued to imbue his fiction.On 9 December 1869, Sacher-Masoch and his mistress Baroness Fanny Pistor signed a contract making him her slave for a period of six months, with the stipulation that the Baroness wear furs as often as possible. The two travelled by train to Italy. As in Venus in Furs, he traveled in the third-class compartment, while she had a seat in first-class, arriving in Venice (Florence, in the novel), where they were not known, and would not arouse suspicion. Sacher-Masoch pressured his first wife - Aurora von R�melin, whom he married in 1873 - to live out the experience of the book, against her preferences. Sacher-Masoch found his family life to be unexciting, and eventually got a divorce and married his assistant.According to official reports, he died in Lindheim, Altenstadt, Hesse, in 1895. It is also claimed that he died in an asylum in Mannheim in 1905. Sacher-Masoch is the great-great-uncle to the British singer and actress Marianne Faithfull on the side of her mother, the Viennese Baroness Eva Erisso.The term masochism was coined in 1886 by the Austrian psychiatrist Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing (1840-1902) in his book Psychopathia Sexualis:"...I feel justified in calling this sexual anomaly "Masochism", because the author Sacher-Masoch frequently made this perversion, which up to his time was quite unknown to the scientific world as such, the substratum of his writings. I followed thereby the scientific formation of the term "Daltonism", from Dalton, the discoverer of colour-blindness."