Schnitzler Arthur. Round Dance and Other Plays

Oxford University Press, 2004. — 437 p.Arthur Schnitzler was born in 1862 into the Jewish professional bourgeoisie of Vienna and somewhat reluctantly followed his father, a distinguished laryngologist, into a medical career. After his father’s death in 1893, however, Schnitzler devoted himself largely to literature. Thanks to his love-tragedy Flirtations and his series of one-act plays about a Viennese man-about-town, Anatol, he acquired a reputation as the chronicler of Viennese decadence which, to his annoyance, stayed with him all his life, despite the variety and originality of his later works. Round Dance, written in the late 1890s, exposes sexual life in Vienna with such witty frankness that it could not be staged till after the First World War, when it provoked a riot in the theatre and a prosecution for indecency. Elsewhere Schnitzler explores love, sexuality, and death, sometimes in polished one-act plays such as The Green Cockatoo, The Last Masks, and Countess Mizzi, sometimes in extended social comedies such as The Vast Domain, always with a sharp, non-judgemental awareness of the complexity and mystery of the psyche. The ironic comedy Professor Bernhardi, based on his and his father’s medical experiences, examines the conflict between the secular state and the Church in a period increasingly poisoned by anti-Semitism. His prose fiction ranges from the early stream-of-consciousness narrative Lieutenant Gustl (1900), which led him to be deprived of his officer status for satirizing the army, to the enigmatic Dream Story (1926), recently adapted by Stanley Kubrick as Eyes Wide Shut, and the exploration of a consciousness sinking into madness, Flight into Darkness (1931). Schnitzler died in 1931, one of the most famous German-language authors of his day.
J. M. Q. Davies read German and Modern Greek at Oxford and spent two years teaching in Vienna, prior to pursuing an academic career in English and Comparative Literature. His publications include Blake’s Milton Designs: The Dynamics of Meaning (1993) and several translations from German, among them Schnitzler’s Dream Story (1999) and a selection of his shorter fiction.
Ritchie Robertson is a Professor of German at Oxford University and a Fellow of St John’s College. He is the author of Kafka: Judaism, Politics, and Literature (OUP, 1985), Heine (Peter Halban, 1988), and The ‘Jewish Question’ in German Literature, 1749–1939 (OUP, 1999), and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Mann (CUP, 2002). He has also edited The German-Jewish Dialogue: An Anthology of Literary Texts, 1749–1993 for the Oxford World’s Classics.