Venus in Furs by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

His account begins with a stay at a health resort in the Carpathian Mountains. (The pioneering psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing based the term “masochism” on Sacher-Masoch’s name and sexual inclinations.)īut it takes Severin a moment to get there. The charge that Severin feels when he kneels at a woman’s feet, for instance, sensing her anger and the bristling of the furs she wears, gives him his identity, a presence to be trampled on.

“The wounds that were healed long ago have opened up again and throb with pain now and then a tear falls onto the page.”) What Sacher-Masoch also makes clear is that Severin’s life has no apparent shape or meaning unless he is able to express his desire for a commanding, withholding woman. (“A strange feeling comes over me as I write these words,” Severin notes near the start of his recollections. From the beginning of the novel, it’s obvious that Sacher-Masoch’s alter ego is saturnine, prone to self-absorption and melancholy. The image triggers something in Severin’s erotic memory. (The book is largely composed around a series of conversations.) Severin’s friend describes a dream, in which he spoke to a statue-like woman who was draped in furs.

We first learn about this Galician nobleman’s passionate, almost clinical desires after a conversation that he has one day with a male friend.

The cruelty of women! For Severin-the endlessly needy anti-hero of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s short, intense erotic novel, “Venus in Furs,” published in 1870-there is no love without denial. Tie me up, tie me down: Nina Arianda and Wes Bentley in “Venus in Fur.” Photograph by Robert Risko

Venus in Furs by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch