The Confusions of Young Torless
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction
Epigraph
Robert Musil was born in Klagenfurt, Austria, in 1880. After abandoning military school he trained as a mathematician, behavioural psychologist, engineer and philosopher. His first novel, The Confusions of Young Törless, an early example of expressionistic writing drawing on his experience of military school, appeared in 1906. During the First World War he served as an officer in the Austrian Army on the Italian front. Having distinguished himself as a soldier, Musil forsook brilliant opportunities and chose, instead, to retire into his writing. His other works include the short stories of Three Women (1924) and a play, The Enthusiasts (1921). He is perhaps best known for his great novel, The Man without Qualities (1930-43), which established Musil as one of the great German writers of the twentieth century, whose work has been compared to Rilke and the Expressionists. This reputation, however eluded him during his lifetime. His small private income was lost in the German inflation and he emigrated from Berlin, and then Vienna, in order to escape Nazism. He died exiled and impoverished in Switzerland in 1942.
Shaun Whiteside was born in Dungannon, Northern Ireland, in 1959, and educated in Dungannon Royal School and King’s College, Cambridge, where he graduated with a First in Modern Languages. He has translated widely from German, French and Italian, and his translations of Arthur Schnitzler’s Beatrice and Her Son and Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy are published by Penguin.
J. M. Coetzee was born in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1940, and educated in South Africa and the United States. His highly acclaimed books include Life & Times of Michael K (1983), winner of the 1983 Booker Prize and the 1985 Prix Etranger Femina; The Master of Petersburg (1994), which was awarded the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, and Disgrace (1999), winner of the 1999 Booker Prize.
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Die Verwirrung des Zöglings Törleβ first published 1906
This translation published in Penguin Classics (UK) 2001
Published in Penguin Books (USA) 2001
10
Introduction copyright © J. M. Coetzee, 2001
Copyright © Rowholt Verlag CmbH, 1978
Translation copyright © Shaun Whiteside, 2001
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Introduction
Robert Musil was born in 1880 in Klagenfurt, capital of the Austrian province of Carinthia. His mother, who came from the upper bourgeoisie, was a highly strung woman with an interest in the arts. His father was an engineer in the imperial administration who in his later years would be rewarded for a career of faithful service with elevation to the minor nobility. Musil Senior accepted without protest a liaison between his wife and a younger man, Heinrich Reiter, that began soon after his son’s birth. Reiter later settled in with the Musils, in a ménage à trois that endured for a quarter of a century.
Musil himself was an only child. Younger and smaller than his classmates at school, he cultivated a physical toughness that lasted all his life. His home life seems to have been tempestuous; at the demand of his mother - and, it must be said, with the boy’s enthusiastic agreement — he was sent at the age of eleven to board at a military Unterrealschuleoutside Vienna. From there he moved in 1894 to the Oberrealschule in Mährisch-Weisskirchen near Brno, capital of Moravia, where he spent a further three years. This school became the model for ‘W.’ in Young Törless.
Rather than follow a military career, Musil decided to study engineering, and at the age of seventeen enrolled in the Technische Hochschule in Brno, where his father now taught. Here he plunged into his scientific studies, disdaining the humanities and the kind of student attracted to the humanities. His diaries reveal him as preoccupied with matters of sex, but in unusually thoughtful ways. He found it difficult to accept the sexual role prescribed for him as a young man by the mores of his class, sowing his wild oats with prostitutes and working girls until it was time to make a bourgeois marriage.
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