Nevertheless, the originals of Basini and of his tormentors Beineberg and Reiting can easily be identified among the boys Musil knew at Mährisch-Weisskirchen, while one of Törless’s deepest confusions - about the nature of his feelings towards his mother — is mirrored in Musil’s own early diaries. The gap between Törless’s own outward sang-froid and the seething forces within him, between the well-regulated daily life at school and the eerie nocturnal floggings in the attic, has its parallel in the gap between the orderly bourgeois front presented by Törless’s parents and what he darkly knows must go on in the privacy of their bedroom.

The master metaphor that Musil uses for all these incommensurabilities comes from Törless’s studies in mathematics. Living side by side with the real numbers, and somehow made to interlock with them by the operations of mathematical reasoning, are the imaginary numbers, numbers which have no referent in the real world. Adults, led by Törless’s teachers, seem to have no trouble in bringing together the domains of the real and the imaginary (to Törless the vertiginously unimaginable). In the euphoric speech he makes to the assembled teachers at the end of the book, Törless claims to have resolved this confusion in his mind (‘I know that I was indeed mistaken’) and to have emerged safely into young adulthood (‘I’m not afraid of anything any more. I know: things are things and will remain so for ever’). His teachers understand nothing of what he says: they have either never had experiences like his, or have tightly repressed them. Törless is unusual in the thoroughness with which he has faced - or been driven to face - the darkness within; whether or not we regard as self-betrayal his later adoption of the pose of what Musil as narrator calls the ‘aesthetically inclined intellectual’, he is certainly, in his confused youth (‘confusion’, Verwirrung,is a word Musil uses with continual irony), the figure of the artist in the modern world, exploring the remoter shores of experience and bringing back his reports.

Despite the amoralism that makes Young Törless so much a product of its age, the moral questions raised by the story will not go away. Beineberg, the more intellectually inclined of Törless’s comrades, has a vulgar-Nietzschean, proto-Fascist justification for what they do to Basini: the three of them belong to a new generation to which the old rules do not apply (‘the soul has changed’); as for pity, pity is one of the lower impulses and must be conquered. Törless is not Beineberg. Nevertheless, his own particular perversity — making Basini talk about what has been done to him - is morally no better than the whippings the other two carry out; while in his own homosexual acts with Basini he is at pains to show the boy no tenderness.

In a world in which there are no more God-given rules, in which it has fallen to the philosopher-artist to give the lead, should the artist’s explorations include acting out his own darker impulses, seeing where they will take him? Does art always trump morality? This early work of Musil’s offers the question, but answers it in only in the most uncertain way.

Musil did not disown Young Törless. On the contrary, he continued to look back with surprise at what he had been able to achieve, even at a technical level, at so early an age. The master metaphor of the book, with its implication that the foundations of our real, reasonable, everyday world have no real, reasonable existence, continues to be explored in The Man without Qualities, though in a spirit more of paradox and irony than of anguish. ‘A person must believe he is something more in order to be capable of being what he is,’ suggests Ulrich, the central character. ‘The present is nothing but a hypothesis that one has not yet finished with.’ Musil’s work, from beginning to end, is of a piece: the evolving record of a confrontation between a man of supremely intelligent sensibility and the times that gave birth to him, times he would justly call ‘accursed’.

‘As soon as we put something into words, we devalue it in a strange way. We think we have plunged into the depths of the abyss, and when we return to the surface the drop of water on our pale fingertips no longer resembles the sea from which it comes. We delude ourselves that we have discovered a wonderful treasure trove, and when we return to the light of day we find that we have brought back only false stones and shards of glass; and yet the treasure goes on glimmering in the dark, unaltered.’

-Maeterlinck

A little station on the stretch leading towards Russia.

Infinitely straight, four parallel iron tracks ran in both directions, between the yellow gravel of the wide track. Alongside each, like a dirty shadow, was the dark line burned into the ground by the exhaust.

Behind the low, oil-painted station building a wide, rutted road led down to the ramp. Its edges faded into the flat-trodden ground all around it, and could only be identified by two rows of acacia trees standing on either side, their parched leaves asphyxiated by dust and soot.

Whether it was these sad colours, or whether it was the wan, faint light of the afternoon sun, exhausted by the haze: there was something indifferent, lifeless, mechanical about both objects and people, as though they had been taken from the stage of a puppet theatre. From time to time, at regular intervals, the station manager stepped out of his office and, each time with an identical turn of his head, looked up the broad stretch of track to the signals of the guard’s hut, which still failed to announce the approach of the express train that had been subject to a long delay at the border; then, with the same movement of his arm he drew out his pocket watch, shook his head and disappeared again; like the coming and going of the figures that step out of old church clocks to announce the hour.

On the wide, well-trodden strip between the rails and the buildings a cheerful party of young people was taking a stroll, walking on either side of an elderly couple who formed the centre of the rather loud conversation. But even the merriment of the group was not genuine; the sound of hearty laughter seemed to fall silent after a few paces, sinking to the ground as though it had encountered some stubborn and invisible obstacle.

Behind her dense veil, Frau Törless - this was the lady of about forty - hid eyes that were sad and red from crying. She was saying goodbye. And once again it was hard for her to leave her only child among strangers for so long, unable to watch over her darling herself.

For the little town was a long way from their home, in the eastern part of the Empire, in the midst of dry and sparsely populated farm land.

The reason why Frau Törless had to bear the fact of her son being in such remote and inhospitable foreign parts was that the town was home to a famous boarding-school built the previous century on the site of a religious foundation. Since that time it had been left where it was, probably to protect the growing adolescents from the corrupting influences of a big city.

For it was here that the sons of the country’s best families received their education, to go on to university after they left the institute, or to join the army or the civil service. For all of these purposes, as well as for social contact in the circles of respectable society, it was thought to be a particular advantage to have been educated at the seminary in W.

Four years previously these considerations had led Herr and Frau Törless to yield to their son’s ambitious urgings and arrange for him to receive a place at the school.

This decision had later cost many tears. Because almost since the moment when the door of the institute had shut irrevocably behind him, little Törless suffered from terrible, passionate homesickness. Neither lessons, nor games in the lush, spacious meadows of the park, nor the other distractions offered by the school, held his attention; he barely took part in them. He saw everything as though through a veil, and during the day he often had trouble choking back a persistent sob; but at night he always cried himself to sleep.

He wrote letters home, almost every day, and he lived only in those letters; everything else that he did seemed to him only a shadowy, meaningless set of events, indifferent stages like the marks on a clock face. But when he wrote he felt something distinctive, exclusive within him; like an island full of wonderful suns and colours, something surged up within him out of the sea of grey sensations that crowded around him with cold indifference day after day. And if by day, at games or in class, he remembered that he would write his letter in the evening, he felt as though he was wearing, hidden on an invisible chain, a golden key with which, if no one was looking, he would be able to open a gate into the most wonderful gardens.

The strange thing about it was that he found something new and alarming in this sudden, consuming affection for his parents.