Dream Story
Arthur Schnitzler
DREAM STORY
Translated by J. M. Q. Davies
Introduction by Frederic Raphael
Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
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PENGUIN TWENTIETH CENTURY-CLASSICS
DREAM STORY
Arthur Schnitzler (1862–1931) was born and died in Vienna. He was raised in a middle-class family, his father being a prominent throat specialist among whose patients were many of the leading actors and singers of his time. Schnitzler attended the exclusive Academisches Gymnasium and began writing when a young boy, but seemed set to follow his father into medicine, qualifying as a doctor in 1885. He was very interested in psychiatry and experimented with hypnosis, and some scholars believe that he anticipated some of Freud’s ideas. In 1903 he married the actress Olga Gussman, with whom he had two children.
Schnitzler’s writings challenged contemporary bourgeois morality, and as a result of this he endured a great deal of personal abuse. His work suffered under the Nazi regime, but since the sixties interest in it has revived. He wrote some twenty-three full length and ten one-act plays, and many prose works.
J. M. Q. Davies read German and Modern Greek at Oxford, and has held lectureships in English and Comparative Literature at universities in Australia and North America. He is currently teaching at Waseda University, Japan. His publications include a book on Blake and Milton, and he has recently translated Arthur Schnitzler: Selected Short Fiction (1999) for Angel Classics.
Frederic Raphael is the author of twenty novels and five volumes of short stories (All His Sons being the latest), as well as many essays and translations from Greek and Latin. He has written two biographies, of Byron and Somerset Maugham. His award-winning screenplays include Darling, Two for the Road and The Glittering Prizes. He co-authored, with Stanley Kubrick, the screenplay for Eyes Wide Shut, which is based on Dream Story. His latest book, Speaking with Kubrick, recounts his experience of working on the screenplay. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Introduction
by Frederic Raphael
By the time Arthur Schnitzler was born in Vienna in 1862, Franz-Josef had been on the throne of Austria-Hungary for ten years. The emperor did not die until 1916. The dual kingdom survived only two more years before being dismantled by the Treaty of Versailles. Although, when he died in 1931, Schnitzler had survived Franz-Josef by fifteen years, his creative life was determined by the protracted twilight of an empire which lost its hegemony, and its nerve, when he was four years old.
In 1866, Bismarck’s Prussia destroyed Austro-Hungary’s bravely incompetent army at Sadowa. The effect of that defeat on the Viennese psyche cannot be exactly assessed. Austria had already suffered preliminary humiliation by the French, under Louis-Napoleon, but Sadowa confirmed that she would never again be a major player in the world’s game. Yet conscious acceptance of Austria’s vanished supremacy was repressed by the brilliance and brio of its social and artistic life. Who can be surprised that Adler’s ‘discovery’ of the inferiority complex, and of compensating assertiveness, was made in a society traumatized by dazzling decline? It was as if the city which spawned Arthur Schnitzler and Sigmund Freud feared to awake from its tuneful dreams to prosaic reality. By a pretty, untranslatable pun, Traum (the German for a dream) and trauma were almost indistinguishable in the Vienna which was at home to both.
Arthur Schnitzler’s father (whose family name had been Zimmermann) had come to Vienna from Hungary before the disasters which fostered Austro-Hungary’s crisis of identity. After them, Vienna soon became the forcing ground for a variety of diagnoses and putative cures: psychological for neurotic individuals; political or nationalistic for the fractious elements of a disintegrating empire. On the surface, however, it was business, and pleasure, as usual.
Medicine offered Schnitzler père a stable, respectable career.
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