Robertson Ritchie - Round Dance and Other Plays

OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

ROUND DANCE
AND OTHER PLAYS

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 fathers 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 fathers 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 Blakes Milton Designs: The Dynamics of Meaning (1993) and several translations from German, among them Schnitzlers 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 Johns 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 Worlds Classics.

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OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

ARTHUR SCHNITZLER

Translated by
J. M. Q. DAVIES
With an Introduction and Notes by
RITCHIE ROBERTSON

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Translations J. M. Q. Davies 2004
Editorial material Ritchie Robertson 2004

First published as an Oxford Worlds Classics paperback 2004

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ALTHOUGH Schnitzler came to literature relatively late, with his first play, Das Mrchen, performed only when he was 31, his early successes coloured his reputation for the rest of his life. He was constantly described, much to his irritation, as the author of Anatol (188891), a series of oneact plays about a young Viennese manabouttown (a sexually hyperactive Bertie Wooster figure), and of the lovetragedy Flirtations (Liebelei, written 1894). Yet his subsequent works included some so innovative in form as to place him among the pioneers of literary modernism, and so satirical in content as to call forth censorship, lawsuits, and denunciation. Foremost among them are his cyclical drama Round Dance (Reigen, written 18967) and the story Lieutenant Gustl (Leutnant Gustl, 1900), which not only anticipates Joyces Ulysses in its use of interior monologue but also, by using this technique to satirize the idiocy of an army lieutenant and the cult of duelling, created a scandal which cost Schnitzler his rank as an officer of the reserve (that is, liable to be called up in the event of war). No writer has ever received so much abuse in the course of his career as I have, he wrote (diary, 19 November 1917). Up to his death in 1931 he wrote a range of plays and prose narratives, including two fulllength novels, which have given him an assured place not only among the significant writers of turnofthecentury Vienna but among the major modernist writers in the German language.