Robert Musil

Musil was born in Klagenfurt, Carinthia, the son of engineer Alfred Edler Musil (1846, Timișoara – 1924) and his wife Hermine Bergauer (1853, Linz – 1924).

The orientalist Alois Musil ("The Czech Lawrence") was his second cousin.

In 1905, Musil met his future wife, Martha Marcovaldi (née Heimann, 21 January 1874 – 6 November 1949).

She had been widowed and remarried, with two children, and was seven years older than Musil.

Robert Musil (6 November 1880 – 15 April 1942) was an Austrian philosophical writer.

His unfinished novel, The Man Without Qualities (Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften), is generally considered to be one of the most important and influential modernist novels.

Soon after his birth, the family moved to Chomutov in Bohemia, and in 1891 Musil's father was appointed to the chair of Mechanical Engineering at the German Technical University in Brno and, later, he was raised to hereditary nobility in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

They sent him to a military boarding school at Eisenstadt (1892–1894) and then Hranice (1894–1897).

The school experiences are reflected in his first novel Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törless (The Confusions of Young Törless).

After graduation Musil studied at a military academy in Vienna during the fall of 1897, but then switched to mechanical engineering, joining his father's department at the Technical University in Brno.

During his university studies, he studied engineering by day, and at night, read literature and philosophy and went to the theatre and art exhibitions.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Ernst Mach were particular interests of his university years.

Musil finished his studies in three years and, in 1902–1903, served as an unpaid assistant to Professor of Mechanical Engineering, in Stuttgart.

During that time, he began work on Young Törless.

He also invented, the Musil color top, a motorised device for producing mixed colours by additive colour-mixing with two differently colored, sectored, rotating discs.

This was an improvement over earlier models, allowing a user to vary the proportions of the two colors during rotation and to read off those proportions precisely.

Musil's sexual life around the turn of the century, according to his own records, was mainly with a prostitute, which he treated partly as an experimental self-experience.

But he also was infatuated with the pianist and mountaineer Valerie Hilpert, who assumed mystical features.

In March 1902, Musil underwent treatment for syphilis with mercury ointment.

He launched himself into a new round of doctoral studies (1903–1908) in psychology and philosophy at the University of Berlin under Professor Carl Stumpf.

Hermine's syphilitic miscarriage in 1906 and her death in 1907 may have been due to infection from Musil.

Musil grew tired of engineering and what he perceived as the limited world-view of the engineer.

His first novel, Young Törless, was published in 1906.

In 1909, Musil completed his doctorate, with a thesis on the philosopher Ernst Mach, and Professor Alexius Meinong offered him a position at the University of Graz, which he turned down to concentrate on writing.

Over the next two years, he wrote and published two stories, ("The Temptation of Quiet Veronica" and "The Perfecting of a Love") collected in Vereinigungen (Unions) published in 1911.

During the same year, Martha's divorce was completed, and Musil married her.

As she was Jewish and Musil Roman Catholic, they both converted to Protestantism as a sign of their union. Until then, Musil had been supported by his family, but he now found employment first as a librarian in the Technical University of Vienna and then in an editorial role with the Berlin literary journal Die neue Rundschau.

In 1916, Musil visited Prague and met Franz Kafka, whose work he held in high esteem.

After the end of the war and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Musil returned to his literary career in Vienna.

He was baptized Robert Mathias Musil and his name was officially Robert Mathias Edler von Musil from 22 October 1917, when his father was ennobled (made Edler), until 3 April 1919, when the use of noble titles was forbidden in Austria.

Musil was short in stature, but strong and skilled at wrestling, and by his early teens, he proved to be more than his parents could handle.

He also worked on a play entitled Die Schwärmer (The Enthusiasts), which was published in 1921.

When World War I began, Musil joined the army and was stationed first in Tirol and then at Austria's Supreme Army Command in Bozen (ital. Bolzano).

During this time, his several years of relationship began with Hermine Dietz, the 'Tonka' of his own novel, published in 1923.

He published a collection of short stories, Drei Frauen (Three Women), in 1924.

He also admired the Bohemian poet Rainer Maria Rilke, whom Musil called "great and not always understood" at his memorial service in 1927 in Berlin.

According to Musil, Rilke "did nothing but perfect the German poem for the first time", but by the time of his death, Rilke had turned into "a delicate, well-matured liqueur suitable for grown-up ladies".

However, his work is "too demanding" to be "considered relaxing".

In 1930 and 1933, his masterpiece, The Man Without Qualities (Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften) was published in two volumes consisting of three parts, from Berlin, running into 1,074 pages.

Volume 1 (Part I: A Sort of Introduction, and Part II: The Like of It Now Happens) and 605-page unfinished Volume 2 (Part III: Into the Millennium (The Criminals)).