Robert Musil

Born Robert Edler von Musil on November 6, 1880, in Klagenfurt, in the southern Austrian province of Carinthia, the son of an engineer and a mother whose long-term lover lived in the family home, an arrangement the boy absorbed in silence, Musil was sent at fourteen to a military boarding school, first at Eisenstadt and then at the Technische Militarakademie in Vienna. He abandoned an officer's career to study mechanical engineering at the Technical University in Brno, then pivoted again to philosophy and experimental psychology at the University of Berlin, completing a doctorate in 1908. His first novel, The Confusions of Young Torless (1906), drew on his boarding school years to explore adolescent cruelty and moral ambiguity with unsettling precision. He published two collections of stories, Unions (1911) and Three Women (1924), and a play, The Visionaries (1921), but his life's work was The Man Without Qualities (Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften), a vast, essayistic, unfinished novel set in the twilight of the Habsburg Empire. The first volume appeared in 1930 to wide critical praise; the second followed in 1933. Musil spent the rest of his life revising, expanding, and rearranging the third volume, which he never completed. When Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany in 1938, Musil and his wife, Martha, fled first to Zurich and then to Geneva, where they lived in poverty and near-total obscurity. He died of a stroke on April 15, 1942, in his Geneva apartment. His wife found him in the bathroom. Barely eight people attended his funeral.