In the Library
Venus in Furs
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, 1870
- Form
- Form Novella
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 3 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by Fernanda Savage (1921)
- Chapters
- Chapters 1
- Length
- Length 40k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
In the public domain in the United States only: this edition is sold and read there and nowhere else.
The moral of the tale is this: whoever allows himself to be whipped, deserves to be whipped.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
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Dangerous Liaisons does the same thing, but plays its contracts and correspondence as a game two people win, until the pleasure curdles into ruin.
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Notes from the Underground
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Notes from the Underground does the same thing, but its narrator chooses humiliation certain that suffering proves he is free rather than merely broken.
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Death in Venice
Thomas Mann
Death in Venice does the same thing, but its man watches himself indulge the obsession that undoes him, powerless and strangely willing all the way down.
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About the book
A sleeper dozing over Hegel dreams that the goddess of love has come to sit in his cold northern room, wrapped to the throat in sables, telling him that men in this climate have forgotten how to love. His friend Severin hands him the manuscript that explains the dream. At a Carpathian spa Severin has found his Venus in Wanda von Dunajew, and what he wants from her is not tenderness but ownership. He drafts the contract himself, signs away his name and his body, follows her to Florence dressed as her servant Gregor, and asks for the whip. Krafft-Ebing took the author's name for the appetite the book describes, which has made it easier to file than to read. What is on the page is stranger: Sacher-Masoch knows the slave is dictating the terms of his own slavery, and that a woman handed the role of goddess may learn it better than the man who wrote it. Long before the last page Wanda has no use for the contract, and Severin has lost the power to tear it up.