Arthur Schnitzler Reclaimed - Softcover

Sigmund Freud wrote Schnitzler a letter in 1922, in honor of his sixtieth birthday, describing the writer as his artistic doppelgänger. "Whenever I am absorbed in one of your beautiful creations, I invariably seem to find beneath their poetic surface the very suppositions, interests, and conclusions that are also mine... I have formed the impression that you know through intuition...everything that I have discovered by laborious work on other people." Schnitzler was both a Jew and a critic of the Austrian monarchy, contributing to the censorship of his work in his lifetime, and by the Nazis after his death. His work ultimately suffered the same fate as the Viennese culture that he was describing: it vanished into obscurity after World War I.

His best-known play today is probably Reigen a.k.a. LA RONDE. This work was the basis for THE BLUE ROOM by David Hare. Audiences may also be familiar with ANATOL, an early work (1893) consisting of seven scenes variously controversial, censored, or banned for immorality. Neither of these plays accurately represents the breadth or depth of Schnitzler’s genius; what Benedict Nightingale describes as his "inquisitive, complex, formidably moral intelligence."

"If previous ages tended blindly to ignore their geniuses," writes John Simon, "ours is all too ready to crown as genius the nearest trendy hack. One of the very few masters not fully acknowledged even posthumously is the Viennese playwright-fiction writer Arthur Schnitzler."