Venus in Furs
A man contracts himself into servitude to a woman he adores. The novel that gave masochism its name.
Framed as a manuscript, the novella records Severin von Kusiemski's arrangement with Wanda von Dunajew, a widow he places above himself and asks to treat him as her property. The two set the terms in writing and travel to Florence, where he takes a servant's name and waits on her. A rival's arrival tips the arrangement toward reversal, and Severin closes with a hardened lesson about women and men. Sacher-Masoch published it in 1870 as part of his unfinished cycle Legacy of Cain.
Krafft-Ebing drew the word masochism from the author's surname in Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), binding a literary case to a diagnosis. Deleuze, in Coldness and Cruelty (1967), reads the text and argues that masochism and sadism are separate structures rather than one pairing; he attends to the written contract, to persuasion and instruction, and to the suspended tableau of the woman in fur.
For a clinician it shows, from inside, how adoration is formalised into an agreement and how a scene is built around waiting rather than release.
About the author
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (1836 to 1895) was an Austrian writer, born in Lemberg (now Lviv). He wrote fiction, folklore studies, and essays, often set in his native Galicia. He is remembered chiefly for the 1870 novella Venus in Furs, whose depiction of a man's willing submission to a dominant woman led the psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing to coin the term masochism, after Sacher-Masoch's name, in Psychopathia Sexualis (1886). The association shadowed his later reputation.
Details
- 1870
- German
- 160
- 9780140447811