Biography Essay

Robert Musil belongs to that small group of twentieth- century novelists who strove to capture in fictional form the definitive image of their age. His early works, the novel Die Verwimmgen des Zoglings Torle (The Confusions of Young Torless, 1906; translated as Young Torless, 1955) and the novella collection Veremigungen (Unions, 1911; translated in Tonka, and Other Stories, 1965), are unsurpassed examples of an innovative, modernist prose style adequate to the representation of complex psychological states. Like his contemporaries James Joyce, Thomas Mann, and Marcel Proust, Musil gradually broadened the scope of his literary investigations to include an entire society. His achievement in some ways parallels that of another contemporary, the painter Wassily Kandinsky: both brought an exceptionally thorough training in philosophy and the physical sciences to the practice of art, and both turned that education to a revolutionary end. Just as Kandinsky opened the way for nonrepresentational painting in...