Sacher-Masoch’s biography has been written with intimate knowledge and much candor by C.F. von Schlichtegroll (Sacher-Masoch und der Masochismus, 1901) and, more indirectly, by his first wife Wanda von Sacher-Masoch in her autobiography (Meine Lebensbeichte, 1906; French translation, Confession de ma Vie, 1907).  Schlichtegroll’s book is written with a somewhat undue attempt to exalt his hero and to attribute his misfortunes to his first wife.  The autobiography of the latter, however, enables us to form a more complete picture of Sacher-Masoch’s life, for, while his wife by no means spares herself, she clearly shows that Sacher-Masoch was the victim of his own abnormal temperament, and she presents both the sensitive, refined, exalted, and generous aspects of his nature, and his morbid, imaginative, vain aspects.

Leopold von Sacher-Masoch was born in 1836 at Lemberg in Galicia.  He was of Spanish, German, and more especially Slavonic race.  The founder of the family may be said to be a certain Don Matthias Sacher, a young Spanish nobleman, in the sixteenth century, who settled in Prague.  The novelist’s father was director of police in Lemberg and married Charlotte von Masoch, a Little Russian lady of noble birth.  The novelist, the eldest child of this union, was not born until after nine years of marriage, and in infancy was so delicate that he was not expected to survive.  He began to improve, however, when his mother gave him to be suckled to a robust Russian peasant woman, from whom, as he said later, he gained not only health, but “his soul”; from her he learned all the strange and melancholy legends of her people and a love of the Little Russians which never left him.  While still a child young Sacher-Masoch was in the midst of the bloody scenes of the revolution which culminated in 1848.  When he was 12 the family migrated to Prague, and the boy, though precocious in his development, then first learned the German language, of which he attained so fine a mastery.  At a very early age he had found the atmosphere, and even some of the most characteristic elements, of the peculiar types which mark his work as a novelist.

It is interesting to trace the germinal elements of those peculiarities which so strongly affected his imagination on the sexual side.  As a child, he was greatly attracted by representations of cruelty; he loved to gaze at pictures of executions, the legends of martyrs were his favorite reading, and with the onset of puberty he regularly dreamed that he was fettered and in the power of a cruel woman who tortured him.  It has been said by an anonymous author that the women of Galicia either rule their husbands entirely and make them their slaves or themselves sink to be the wretchedest of slaves.  At the age of 10, according to Schlichtegroll’s narrative, the child Leopold witnessed a scene in which a woman of the former kind, a certain Countess