Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

Leopold Ritter von Sacher-Masoch was an Austrian nobleman, writer and journalist, who gained renown for his romantic stories of Galician life. The term masochism is derived from his name, invented by his contemporary, the Austrian psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing. Masoch did not approve of this use of his name. 

 

During his lifetime, Sacher-Masoch was well known as a man of letters, in particular a utopian thinker who espoused socialist and humanist ideals in his fiction and non-fiction. Most of his works remain untranslated into English. Until recently, his novella Venus in Furs was his only book commonly available in English, but an English translation by William Holmes of Die Gottesmutter was released in 2015 as The Mother of God. 

 

Von Sacher-Masoch was born in the city of Lemberg (now Lviv, Ukraine), the capital of the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, at the time a province of the Austrian Empire, into the Roman Catholic family of an Austrian civil servant, Leopold Johann Nepomuk Ritter von Sacher (1797-1874), and Charlotte von Masoch (1802–1870), a Ukrainian noblewoman. The father later combined his surname with his wife's 'von Masoch', at the request of her family (she was the last of the line). Von Sacher served as a Commissioner of the Imperial Police Forces in Lemberg, and he was recognised with a new title of nobility as Sacher-Masoch awarded by the Austrian Emperor. 

 

Leopold studied law, history and mathematics at Graz University (where he obtained a doctorate in history in 1856), and after graduating he became a lecturer there. 

 

His early, non-fictional publications dealt mostly with Austrian history. At the same time, Masoch turned to the folklore and culture of his homeland, Galicia. Soon he abandoned lecturing and became a free man of letters. Within a decade his short stories and novels prevailed over his historical non-fiction works, though historical themes continued to imbue his fiction. 

 

Panslavist ideas were prevalent in Masoch's literary work, and he found a particular interest in depicting picturesque types among the various ethnicities that inhabited Galicia. From the 1860s to the 1880s he published a number of volumes of Jewish Short Stories, Polish Short Stories, Galician Short Stories, German Court Stories and Russian Court Stories. 

 

In 1869, Sacher-Masoch conceived a grandiose series of short stories under the collective title Legacy of Cain that would represent the author's aesthetic Weltanschauung. The cycle opened with the manifesto The Wanderer that brought out misogynist themes that became peculiar to Masoch's writings. Of the six planned volumes, only the first two were ever completed. By the middle of the 1880s, Masoch abandoned the Legacy of Cain. Nevertheless, the published volumes of the series included Masoch's best-known stories, and of them, Venus in Furs (published 1870) is the most famous today. The novella expressed Sacher-Masoch's fantasies and fetishes (especially for dominant women wearing fur). He did his best to live out his fantasies with his mistresses and wives. In 1873 he married Angelika Aurora Rümelin. 

 

Sacher-Masoch edited the Leipzig-based monthly literary magazine Auf der Höhe. Internationale Review (At the pinnacle. International review), which was published from October 1881 to September 1885. 

 

In his later years, he worked against local antisemitism through an association for adult education called the Oberhessischer Verein für Volksbildung (OVV), founded in 1893 with his second wife, Hulda Meister, who had also been his assistant for some years. 

 

Fanny Pistor was an emerging literary writer. She met Sacher-Masoch after she contacted him, under the assumed name and fictitious title of Baroness Bogdanoff, for suggestions on improving her writing to make it suitable for publication. She was the inspiration for Venus im Pelz. 

 

In 1874, Masoch wrote the novel Die Ideale unserer Zeit (The Ideals of Our Time), an attempt to give a portrait of German society during its Gründerzeit period. 

 

In his late fifties, his mental health began to deteriorate, and he spent the last years of his life under psychiatric care. According to official reports, he died in Lindheim near Altenstadt, in 1895. It is also claimed that he died in an asylum in Mannheim in 1905. 

 

Sacher-Masoch is the great-uncle of Eva von Sacher-Masoch, Baroness Erisso, mother of British singer and actress Marianne Faithfull.