Musil, Robert

Musil, Robert (1880-1942), Austrian novelist. Musil was born into the lowest rank of nobility (“Edler”) in Klagenfurt on November 6, 1880. After studying at Berlin University, he lectured in engineering while writing his first novel, Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törless (1906), a depiction of adolescents in a military academy like the one he himself had attended. Its success encouraged him to leave teaching and combine work as a librarian and editor, working on Die Neue Rundschau, with writing two unsentimental novellas about sexual relationships which were published as Vereinigungen (1911).

Musil served in the imperial army during World War I and was then a civil servant in the new Austrian Republic from 1919 to 1922, before becoming a full-time writer and publishing a book of short stories, Drei Frauen, in 1924. Apart from two years in Berlin (1931-1933), he lived in Vienna until the anschluss of 1938, after which he moved to Switzerland. His main work in these years consisted of researching and writing his long, panoramic, but unfinished novel, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (1930-1943; The Man Without Qualities), which examines the purposeless existence of its anti-hero character, Ulrich, against the background of a detailed re-creation of Austrian society before 1914.