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  • Published: 6 October 2000
  • ISBN: 9780140447811
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 160
  • RRP: $32.99
Categories:

Venus in Furs




Venus in Furs describes the obsessions of Severin von Kusiemski, a European nobleman who desires to be enslaved to a woman. Severin finds his ideal of voluptuous cruelty in the merciless Wanda von Dunajew. This is a passionate and powerful portrayal of one man's struggle to enlighten and instruct himself and others in the realm of desire. Published in 1870, the novel gained notoriety and a degree of immortality for its author when the word "masochism"—derived from his name—entered the vocabulary of psychiatry. This remains a classic literary statement on sexual submission and control.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

  • Published: 6 October 2000
  • ISBN: 9780140447811
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 160
  • RRP: $32.99
Categories:

Other books in the series

Russian Thinkers
The New Penguin Book Of American Short Stories, From Washington Irving To Lydia Davis
When You Are Old
The Black Tulip
The Lady of the Camellias
The Good Soldier
Selected Poetry
Man and Superman
Military Dispatches
The Prelude

About the author

Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

Leopold von Sacher-Masoch was born in 1836 in Lemberg (today Lvov), in the province of Habsburg Galicia. In 1864 he wrote a novella, Don Juan von Kolomea, set in Habsburg Galicia, and in 1865 a historical novel about the eighteenth-century Habsburg chancellor Prince Kaunitz. In 1870 he published several novellas, conceived as part of a larger fictional work, The Testament of Cain; one of these was Venus in Furs, which earned him immediate notoriety for its unprecedented treatment of a man who passionately made himself the slave of the woman he loved. In 1872 he met Aurora Riimelin, who married him and assumed the name, as well as the erotic persona, of Wanda, the heroine of Venus in Furs. In 1890 Richard von Krafft-Ebing introduced "masochism" as a clinical category in his Psychopathia Sexualis. When Sacher-Masoch died in 1895, his works of fiction, and especially Venus in Furs, were already widely recognized as giving literary expression to a not uncommon, but previously little discussed, complex of romantic and sexual fantasies.