Bloomsday 2022 we celebrate the Ukrainian writer Leopold von Sacher-Masoch and his formative influence in Joyce's creation of Leopold Bloom
“Tales of the Ghetto”, “Jewish life : tales from nineteenth-century Europe”, “A Light for Others, and Other Jewish Tales From Galicia” were formative in the creation of Leopold Bloom.
“Mr Bloom turned over idly pages of The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, then of Aristotle’s Masterpiece. Crooked botched print. Plates : infants cuddled in a ball in bloodred wombs like livers of slaughtered cows. Lots of them like that at this moment all over the world. All butting with their skulls to get out of it. Child born every minute somewhere. Mrs Purefoy. He laid both books aside and glanced at the third : Tales of the Ghetto by Leopold von Sacher Masoch. — That I had, he said, pushing it by.”
Ulysses 10. 591-2
Ulysses 10. 591-2
“Tales of the Ghetto”, “Jewish life : tales from nineteenth-century Europe”, “A Light for Others, and Other Jewish Tales From Galicia” were formative in the creation of Leopold Bloom.
“Mr Bloom turned over idly pages of The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, then of Aristotle’s Masterpiece. Crooked botched print. Plates : infants cuddled in a ball in bloodred wombs like livers of slaughtered cows. Lots of them like that at this moment all over the world. All butting with their skulls to get out of it. Child born every minute somewhere. Mrs Purefoy. He laid both books aside and glanced at the third : Tales of the Ghetto by Leopold von Sacher Masoch. — That I had, he said, pushing it by.”
Ulysses 10. 591-2
Ulysses 10. 591-2
In 1883, when an event was held to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of his first book, congratulations were received from literary figures including Zola, the younger Dumas, Victor Hugo and Ibsen.
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch depicts the eastern European Jew and provides much in nuance and complexity of language for Joyce to absorb and recreate within the fabric of a Jew in Dublin in 1904.
Joyce ‘s Trieste Library had multiple books written by this Ukrainian writer who wrote in German but with a polyphonic sensibility from his first language learned from his wet nurse, Handzia from the village of Vynnyky near Lviv. “With her milk, I absorbed love for Ukrainians, absorbed the Ukrainian language and love for the land of my birth, for my fatherland. Thanks to my wet nurse, the Ukrainian language became the first one that I spoke.”
When Leopold von Sacher-Masoch a German language writer published “A Galician Story” in 1846, critics called him “the Colombus of the east”. Ukrainian folk oral literature, poetry, and songs are among the most distinctive ethno-cultural features of Ukrainians as a people.
Larysu Tsybenko introducing the Ukraine Language translation in 1999 describes a linguistic complexity that highlights why his work was of such intense interest to James Joyce. “despite the meticulously controlled adherence to the literary norm of the national language, one can hear through its structures the melody of a multiethnic linguistic environment…endowing his language with a characteristic polyphony…other languages saturated his works with a peculiar aura…Galicia a supra –ethnic entity-an indivisible amalgam of German, Slavic and Jewish elements.”
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (1836-1895) was born in Lviv in eastern Galicia, close to the Polish border. At that time the kingdom of Galicia was the most ethnically diverse region of the Habsburg Empire. This diversity was reflected in his parents Leopold Johann Nepomuk Ritter von Sacher (1797-1874), and Charlotte Josepha von Masoch (1802–1870), a Ukrainian noblewoman, the Sacher-Masoch family was of Spanish, Austrian and Slovakian descent.
In Ulysses, Bloom's father is Rudolph Virag, who was born in Szombathely in western Hungary in 1815, and moved to Szesfehervar and Budapest before leaving Hungary in 1852. Between 1867 and 1918 Slovakia, Austria and Hungary were parts of the same country, the Austro-Hungarian Empire as was Trieste which Joyce came to from Dublin in 1904 and the city was his home for 15 years.
"Jewish Life" and “A Light For Others, and Other Jewish Tales From Galicia” provide a comprehensive portrait of Jewish customs and culture. In total there are 14 German-language books of Jewish stories written by Sacher-Masoch. His writing was mainly translated into French and Russian.
Sacher Masoch’s knowledge of the Tulmut was profound even though his upbringing was aristocratic Christian and this facilitated a rich imaginative engagement.
Karaites maintain that all of the divine commandments handed down to Moses by God were recorded in the written Torah without additional Oral Law or explanation. Karaite Judaism is distinct from mainstream Rabbinic Judaism, which considers the Oral Torah, codified in the Talmud and subsequent works, to be authoritative interpretations of the Torah. Consequently, Karaite Jews do not consider the written collections of the oral tradition in the Talmud as binding.
Sacher Masoch wrote about Hasidic orthodox Jews versus Jewish enlightenment, underpinned by his extensive absorption of Jewish folklore. Gallacia was a place where strife and conflict unfolded between the Hasidim and their opposite including the Maskilim. Sacher-Masoch writes “The madness of Hasidim can be attributed to the wide, limitless plains of Gallacia” and he compares Hasidic fantasies to those of Hamlet and Faust.
Auf der Hoe (1881-1885) was a journal edited by Sacher Masoch that expressed disapproval of Jews who assimilated to the point of erasing all aspects of their Jewish heritage. Auf der Hoe also addressed antisemitism more directly when it was spreading amongst the educated elite.
“Pintschew and Mintschew” depicts two Jews in Talmudic disputations and authentic arguments from the Talmud. In the “The Writ of Divorce” he explores a domineering Jewish women who gains control in her marriage by being a better Talmud scholar than her husband. Beautiful women with weak husbands feature in much of his writing.
In his footnote to “Don Juan von Kolomea” he highlights the physical beauty, harmony of languages and the richness of the folk poetry of the 20 million Cossacks.
“The Ukrainian Woman is the Spanish woman of the East unlike Russian and German women who want to submit and Polish rule over their husbands, the Ukrainian woman demands Equality with him. At any opportunity their unrestrainable Cossack spirit goes ablaze recognising no master and no servant. Between the Don and the Carpathians live the natural born democrats –consciousness not supressed by Byzantine Empire, Viking, Polish King or Russian Tsar. They live in small republican communities as equals amongst equals; for the Eastern Slavs they are the sprouts of the future …” “Female Portraits from Galicia”
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch ethnographic work highlighted the subjugation of women and his exploration of power plays within a male female sexual dynamic was ground breaking.
When “Venus in Furs” was published in 1870 it was a huge success, regarded as pornographic this literary work had a notoriety that was compounded by biographical details. In 1869. Sacher-Masoch signed a contract with his mistress Baroness Fanny Pistor making him her slave for the period of six months. This has many parallels with James Joyce’s erotic letters to Nora as he explored similar themes in the writing of the Circe episode of Ulysses. This is not an indulgence but a necessary process when as writers Leopold von Sacher-Masoch and James Joyce seek to encapsulate eternal truth in the poetic imagination that springs from language as a living entity not an abstraction or fantasy.
In 1886 Richard von Krafft-Ebing published his scholarly work “Psychopathia Sexualis” and appropriated Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s name to describe a desire for punishment ‘Masochism’. This classification diminished the larger male female sexual power play underpinning Sacher-Masoch’s writing and was detrimental to “Venus in Furs” profile as a significant literary work. Joyce would take this dynamic and incorporate it into the Circe episode of Ulysses and in 1922 his book was banned as obscene for 10 years under USA censorship laws.
Circe as an all-powerful female force of nature who turned the seafaring crew of Odysseus into swine in Homer’s Greek epic poem was given a contemporary poetic expression in Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s “Venus in Furs”
Indeed early in the book immediately before Severin’s first meeting with Wanda, he is reading Homer’s Odyssey – “Again I am sitting in my honey-suckle arbor, reading in the Odyssey about the beautiful witch who transformed her admirers into beasts.”
Wanda defines the Christian deprivation of the senses as corruption and Severin reads to her for Goethe’s “Roman Elegy”.
“The struggle of the spirit against the senses is the gospel of modern man. I do not wish to have any part in it.”
.”I really believe," said Wanda thoughtfully, “that your madness is nothing but a demonic, unsatisfied sensuality. Our unnatural way of life must generate such illnesses. Were you less virtuous, you would be completely sane.”
“You look at love, and especially woman," she began, "as something hostile, something against which you put up a defence, even if unsuccessfully. You feel that their power over you gives you a sensation of pleasurable torture, of pungent cruelty. This is a genuinely modern point of view."
"You don’t share it?"
"I do not share it," she said quickly and decisively, shaking her head, so that her curls flew up like red flames.
"The ideal which I strive to realize in my life is the serene sensuousness of the Greeks—pleasure without pain. I do not believe in the kind of love which is preached by Christianity, by the moderns, by the knights of the spirit. Yes, look at me, I am worse than a heretic, I am a pagan.
’Doest thou imagine long the goddess of love took counsel — When in Ida’s grove she was pleased with the hero Achilles?’
"These lines from Goethe’s Roman Elegy have always delighted me.
"In nature there is only the love of the heroic age, ’when gods and goddesses loved.’ At that time ’desire followed the glance, enjoyment desire.’ All else is factitious, affected, a lie. Christianity, whose cruel emblem, the cross, has always had for me an element of the monstrous, brought something alien and hostile into nature and its innocent instincts.
"The battle of the spirit with the senses is the gospel of modern man. I do not care to have a share in it."
"Yes, Mount Olympus would be the place for you, madame," I replied, "but we moderns can no longer support the antique serenity, least of all in love. The idea of sharing a woman, even if it were an Aspasia, with another revolts us. We are jealous as is our God. For example, we have made a term abuse out of the name of the glorious Phryne.
"We prefer one of Holbein’s meagre, pallid virgins, which is wholly ours to an antique Venus, no matter how divinely beautiful she is, but who loves Anchises to-day, Paris to-morrow, Adonis the day after. And if nature triumphs in us so that we give our whole glowing, passionate devotion to such a woman, her serene joy of life appears to us as something demonic and cruel, and we read into our happiness a sin which we must expiate."
"So you too are one of those who rave about modern women, those miserable hysterical feminine creatures who don’t appreciate a real man in their somnambulistic search for some dream-man and masculine ideal. Amid tears and convulsions they daily outrage their Christian duties; they cheat and are cheated; they always seek again and choose and reject; they are never happy, and never give happiness. They accuse fate instead of calmly confessing that they want to love and live as Helen and Aspasia lived. Nature admits of no permanence in the relation between man and woman."
"But, my dear lady—"
"Let me finish. It is only man’s egoism which wants to keep woman like some buried treasure. All endeavors to introduce permanence in love, the most changeable thing in this changeable human existence, have gone shipwreck in spite of religious ceremonies, vows, and legalities. Can you deny that our Christian world has given itself over to corruption?"
“You look at love, and especially woman,” she began, “as something hostile, something against which you put up a defense, even if unsuccessfully. You feel that their power over you gives you a sensation of pleasurable torture, of pungent cruelty. This is a genuinely modern point of view.”
“You don’t share it?”
“I do not share it,” she said quickly and decisively, shaking her head, so that her curls flew up like red flames. “The ideal which I strive to realize in my life is the serene sensuousness of the Greeks—pleasure without pain. I do not believe in the kind of love which is preached by Christianity, by the moderns, by the knights of the spirit. Yes, look at me, I am worse than a heretic, I am a pagan.”
“Venus in Furs” final paragraph asserts equality between the sexes as vital to humanity. “But the moral?” “That woman, as nature has created her and as man is at present educating her, is his enemy. She can only be his slave or his despot, but never his companion. This she can become only when she has the same rights as he, and is his equal in education and work.”
References and Further Reading:
The Ukrainian edition of Ulysses translated by Oleksandr Terekh and Oleksandr Mokrovolskyi (2018).
Joyce’s Trieste library Sacher, H., ed., Zionism and the Jewish Future (London: John Murray, 1916)
Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von, Grausame Frauen, 4 vols. ...
Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von, Katharina II. (Berlin, n.d.)
Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von, Liebesgeschichten (Berlin, n.d.)
Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von, Scene del ghetto [Società editoriale milanese, 1909] https://www.jjon.org/libraries/joyce-s-library
“Venus in Furs” by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch https://www.gutenberg.org/files/6852/6852-h/6852-h.htm “Roman Elegy” (Erotica Romana) by Johann Wolfgang Goethe https://www.gutenberg.org/files/7889/7889-h/7889-h.htm
All rights reserved. Clara Mason, James Joyce Foundation. 14 June 2022
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch depicts the eastern European Jew and provides much in nuance and complexity of language for Joyce to absorb and recreate within the fabric of a Jew in Dublin in 1904.
Joyce ‘s Trieste Library had multiple books written by this Ukrainian writer who wrote in German but with a polyphonic sensibility from his first language learned from his wet nurse, Handzia from the village of Vynnyky near Lviv. “With her milk, I absorbed love for Ukrainians, absorbed the Ukrainian language and love for the land of my birth, for my fatherland. Thanks to my wet nurse, the Ukrainian language became the first one that I spoke.”
When Leopold von Sacher-Masoch a German language writer published “A Galician Story” in 1846, critics called him “the Colombus of the east”. Ukrainian folk oral literature, poetry, and songs are among the most distinctive ethno-cultural features of Ukrainians as a people.
Larysu Tsybenko introducing the Ukraine Language translation in 1999 describes a linguistic complexity that highlights why his work was of such intense interest to James Joyce. “despite the meticulously controlled adherence to the literary norm of the national language, one can hear through its structures the melody of a multiethnic linguistic environment…endowing his language with a characteristic polyphony…other languages saturated his works with a peculiar aura…Galicia a supra –ethnic entity-an indivisible amalgam of German, Slavic and Jewish elements.”
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (1836-1895) was born in Lviv in eastern Galicia, close to the Polish border. At that time the kingdom of Galicia was the most ethnically diverse region of the Habsburg Empire. This diversity was reflected in his parents Leopold Johann Nepomuk Ritter von Sacher (1797-1874), and Charlotte Josepha von Masoch (1802–1870), a Ukrainian noblewoman, the Sacher-Masoch family was of Spanish, Austrian and Slovakian descent.
In Ulysses, Bloom's father is Rudolph Virag, who was born in Szombathely in western Hungary in 1815, and moved to Szesfehervar and Budapest before leaving Hungary in 1852. Between 1867 and 1918 Slovakia, Austria and Hungary were parts of the same country, the Austro-Hungarian Empire as was Trieste which Joyce came to from Dublin in 1904 and the city was his home for 15 years.
"Jewish Life" and “A Light For Others, and Other Jewish Tales From Galicia” provide a comprehensive portrait of Jewish customs and culture. In total there are 14 German-language books of Jewish stories written by Sacher-Masoch. His writing was mainly translated into French and Russian.
Sacher Masoch’s knowledge of the Tulmut was profound even though his upbringing was aristocratic Christian and this facilitated a rich imaginative engagement.
Karaites maintain that all of the divine commandments handed down to Moses by God were recorded in the written Torah without additional Oral Law or explanation. Karaite Judaism is distinct from mainstream Rabbinic Judaism, which considers the Oral Torah, codified in the Talmud and subsequent works, to be authoritative interpretations of the Torah. Consequently, Karaite Jews do not consider the written collections of the oral tradition in the Talmud as binding.
Sacher Masoch wrote about Hasidic orthodox Jews versus Jewish enlightenment, underpinned by his extensive absorption of Jewish folklore. Gallacia was a place where strife and conflict unfolded between the Hasidim and their opposite including the Maskilim. Sacher-Masoch writes “The madness of Hasidim can be attributed to the wide, limitless plains of Gallacia” and he compares Hasidic fantasies to those of Hamlet and Faust.
Auf der Hoe (1881-1885) was a journal edited by Sacher Masoch that expressed disapproval of Jews who assimilated to the point of erasing all aspects of their Jewish heritage. Auf der Hoe also addressed antisemitism more directly when it was spreading amongst the educated elite.
“Pintschew and Mintschew” depicts two Jews in Talmudic disputations and authentic arguments from the Talmud. In the “The Writ of Divorce” he explores a domineering Jewish women who gains control in her marriage by being a better Talmud scholar than her husband. Beautiful women with weak husbands feature in much of his writing.
In his footnote to “Don Juan von Kolomea” he highlights the physical beauty, harmony of languages and the richness of the folk poetry of the 20 million Cossacks.
“The Ukrainian Woman is the Spanish woman of the East unlike Russian and German women who want to submit and Polish rule over their husbands, the Ukrainian woman demands Equality with him. At any opportunity their unrestrainable Cossack spirit goes ablaze recognising no master and no servant. Between the Don and the Carpathians live the natural born democrats –consciousness not supressed by Byzantine Empire, Viking, Polish King or Russian Tsar. They live in small republican communities as equals amongst equals; for the Eastern Slavs they are the sprouts of the future …” “Female Portraits from Galicia”
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch ethnographic work highlighted the subjugation of women and his exploration of power plays within a male female sexual dynamic was ground breaking.
When “Venus in Furs” was published in 1870 it was a huge success, regarded as pornographic this literary work had a notoriety that was compounded by biographical details. In 1869. Sacher-Masoch signed a contract with his mistress Baroness Fanny Pistor making him her slave for the period of six months. This has many parallels with James Joyce’s erotic letters to Nora as he explored similar themes in the writing of the Circe episode of Ulysses. This is not an indulgence but a necessary process when as writers Leopold von Sacher-Masoch and James Joyce seek to encapsulate eternal truth in the poetic imagination that springs from language as a living entity not an abstraction or fantasy.
In 1886 Richard von Krafft-Ebing published his scholarly work “Psychopathia Sexualis” and appropriated Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s name to describe a desire for punishment ‘Masochism’. This classification diminished the larger male female sexual power play underpinning Sacher-Masoch’s writing and was detrimental to “Venus in Furs” profile as a significant literary work. Joyce would take this dynamic and incorporate it into the Circe episode of Ulysses and in 1922 his book was banned as obscene for 10 years under USA censorship laws.
Circe as an all-powerful female force of nature who turned the seafaring crew of Odysseus into swine in Homer’s Greek epic poem was given a contemporary poetic expression in Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s “Venus in Furs”
Indeed early in the book immediately before Severin’s first meeting with Wanda, he is reading Homer’s Odyssey – “Again I am sitting in my honey-suckle arbor, reading in the Odyssey about the beautiful witch who transformed her admirers into beasts.”
Wanda defines the Christian deprivation of the senses as corruption and Severin reads to her for Goethe’s “Roman Elegy”.
“The struggle of the spirit against the senses is the gospel of modern man. I do not wish to have any part in it.”
.”I really believe," said Wanda thoughtfully, “that your madness is nothing but a demonic, unsatisfied sensuality. Our unnatural way of life must generate such illnesses. Were you less virtuous, you would be completely sane.”
“You look at love, and especially woman," she began, "as something hostile, something against which you put up a defence, even if unsuccessfully. You feel that their power over you gives you a sensation of pleasurable torture, of pungent cruelty. This is a genuinely modern point of view."
"You don’t share it?"
"I do not share it," she said quickly and decisively, shaking her head, so that her curls flew up like red flames.
"The ideal which I strive to realize in my life is the serene sensuousness of the Greeks—pleasure without pain. I do not believe in the kind of love which is preached by Christianity, by the moderns, by the knights of the spirit. Yes, look at me, I am worse than a heretic, I am a pagan.
’Doest thou imagine long the goddess of love took counsel — When in Ida’s grove she was pleased with the hero Achilles?’
"These lines from Goethe’s Roman Elegy have always delighted me.
"In nature there is only the love of the heroic age, ’when gods and goddesses loved.’ At that time ’desire followed the glance, enjoyment desire.’ All else is factitious, affected, a lie. Christianity, whose cruel emblem, the cross, has always had for me an element of the monstrous, brought something alien and hostile into nature and its innocent instincts.
"The battle of the spirit with the senses is the gospel of modern man. I do not care to have a share in it."
"Yes, Mount Olympus would be the place for you, madame," I replied, "but we moderns can no longer support the antique serenity, least of all in love. The idea of sharing a woman, even if it were an Aspasia, with another revolts us. We are jealous as is our God. For example, we have made a term abuse out of the name of the glorious Phryne.
"We prefer one of Holbein’s meagre, pallid virgins, which is wholly ours to an antique Venus, no matter how divinely beautiful she is, but who loves Anchises to-day, Paris to-morrow, Adonis the day after. And if nature triumphs in us so that we give our whole glowing, passionate devotion to such a woman, her serene joy of life appears to us as something demonic and cruel, and we read into our happiness a sin which we must expiate."
"So you too are one of those who rave about modern women, those miserable hysterical feminine creatures who don’t appreciate a real man in their somnambulistic search for some dream-man and masculine ideal. Amid tears and convulsions they daily outrage their Christian duties; they cheat and are cheated; they always seek again and choose and reject; they are never happy, and never give happiness. They accuse fate instead of calmly confessing that they want to love and live as Helen and Aspasia lived. Nature admits of no permanence in the relation between man and woman."
"But, my dear lady—"
"Let me finish. It is only man’s egoism which wants to keep woman like some buried treasure. All endeavors to introduce permanence in love, the most changeable thing in this changeable human existence, have gone shipwreck in spite of religious ceremonies, vows, and legalities. Can you deny that our Christian world has given itself over to corruption?"
“You look at love, and especially woman,” she began, “as something hostile, something against which you put up a defense, even if unsuccessfully. You feel that their power over you gives you a sensation of pleasurable torture, of pungent cruelty. This is a genuinely modern point of view.”
“You don’t share it?”
“I do not share it,” she said quickly and decisively, shaking her head, so that her curls flew up like red flames. “The ideal which I strive to realize in my life is the serene sensuousness of the Greeks—pleasure without pain. I do not believe in the kind of love which is preached by Christianity, by the moderns, by the knights of the spirit. Yes, look at me, I am worse than a heretic, I am a pagan.”
“Venus in Furs” final paragraph asserts equality between the sexes as vital to humanity. “But the moral?” “That woman, as nature has created her and as man is at present educating her, is his enemy. She can only be his slave or his despot, but never his companion. This she can become only when she has the same rights as he, and is his equal in education and work.”
References and Further Reading:
The Ukrainian edition of Ulysses translated by Oleksandr Terekh and Oleksandr Mokrovolskyi (2018).
Joyce’s Trieste library Sacher, H., ed., Zionism and the Jewish Future (London: John Murray, 1916)
Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von, Grausame Frauen, 4 vols. ...
Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von, Katharina II. (Berlin, n.d.)
Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von, Liebesgeschichten (Berlin, n.d.)
Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von, Scene del ghetto [Società editoriale milanese, 1909] https://www.jjon.org/libraries/joyce-s-library
“Venus in Furs” by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch https://www.gutenberg.org/files/6852/6852-h/6852-h.htm “Roman Elegy” (Erotica Romana) by Johann Wolfgang Goethe https://www.gutenberg.org/files/7889/7889-h/7889-h.htm
All rights reserved. Clara Mason, James Joyce Foundation. 14 June 2022