Robert Musil Forgotten Plays Inspired His Greatest Work of Fiction

Summary

The years 1921 to 1924 constituted the height of Robert Musil’s participation in the world of theater as both critic and dramatist. He later had plans to collect his writings on theater into a book, which he considered calling Pathology of the Theater or Theater from the Outside. In one notebook entry, he writes that “A pathologist would be able to diagnose a great deal about our time through the theater.”Article continues after advertisement According to his own avowal, Musil was spurred on to the writing of his two finished plays, The Utopians and Vinzenz and the Mistress of Important Men, by his negative assessment of the contemporary offerings. The Utopians (1921)—which took him approximately ten years to write and which he considered one of his major works—was written, he explained, to “finally, for once, bring some spirit into the controversies surrounding the theater.” It was awarded the prestigious Kleist Prize almost immediately, but was only premiered in 1929, against Musil’s wishes, under the directorship of Jo Lhehrman—a con-man who could almost have come right out of one of Musil’s own plays. Of the second, Vinzenz and the Mistress of Important Men (1923)—a farce that was performed to enthusiastic audiences even before its publication in book form—he reported, “[B]ecause, for once, it just all finally got to be too stupid, I have written a play in 14 days.” Both were written in tandem with his close analysis of contemporary theater and as partial answers to the problems this analysis posed. We know that late drafts for The Man without Qualities are rife with a variety of utopias, which the author in extremis considered as possible endings for the unfinished (unfinishable) novel. None was more favored than his “utopia of the next step,” a mode of life and thought prefigured in The Utopians and in Vinzenz and the Mistress of Important Men, whereby an action may only be judged by what it brings in its wake, ad infinitum. This utopian state constitutes a ra...