Arthur Schnitzler

I received a call from MacLeod's Books this morning. I mentioned I was looking for Arthur Schnitzler about two years ago, and today the book had surfaced.

I had purchased Dream Story previously (the book that Eyes Wide Shut was based on) but I was looking for a story that my Russian Literature Professor had told me over coffee 4 years ago - two strangers mysteriously arrive in a small village and orchestrate the first sexual experiences of two young locals. It was a Schnitzler book, and it had been turned into a Polish film called Pornografia. He described the perfect scene - the boy lays on his back in the loft of a barn, and the girl hovers over him and passes a raspberry from her mouth to his.

La Ronde is a Schnitzler play. Written in 1900 it was initially circulated among friends. When it was performed publicly two decades later it aroused strong reactions. Schnitzler was personally attacked as a Jewish pornographer. The play scrutinizes the sexual morals and class ideology of its day through a series of encounters between pairs of characters (shown before or after a sexual encounter). By choosing characters across all levels of society, the play is also a social comment on how sexual contact overcomes boundaries of class. Both the German Reigen and the French Ronde mean Round dance, like the English nursery rhyme Ring a Ring o' Roses (with the ending: "they all fall down"). This is directly relates to one of the controversial themes of the play - the transmission of syphilis across different layers of society.