He showed a decided preference for delineating cruel, mannish types of
women and incredibly weak types of men.
As in the case of Marquis de Sade, we observe here a strange
parallelism between the man's writings and his own biography.
Sacher-Masoch's first love was a woman much older than himself, Anna
von Kattowitz, who for four years humiliated, insulted and victimised
him in every possible way, finally running away with a Russian
adventurer.
Then he met Princess Bogdanoff for whom he abandoned temporarily his
professional and literary ambitions. She took him to Italy where he
was compelled to serve her as a secretary and valet. He enjoyed the
relationship, but the princess soon tired of him.
His next liaison was with Baroness Fanny Pistor, with whom he had his
picture taken once in the following position: she seated on a sofa and
clad in furs, he kneeling at her feet on the floor.
Then came Baroness Reizenstein, whom he could not love very long for
she refused to satisfy his morbid craving for physical torture and
humiliating treatment and, besides, was homosexual.
Then he became engaged to a young artist, Miss Bauerfeld, of Graz.
Soon after, however, he met an ugly, mannish hysterical person, Vanda
Dunayef, who gratified better his perverse leanings and compelled him
to break his engagement. A child was born of their union and in 1873
they were married. They traveled from town to town, apparently unable
to find peace anywhere, and she finally left him to elope with a
reporter from the Paris Figaro.
Sacher-Masoch secured a divorce and married again, this time a motherly
type of woman, Hulda Meister, retired with her to the small village of
Lindheim and died there on March 9, 1895.
A few incidents of his life describe well his perversion.
=Love of the Whip.= Once, according to Havelock Ellis, in the
course of an innocent romp in which the whole household took part,
Sacher-Masoch asked his wife to whip him. She refused. Then he
suggested the maid should do it.
His wife did not take this seriously, but he had the servant whip
him to his full enjoyment. When his wife urged that it would not be
possible to keep the maid after this, Sacher-Masoch agreed and she was
discharged.
He constantly found pleasure in placing his wife in awkward or
compromising circumstances, a pleasure she was too normal to share.
This led to much domestic unhappiness. Against her wish he persuaded
her to whip him with whips to which nails were attached. This he
claimed was a literary stimulus.
Dr. Eulenburg tells of a young woman with whom Sacher-Masoch
corresponded for a while and to whom he wrote that "his greatest joy
would be to be whipped by a woman." Later on, Sacher-Masoch met her in
Vienna and asked her to don a fur coat and to whip him. She however,
pretended to treat the matter as a joke, and dismissed him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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