Person Without Personality
by I
About This Novel
The pinnacle of novels in the 20th century, a pioneer of modern literature as famous as Kafka, Joyce, and Proust. "Man Without Personality" is the unfinished posthumous work of the Austrian writer Robert Musil. It is a "spiritual novel" and a literary work rich in essayistic thinking. Through the miniature world in the novel, the writer outlines the transition from the upper-class civil society shaped by enlightenment rationality to the modern mass society. It displays a wax museum of the characters of his era and occupies an important position in the modernist literature of the 20th century. The background of the novel is the Austro-Hungarian Empire before 1914. In Vienna, a committee was formed to prepare for the celebrations in 1918 of the seventieth anniversary of the reign of Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph, the same year that Germany would celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of Kaiser Wilhelm II; so the Austrian operation was called a "parallel operation" (however, 1918 would be the year of the fall of both kingdoms, which puts a comically absurd bombshell into the basis of the novel). The protagonist of the novel - Ulrich, the secretary of the Parallel Action Committee - realizes that possibilities are more important to him than the mediocre and rigid reality; he feels that he is a person without personality, because he no longer regards people, but material, as the center of modern reality: "Today... Has produced a world without individuality, a world without the experience of those who experience it." He saw that he was forced to face various problems of the times, and to face various contradictions between reason and soul, scientific faith and cultural pessimism.
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