Begun in the early 1920s, the first volume was published in 1930 and remained unfinished when Musil died in 1942. That Vienna is the setting of this most celebrated of seldomly read novels, released in a new translation by Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike and available in its entirety for the first time in English. Tumultuous, manic, and loosed from its traditional moral and spiritual moorings, Vienna was a fertile breeding ground not only for genius but also for defensive provincialism and, ultimately, fascism. It was also, as the hub of the last Habsburg Empire, the rotting, living-dead core of ancien-rÇgime Europe. Vienna, on the eve of WW I, home to Freud, Mahler, and Wittgenstein, was the apex of European civilization.
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