Roman Polanski and the man who invented masochism
On the UK release of Roman Polanski's Venus in Fur Nicholas Blincoe returns to Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's novella, a sweetshop of seduction and suspense
by Nicholas BlincoeThe Guardian, Friday 23 May 2014
Pulling strings … Emmanuelle Seigner and Mathieu Amalric in Venus in Fur. Photograph: Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar
Roman Polanski´s new film, Venus in Fur, sent me back to Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's 1870 novella with every intention of writing a stern, authoritative appraisal. Inevitably, I was soon playing around with Google Maps as I plotted a journey from Lviv, the birthplace of Sacher-Masoch; through Nowy Sacz, home to Isidor Isaak Sadger, the psychiatrist who coined the term sadomasochist; to Krakow, the city where Roman Polanski was born. The entire trip would take no more than four hours by car, five tops, through the old kingdom of Galicia, now western Ukraine and Poland.
The term "masochism" first appears in Richard Krafft-Ebing's 1886 forensic reference book,Psychopathia Sexualis. So does "sadism", for that matter, but the Marquis de Sade had been dead for 72 years. Sacher-Masoch was very much alive, and aghast to discover how his name had been used. He was a famous author and social reformer, the editor of On the Highest, a radical magazine that fought for Jewish rights and female emancipation. Suddenly, he was a sexual preference. The term stuck. No one who has read Venus in Furswill be surprised to learn that Sacher-Masoch was a masochist, who was moderately successful at encouraging women to play along. Without his talent for persuasion, he might have been a very unhappy man – and he would certainly not have been a writer, because his gift for making the dubious seem plausible lies at the heart of his work. In Venus in Furs, Severin von Kusiemski convinces the lively and affectionate Wanda von Dunajew that her true, hidden self that he adores is cold and cruel. Wanda obliging turns herself into an ice queen. Sacher-Masoch is the kind of slave who is forever pulling the strings.