Adventurer novella

The adventure novella is a fragment of a novella written in the summer of 1928 , in which the aging Arthur Schnitzler dealt, among other things, with the motif of sudden death.

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First part

After the death of his parents from the plague , the eighteen-year-old Anselmo Rigardi decides to turn his back on his hometown Bergamo and start a new life. So he begins a seven-day hike. First he meets the threatening Count Raspighi, who loses his bride Anita to him in the game. After spending the night with her, Anselmo and Raspighi have a duel that ends with Raspighi's death. After this tragic episode, Anselmo continues his wandering and turns out all sorts of tempting opportunities to settle down or enter the service of a nobleman. He believes that his fate will tell him and that he will finally find his true destiny. After a week, he unintentionally reached a clearing on which there was a wall overgrown with greenery. There he meets an old monk who tells him about the owner of the property behind the wall, a doctor and alchemist named Geronte, who can predict the exact day and hour of his death for everyone. The conversation between the monk and Anselmo is interrupted by the arrival of some soldiers who force Geronte to accompany them to determine the time of their prince's death. While Geronte is away, Anselmo is let into the house by his daughter Lucrezia, who gives herself to him like a bride. When Geronte returns and finds Anselmo with his daughter, he predicts Anselmo that he will die within a year, after which he leaves the house in despair.

Second part

In the further course of the novel, which is only planned as a sketch, it is reported that Geronte only prophesied Anselmo's death to see how it would prove itself in the next year and whether it is worthy of Lucrezias.

Anselmo kills the prince of the principality, unites his kingdom, becomes prince himself and defeats the enemy in battle. But instead of enjoying his new position, he finds no rest because of his imminent death and takes poison. Geronte, who has learned that Anselmo behaved as a hero, reveals to him too late that his prophecy was made up, and Anselmo dies from the poison.

background

In the summer of 1928 Schnitzler began with the adventurous novella, which was originally conceived as a fragment, one of his last works. After the tragic suicide of his daughter Lili in July 1928, the novella remained only a fragment and until his death in 1931 Schnitzler was only able to complete the first version of the story from 1927, The Second .

interpretation

Schnitzler chose Renaissance Italy (around 1520) as the background for his novella , which was characterized by a new, freer image of man than in the Middle Ages and torn by small wars and private feuds between absolute princes and city lords. Schnitzler deals with two motifs in this story: the relationship between fate and free will and the topos of the prophecy of death, which is fulfilled because the person concerned believes in it. (" Self-fulfilling Prophecy ")

Anselmo, torn from his everyday life by the sudden death of his parents, becomes aware of an unexpected freedom and realizes that he no longer “was someone who primarily advised, talked and did whatever he wanted or did Answer ”, but“ [was allowed] to direct the steps wherever he wanted and the world belonged to him ”. To want to savor his new freedom, he leaves home: “Not like someone drawn, not like a refugee”, but as someone who knows “that he had a rare fate and was destined for a rare one”. His freedom, which he wants to defend for anything in the world - he leaves his first lover because of the "fear of being held" - seems to be limited by himself, however, since he does not rely on his own decision to be leaves his own judgment, but believes in a special fate: “He was in no mood to waste himself in the slightest; there was a certain, if not completely conscious, feeling in him that whatever might be waiting for him would know to report itself with an unmistakable, beyond doubt clear certainty, yes, that what he […] had experienced had been nothing but a tremendous shadow cast by a predetermined fate so that it would find it ready at the right moment ”. When he came to Geronte's house, “he looked around as if the adventure or even the fate that was intended for him must come from somewhere”. This extraordinary belief in fate also leads to his absolute conviction that Geronte's prophecy must be true. He himself fulfills the prophecy by believing in it.

Schnitzler makes use of the topos of the prophecy of death, which he already used in different versions in Die , Die Weissagung and Das Schicksal des Freiherrn von Leisenbohg . The extraordinary belief in fate and the topos of the fulfillment of the prophecy are very reminiscent of Greek mythology : Just as Laios, the father of Oedipus , fulfilled the prophecy that his son would kill him and marry his wife by not being with his son Growing up, Anselmo fulfills the prophecy herself.

The same motive also used Franz Kafka in Process : K. only dies because he submits to the court and sentenced to death itself. It is of course uncertain whether Schnitzler knew the novel, which was first published in 1925 , and was influenced by it.

As a literary model for the novella is u. a. To name Boccaccio's collection of novels Decamerone : While the plague in Florence in 1348 provides the framework for Boccaccio's story, it acts as the impetus for the plot in the adventurer 's novella . Not only does the atmosphere of Italy, which is divided into city-states, create a remarkable similarity, the sometimes frivolous short novellas of Decamerone also echo with Lucrezia's defloration in the absence of her father. In addition, the story is similar to Eichendorff's romantic novella From the life of a good-for-nothing , in which the good-for-nothing sets out into the world as a young man and finds happiness with his lover after a trip to Italy, only guided by fate.