Venus in Furs

Leopold von Sacher-Masoch was born in 1836 in Lemberg (today Lvov), in the province of Habsburg Galicia. In 1864 he wrote a novella, Don Juan von Kolomea, set in Habsburg Galicia, and in 1865 a historical novel about the eighteenth-century Habsburg chancellor Prince Kaunitz. In 1870 he published several novellas, conceived as part of a larger fictional work, The Testament of Cain; one of these was Venus in Furs, which earned him immediate notoriety for its unprecedented treatment of a man who passionately made himself the slave of the woman he loved. In 1872 he met Aurora Riimelin, who married him and assumed the name, as well as the erotic persona, of Wanda, the heroine of Venus in Furs. In 1890 Richard von Krafft-Ebing introduced "masochism" as a clinical category in his Psychopathia Sexualis. When Sacher-Masoch died in 1895, his works of fiction, and especially Venus in Furs, were already widely recognized as giving literary expression to a not uncommon, but previously little discussed, complex of romantic and sexual fantasies.