Arthur Schnitzler - Definition and Overview

Arthur Schnitzler (May 15, 1862 - October 21, 1931) was an Austrian writer and doctor.

He was born in Vienna and began studying medicine at university in 1879 where he received his doctorate of medicine in 1885. He then worked in Vienna's General Hospital (Allgemeines Krankenhaus).

His works illuminated personal relationships so cuttingly (causing scandals more than once) that fellow Viennese Sigmund Freud confessed almost enviously that Schnitzler succeeded in intuitively finding solutions where he himself required long scientific research to achieve the same result. Despite his seriousness of purpose, Schnitzler frequently approaches the bedroom farce in his plays.

Meticulously he kept a diary from his seventeenth year until two days before his death in Vienna. This manuscript of almost 8,000 pages has been edited in ten volumes between 1981 and 2000 by the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

Selected works

• Reigen (1900), usually called La Ronde, still frequently presented, and made into a movie (1964), directed by Roger Vadim. Another filmization is by Max Ophüls.
• Anatol (1893)
• Anatols Größenwahn
• Das weite Land (1909)
• Der grüne Kakadu
• Professor Bernhardi (1912)
• Leutnant Gustl (1900)
• Liebelei (1895) (made into film by Max Ophüls)
• Traumnovelle (1925/26) (adapted as the film Eyes Wide Shut by American director Stanley Kubrick)