APPENDIX
TWO CONTRACTS SIGNED BY SACHER-MASOCH
(Contract between Frau Fanny von Pistor and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch.)
Herr Leopold von Sacher-Masoch agrees on his word of honor to be the slave of Frau von Pistor and unconditionally fulfill her every wish and every order for a period of six months.
For her part, Frau von Pistor cannot demand anything dishonorable of him—anything that would make him disreputable as a human being and a citizen. Furthermore she must leave him six hours daily for his work and never look at his letters or writings. At every offense or negligence or lèse-majesté, the Mistress (Fanny Pistor) may punish her slave (Leopold von Sacher-Masoch) as she sees fit and at her own discretion. In short, her subject, Gregor, must display slavish submission to his Mistress, take any bestowal of her favor as a delightful gift, and make no demand on her love or assert any right as her lover. Fanny Pistor, in return, promises to wear fur as often as practical and especially when being cruel.
After a period of six months, this slavery intermezzo is to be regarded by both sides as having never happened, and no serious allusion is to be made to it. Everything is to be viewed as forgotten, and both sides are to return to their earlier amorous relationship. [Later deleted.]
These six months need not be in direct sequence; they can be interrupted for long periods of time and end and start according to the Mistress’s whim.
This contract is confirmed by the signatures of the participants.
Taking effect on 8 December 1869
Fanny Pistor Baddanow
Sir Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
(Contract between Sacher-Masoch and Wanda von Dunajew.)
My slave!
The conditions under which I accept you as my slave and tolerate you at my side are as follows:
Completely unconditional surrender of your self.
You have no will outside of me.
You are a blind tool in my hands, following all my orders without contradiction. Should you forget that you are my slave and should you fail to show me unconditional obedience in all matters, I have the right to punish and chastise you entirely at my own discretion, and you are not to so much as dare complain about it.
Anything pleasant or felicitous that I grant you is to be regarded as a favor and must be gratefully taken by you only as such; I have no obligation, no indebtedness toward you.
You may not be my son, brother, or friend, you are nothing but my slave lying in the dust.
Just like your body, your soul also belongs to me, and if that makes you suffer, you must nevertheless subjugate your feelings, your emotions to my domination.
I am permitted to exercise the greatest cruelty, and even if I maim you, you are to endure it without complaint. You must labor for me like a slave, and if I revel in luxury while keeping you deprived and kicking you, you must unprotestingly kiss the foot that has kicked you.
I can dismiss you at any moment, but you must never be away from me without my permission; and should you flee from me, you grant me the power and the right to torture you to death with any conceivable torments.
Aside from me you have nothing, I am everything to you: your life, your happiness, your unhappiness, your torment, and your pleasure.
You must carry out anything I demand, good or evil, and if I demand a crime from you, then you must become a criminal in obedience to my will.
Your honor belongs to me as do your blood, your mind, your capacity for work; I am your Mistress over life and death.
If ever you can no longer bear my domination, and the chains become too heavy for you, then you must kill yourself—I will never give you your freedom.
I commit myself on my word of honor to be the slave of Frau Wanda von Dunajew, in exact accordance with her demands, and to submit unresistingly to everything that she imposes on me.
Dr. Leopold Knight von Sacher-Masoch
EXPLANATORY NOTES
1. Staff: According to legend, Tannhäuser, trying to repent for his sensual life in the service of Frau Venus, was told by Pope Urban that his sins could not be forgiven any more than the staff in his hand could blossom. But three days later the staff began sprouting green leaves. Unfortunately, Tannhäuser had disappeared forever.
2. Hegel: We can’t really fault the narrator for dozing off while reading Hegel—even though the passage was probably from “Master and Servant” in The Phenomenology of Mind.
3. Galicia was the Austrian name for a large multiethnic province of the Habsburg monarchy, including Poles, Jews, Germans, and Ruthenians or Ukrainians. Galicia was created from the partitioned lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the late eighteenth century, became part of Poland again after World War I, and is today divided between Poland and Ukraine. The administrative capital of the Habsburg province was called Lwów in Polish, Lemberg in Germany, Lemberik in Yiddish, and Lviv in Ukrainian.
4. Manon Lescaut (1731), a novel penned by Antoine François Prévost, a Benedictine monk, describes the obsessive love that the Chevalier des Grieux develops for Manon, thereby causing his own doom. The story was treated in operas by Massenet and Puccini.
5. Creator: the Greek legend of the sculptor Pygmalion, whose beautiful statue of a woman came to life.
6. Circe in the Odyssey.
7. Aspasia: the most famous of the Ionian courtesans and the mistress of the Greek historian Pericles.
8. Astarte, the Semitic goddess of love and nature, was eventually identified with Aphrodite/Venus in Greco-Roman mythology.
9. Peter Schlemihl, the man who sold his shadow to the devil, figures in stories by German writers Adalbert Chamisso and Hoffmann as well as in Offenbach’s opera The Tales of Hoffmann. His name derives from the Yiddish word for “unlucky person.”
10. Aleksey Feofilaktovich Pisemsky (1820–1881) was a Russian realist author. His best works describe the life of the common people, whom he got to know intimately when investigating conditions in the Russian interior.
11. The “nihilistic aesthetician” is presumably Nietzsche.
12. The “sacred monkeys of Benares” was one of Schopenhauer’s ways of describing women.
Plato’s rooster: Diogenes snatched up a rooster, tossed it into Plato’s school, and exclaimed: “This is Plato’s human being.”
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Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs
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