Clara Winston Bücher

Die Briefe. Die Briefe an die Eltern, Milena Jesenská-Polak, Felice Bauer, an die Schwester Ottla, Oskar Pollak, Oskar Baum, Felix Weltsch, Robert Klopstock, Elsa und Max Brod u. a. „Briefe schreiben heißt sich vor den Gespenstern entblößen, worauf sie gierig warten. Geschriebene Küsse kommen nicht an ihren Ort, sondern werden von den Gespenstern auf dem Wege ausgetrunken“ (An Milena). „Ich kann nicht glauben, dass in irgendeinem Märchen um irgendeine Frau mehr und verzweifelter gekämpft worden ist als um dich in mir, seit dem Anfang und immer von neuem und vielleicht für immer“ (An Felice Bauer).

Heimito von Doderer was one of the twentieth century's most distinguished Austrian novelists. His finest novel is The Demons, a monumental work and itself the 'Götterdämmerung' as it were to earlier novels. The central preoccupation of this masterpiece is the decline of European civilization. He began work on it in 1931, after reading Dostoyevsky's The Devils. Symphonic in construction, it is a panoramic re-creation of Viennese society in all its strata, conjuring the depths as well as the heights of everything we might think of as Vienna. Doderer has Balzacian scope as well as owing much to Proust and Musil. His human comedy is drawn with a humour as vital when ironic as when satirical, and his baroque imagination is well served by his tireless linguistic ingenuity.