Hugo von Hoffmannsthal made his mark as a poet, as a playwright, and as
the librettist for Richard Strauss's greatest operas, but he was no less
accomplished as a writer of short, strangely evocative prose works. The
atmospheric stories and sketches collected here--fin-de-siècle fairy
tales from the Vienna of Klimt and Freud, a number of them never before
translated into English--propel the reader into a shadowy world of
uncanny fates and secret desires. An aristocrat from Paris in the plague
years shares a single night of passion with an unknown woman; a cavalry
sergeant meets his double on the battlefield; an orphaned man withdraws
from the world with his four servants, each of whom has a mysterious
power over his destiny.
The most influential of all of Hofmannsthal's writings is the title
story, a fictional letter to the English philosopher Francis Bacon in
which Lord Chandos explains why he is no longer able to write. The
"Letter" not only symbolized Hofmannsthal's own turn away from poetry,
it captured the psychological crisis of faith and language which was to
define the twentieth century.