ABSTRACT
Robert Musil (1880-1942) is the preeminent philosophical novelist of the twentieth century. Musil was born in the city of Klagenfurt, a provincial city south of Vienna in the province of Carinthia, one of the crown lands of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was sent to a military boarding school at the age of eleven, trained in the sciences, and eventually studied engineering. In his early twenties, Musil travelled to Berlin to study philosophy and psychology, using his early boarding school experiences as the basis for his first novel, The Confusions of Young Törless (1906), the story of a cerebral young boy obsessed with the philosophical foundations of mathematics and the masochistic behavior of his fellow students. It was well received. Musil took a doctorate in philosophy in 1908 and eventually returned to Vienna, where he lived in a quiet house at Rasumofskygasse 20 from 1921-1938.
