ABSTRACT
Robert Musil (1880-1942) achieved fame in Germany and Austria for a few years aft er 1930 and then disappeared from the public eye until 1949, when an article in the Times Literary Supplement named him as the most important writer in German of his time (Hickman, 1984). “Probably,” David Luft (2003) suggests, Musil is “the equal of anyone since Nietzsche in his intelligence and insight in the realm of the soul” (p. 3). Musil may still be, in the words of Frank Kermode, “the least read of the great twentieth-century novelists” (quoted in Rogowski, 1994, p. 4). Musil is also an exemplary example of a public pedagogue, a public-and-private intellectual, that is, one who draws upon subjective resources to address the pressing issues of the day.1
