Austrian novelist, best known for his monumental unfinished novel DER MANN OHNE EIGENSCHAFTEN (The Man Without Qualities) in three volumes. The first book was published in 1930, part of the second book in 1933 and remaining texts posthumously in 1943. Musil's writings have often compared to those of Marcel Proust.

'"The Man without Qualities, lacking a plot, is not a novel of action but rather the supreme example in Western literature of the novel of ideas. So, too, is Ulrich a protagonist who exists not at all through his actions but mainly through his ideas, which seem to be constantly "spreading out as an infinitely interwoven surface."'
(Frederick G. Peters in Robert Musil, 1978)

Robert Musil was born in Klagenfurt, Austria. His father, Alfred Musil was a professor of engineering at the Technical University of Brünn and an arms manufacturer. His mother, Hermine Musil, carried on a forty-year liaison with a teacher who lived with the family.

At the age of 12 Musil was sent to a military academy in Eisenstadt, then to a senior military academy in Mährisch-Weisskirchen and the Technical Military Academy of Vienna. From 1898 to 1901 he studied at the university where his father taught, and passed his second engineering examination. He later studied philosophy, mathematics and psychology, earning a Ph.D. from the University of Berlin in 1908. His doctoral dissertation dealt with the Viennese philosopher Ernest Mach, who claimed that the reality we know is constituted only in and by our sensations.

Musil' first novel, DIE VERWIRRUNGEN DES ZÖGLINGS TÖRLESS (1906), was about adolescent self-discovery, and gained a huge success. He also wrote plays, essays and short stories. In 1911 he published two novellas, DIE VOLLENDUNG DER LIEBE and DIE VERSUNCHUING DER STILLEN VERONIKA, under the title VEREINIGUNGEN. The work did not attract critical attention, but after Musil's death it was considered major fiction. The portrayal of the feelings and thoughts of his heroines, which took over two years, led Musil to the point of exhaustion.

From 1911 to 1914 Musil worked as a librarian in Vienna. During World War I he served in the Austrian army. He was hospitalised in 1916, and in 1916-18 became the editor of an army newspaper. After the war he worked as a civil servant at the Defence Ministry. In the 1920's when government cutbacks led to the termination of Musil's job, he became a full-time writer and freelance journalist.

The success Musil achieved in the 1920s with his plays and satires did not last, and his financial situation became worse when he started to devote more time to his monumental novel The Man without Qualities, which the author believed was a thorough intellectual analysis of his times and a suggestion of a positive solution. In 1929 he suffered a mental breakdown. Musil lived in Berlin (1931-33) and in Vienna (1933-38). When the Nazis entered Vienna in 1938, Musil and his Jewish wife fled to Switzerland, where he spent his last years in poverty and obscurity. Musil died in Geneva on April 15, 1942.

The Man Without Qualities portraits life in the last days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1913-14. Ulrich, the thirty-two-year old Viennese protagonist of the novel is a highly trained mathematician, scientist, and psychologist. Ulrich feels to be merely the convergence of impersonal qualities. He cannot take his qualities seriously. One day he decides to take a holiday and search for the meaning of life. In his desperate efforts Ulrich's acquaintances function as illustrations of decadent ways of living. Many of the other characters are based more or less on Musil's friends and figures from public life, among them the writer Franz Werfel. Musil's novel was left unfinished. The first volume appeared in 1930 and first part of volume two was published in 1933. Much of the book was written in Berlin (1931-33), where Musil wrote his novel Young Törless, met his wife Martha, and gave his famous speech on Rilke's death in 1927.

As an essayist Musil was prolific, dealing with a wide range of subjects. Relativity played a major role in Musil's thinking: a murderer could be either considered as such and tried by the courts, or seen as a national hero and celebrated. In 'The Obscene and Pathological in Art' (1911) he takes the side of those people who are persecuted by the authorities. In 'The Religious Spirit, Modernism, and Metaphysics' (1912) he argues that modernity was simply the result of injecting religion with bourgeois reason, of discarding emotions, and of ignoring rationality as the prime goal of the modern world. With his essays Musil attempted to deal with the moral world with the same analytical tools employed in laboratories, an idea he outlined in 'Political confessions of a young man' (1913).

For further reading: Distinguished Outsider by Christian Rogowski (1994); Essayism: Conrad, Musil, and Pirandello by Thomas Harrison (1992); Robert Musil and the Literary Landscape of His Time, ed. by Hannah Hickman (1991); Robert Musil: Leben und Werk in Bildern und Texten by Karl Corino (1988); Robert Musil by Lowell A. Bangerter (1988); Robert Musil and the Culture of Vienna by Hannah Hickman (1984); Robert Musil and the Crisis of European Culture, 1880-1942, by David S. Luft (1980); Robert Musil by F.G. Peters (1978); Robert Musil: Ethik und Ästhetik by Marie-Louise Roth (1972); Robert Musil by Annie Servranckx-Renier (1972); Robert Musil: An Introduction to His Work by B. Pike (1961)

• DIE VERWIRRUNGEN DES ZÖGLINGS TÖRLESS, 1906 - Young Törless - film 1966, Der junge Törless, dir. by Volker Schlöndorff
• VEREINIGUNGEN, 1911 (Die Vollendung der Liebe, transl. as The Perfecting of a Love; Die Versuchung der Stllen Veronika, transl. as The Temptation of Quiet Veronica)
• DIE SCHWÄRMER, 1920 - The Enthusiasts - (Kleist Prize in 1923)
• DREI FRAUEN, 1923
• VINZENZ UND DIE FREUNDIN BEDEUTENDER MÄNER, 1923
• GRIGIA, 1923
• DIE PORTUGIESIN, 1923
• VINZENZ UND DIE FREUNDIN BEDEUTENDER MÄNNER, 1924
• REDE ZUR RILKE-FEIER, 1927
• DER MANN OHNE EIGENSCHAFTEN (THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES), 1930-43 (Goethe's Prize in 1933)
• NACHLASS ZU LEBZEITEN, 1936
• ÜBER DIE DUMMHEIT, 1937
• GESAMMELTE WERKE, 1952-57 (3 vols. rev. ed. 2 vols. 1978)
• TAGEBÜCHER, APHORISMEN, ESSAYS UND REDEN, 1955
• DAS HILFLOSE EUROPA, 1961
• THEATER, 1965
• TONKA AND OTHER STORIES, 1965
• DER DEUTSCHE MENSCH ALS SYMPTOM, 1967
• THREE SHORT STORIES, 1970
• TAGEBCHER, 1976
• KLEINE PROSA, APHORISMEN, AUTOBIOGRAPHISCHES; ESSAYS UND REDEN, KRITIK, 1978
• ON MACH'S THEORIES, 1982
• PICTURES, 1983
• SELECTED WRITINGS, 1986
• PRECISION AND SOUL, 1990
• DER LITERARISCHE NACHLASS, 1992 (CD-Rom)