Ritter von Leopold Sacher-Masoch

Born in Lemberg, in the Austrian Empire (now Lviv, Ukraine), Leopold von Sacher-Masoch was an Austrian writer and journalist whose fiction often drew on Galician life. During his lifetime, he was admired for colorful, psychologically charged stories and was sometimes compared with major European writers of his era.

His most famous book is Venus in Furs, a novel that helped fix his reputation long after his death. Although his surname gave rise to the term “masochism,” that label captures only one part of a much larger body of work that included historical writing, journalism, and fiction shaped by the cultures of Eastern Europe.

He died in 1895. Readers still return to his books for their unusual mix of desire, power, identity, and atmosphere, as well as for the window they offer into a complicated corner of the old Habsburg world.