A haze of nostalgia has blanketed fin de siècle Vienna since 1941, when The World of Yesterday, Stefan Zweig’s elegy for the “Austrian-Jewish-bourgeois culture that culminated in Mahler, Hoffmannsthal, Schnitzler, and Freud” first appeared. The Viennese bourgeoisie in the 1890s were, after all, the most cultivated and refined middle class in the world, and they set an all but unassailable benchmark in cultural accomplishment. It was an era of relative innocence: the assumptions of the Enlightenment and faith in the ideal of human progress were unquestioned; the empire’s endemic anti-Semitism had been in abeyance for two decades; the tremors of the tottering Hapsburg monarchy were easily ignored. Zweig described this “golden age of security” as an age of reason in which radicalism and violence seemed impossible.

The irrational was relegated to the psyche. Arthur Schnitzler and Sigmund Freud were charting the murky psychological depths of the haute bourgeoisie with equal intensity. Yet Schnitzler’s depictions of Viennese neuroses in his fiction and drama were far more empathetic and, in their ambiguity, subtler than Freud’s more objective and definitive case studies. For fear of being unduly influenced, Freud was reluctant to read his fellow doctor’s work. He even avoided meeting Schnitzler for many years, confessing to the latter that he had done so out of a kind of Doppelgängerscheu or apprehension before his psychological double. Indeed, many of the psychological mechanisms analysed by Freud—the transmutation of desires and fears in dreams, hysterical manifestations of repressed libidos, the conflicts of eros and thanatos—are described intimately in Schnitzler’s works.

Schnitzler, born to a noted Viennese laryngologist in 1862, pursued the medical career expected of him dutifully but without enthusiasm, abandoning it as soon as he was able to support himself with his writing. His literary success was initially de scandale. He was unflinching in his depiction of the moral hypocrisy of the era’s sexual double standard, as well as the futility of the cult of dueling, which, although illegal, was central to the code of honor. In 1900, his short story “Leutnant Gustl,” the interior monologue of a blustering subaltern justifying his fear of fighting a duel, so incensed the military establishment that Schnitzler was cashiered from the reserves. Reigen, a sexual morality play of ten overlapping amorous encounters, culminating in dotted lines and lowered curtains, was published in 1903 but banned from the stage until 1920. Even then, the premiere caused a riot and the play was banned for a further year. Neither the prostitute in the first and last vignettes, nor the characters’ promiscuity and the implied connection to the dance of death of spreading syphilis outraged the public as much as the predatory indifference with which the characters discard one another once their conquest is complete. Schnitzler’s depiction of his era’s underbelly was simply too accurate.

Yet Schnitzler’s success depended on more than his ability to shock his contemporaries into recognition. His characterization is subtle and complex. And his portrayal of the subconscious strategies used to ward off threats to self-images are timeless in their exactitude.

Night Games, Margret Schaefer’s smooth new translation of seven short stories and two novellas, including “Dream Story,” provides a much-needed tonic to Stanley Kubrick’s interpretation of the latter in Eyes Wide Shut and a reminder of the depth of Schnitzler’s insight into the human character. Schnitzler knew his limitations. He noted in his diary that although he would never be one of the great writers, he was nonetheless quite confident that his capacities included “poetic elements of the first rank.” These elements are very much in evidence in this collection.

His finely modulated interior monologues chart the evolution of his characters’ self-knowledge. Each insight into oneself brings an immediate, compensatory shift in self-deception. In “The Widower,” a young husband learns that his wife has betrayed him with his best friend, and we follow his progression through shock, indifference, rage, and rationalizing of his own infidelities, to a self-satisfied compassion for the suffering his friend must have endured in the deception. Yet these defenses collapse before the final revelation.

The title novella, “Night Games,” is a prime example of Schnitzler’s ability to create an intricate plot, which, with each twist, upsets the tenuous moral balance it had just established. Lieutenant Willi Kasda agrees to help a friend pay off a gambling debt. Short of cash, he turns to cards. His evening begins with a spectacular winning streak. Otherwise measured, Kasda soon succumbs to fantasies of what a bit more ready cash will bring him. His fall is also spectacular. His honor in jeopardy, and unable to abandon his vision of himself as a priviledged roué, he turns to Leopoldine, his uncle’s wealthy estranged wife. Leopoldine is a former prostitute turned shrewd businesswoman who has gained control of the uncle’s fortune. Kasda had once been involved with her, but, despite her many charms and obvious love for him, he callously left her. Now she hints that she will help him if he spends the night with her.

When Kasda realizes that she never intended to pay his entire debt, but only to leave a token thousand gulden in revenge for his having once paid her for a night she offered him out of love, he is indignant. “As if she could have any doubt that he would have thrown the whole eleven thousand back at her feet if she had dared to offer them as a payment for his services.” But he soon has to admit what he knew all along:  

that he had been prepared to sell himself. And not only to her but to any other, to anyone at all, anyone who could save him. And thus … he began to feel the hidden and yet inescapable justice that had trapped him not only in this sorry adventure but in the essential core of his life.

Each step that brings Kasda closer to the essential core of his life shifts the kaleidoscope of his past.

In Schnitzler’s fiction, character is fate. Passions and insecurities that have been repressed or denied eventually manifest themselves with such strength that they appear as forces of destiny to the men and women at their mercy. Self-awareness, however, provides little defense. It simply makes for greater poignancy in the struggle. Even the most astute characters are compelled to pay the exorbitant price desire demands for a happiness they know to be fleeting, if not altogether illusory.

More striking than his unusually fine sense of moral ambiguity is the contrast between Schnitzler’s diaries and autobiography and his literary writings. In his diaries, he obsessively records his many, usually overlapping, affairs. And, while taking advantage of mores that not only tolerated but also encouraged male infidelity, he heaped scorn and invective upon his mistresses for their lapses, real and imagined. Yet in his fiction, even the most calculating of grisettes are portrayed sympathetically and accorded a measure of dignity.

Moral hypocrisy, depicted in full and unsparing tawdriness in his stories and plays, is dismissed cavalierly in his autobiography, Youth in Vienna. Schnitzler recalls a visit to a pretty chorus girl with his close friend Richard, who was in temporary recovery from syphilis. As the young lady was “undecided rather than demure,” the two men drew lots. Schnitzler won, but adds that

since she had told me the name of her lover, a Hungarian aristocrat, and his doctor’s indiscretion had previously informed me as to the condition of his health, and when, with my arm around her neck, I by chance touched a gland which according to my medical knowledge felt highly suspicious, I nobly waived the prize I had won and left it to my friend, who, fortunately or unfortunately was in no more danger from this direction.

Schnitzler then retreated to a café, and with “scornful irony” transformed the incident into fiction.

The Olympian balance between realism and idealism, cynicism and compassion that often eluded Schnitzler in his personal writing elevates his fiction above mere period pieces. While Schnitzler has painted an exquisite, nuanced, and unsparing portrait of his age, the urgency of his fiction rests upon his success in capturing the eternal drama of the inner life in intimate detail.

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