Publisher's Synopsis
The ageing Casanova, struggling in vain to regain his youth; a beautiful young Viennese socialite, compelled to sell her honour in order to save her family from disgrace; a disdainful lieutenant, driven to the edge by his compulsive gambling -- such are the characters we encounter here, all of them Schnitzler types who appear again and again, infinitely varied and delicately nuanced, throughout the author's dramas and prose works. A physician by training, Schnitzler was essentially interested only in cases involving nervous and mental disorders; he practiced medicine half-heartedly for a few years before turning exclusively to writing, and it was here that he delved deeply into the psyches of his characters and laid bare their innermost fears and desires. His contemporary Sigmund Freud recognised in Schnitzler's work an approach to the understanding of the human mind so strikingly similar to his own that he considered the writer his virtual Doppelgänger.
