Many assumptions about Robert Walser are challenged in an essay by Jacob Silverman. We quote some of these points, to put Walser in a contemporary context:
...[M]y essay about Robert Walser, focus[es] on the Swiss author’s microscripts—peculiar short stories written in a minuscule script on business cards, receipts, torn-off novel covers, and other forms of scrap paper. Before entering the Herisau asylum in 1933, for a putative diagnosis of schizophrenia, Walser had written and published widely, including in many of Central Europe’s German-language newspapers. But by the time he died in 1956, he was, like many writers of his type, nearly friendless and forgotten, and he likely hadn’t written anything in years. He was, in many respects, alone and insubstantial.
On December 25, 1956, a group of children in Herisau found Walser’s body in the snow, his right hand on his chest, his left arm outstretched, a black hat lying nearby. Seventy-eight years old, he had died while on one of his customary long walks...[T]his ... life story, marked by recurrent insecurities, poverty, an inability to find satisfying companionship of the amorous or intellectual kind, and a quiet death... meant that he, too, like the rest of his siblings, would die childless. .... However low Walser’s reputation may have dipped...some Europeans say he never went out of fashion......The wealth of new translations of Walser works, as well as the frequent appearance of new critical pieces, has only cemented his status as an important representative of early twentieth-century European literature. His tangled microscripts, published in German but most not yet translated into English, ensure that his posthumous life will be a long one....
...[M]y essay about Robert Walser, focus[es] on the Swiss author’s microscripts—peculiar short stories written in a minuscule script on business cards, receipts, torn-off novel covers, and other forms of scrap paper. Before entering the Herisau asylum in 1933, for a putative diagnosis of schizophrenia, Walser had written and published widely, including in many of Central Europe’s German-language newspapers. But by the time he died in 1956, he was, like many writers of his type, nearly friendless and forgotten, and he likely hadn’t written anything in years. He was, in many respects, alone and insubstantial.
On December 25, 1956, a group of children in Herisau found Walser’s body in the snow, his right hand on his chest, his left arm outstretched, a black hat lying nearby. Seventy-eight years old, he had died while on one of his customary long walks...[T]his ... life story, marked by recurrent insecurities, poverty, an inability to find satisfying companionship of the amorous or intellectual kind, and a quiet death... meant that he, too, like the rest of his siblings, would die childless. .... However low Walser’s reputation may have dipped...some Europeans say he never went out of fashion......The wealth of new translations of Walser works, as well as the frequent appearance of new critical pieces, has only cemented his status as an important representative of early twentieth-century European literature. His tangled microscripts, published in German but most not yet translated into English, ensure that his posthumous life will be a long one....
There is no reason to doubt the accuracy of this assessment, published in 2010.
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