Pregledni rad
A State Without Qualities: On Musil’s Kakania
Marijan Bobinac
; Sveučilište u Zagrebu
Sažetak
The works of numerous Austrian authors of the immediate post-imperial period—including those most renowned—frequently take as their thematic point of reference the recently collapsed Habsburg Monarchy, a state formation that some of them, Karl Kraus for example, encode negatively, while many others, such as Joseph Roth and Stefan Zweig, recall with wistfulness, regarding its disappearance as a profound loss. Robert Musil, however—whose principal work The Man Without Qualities, itself one of the central achievements of classical modernism, is firmly anchored in the Austro-Hungarian world—aligns with neither of these two positions. Although a sharp critic of the ideological distortions characteristic of Habsburg society and culture, Musil’s perspective on the old Central European empire is marked by a benevolent irony, a quality most clearly expressed in the name he devised for it: “Kakania”. This authorial neologism, long established as a synonym for the k.u.k. monarchy, most vividly reveals the ambivalence of Musil’s attitude toward Austria-Hungary, an ambivalence the narrator elaborates at length in the eighth chapter of The Man Without Qualities. Taking this indisputably central segment of the novel as its point of departure, the present article, following several introductory remarks, examines the various semantic dimensions of Musil’s concept of Kakania.
Ključne riječi
Robert Musil, Kakania; The Man Without Qualities; Habsburg Monarchy; ambivalence; ironic affection
Hrčak ID:
342288
URI
Datum izdavanja:
22.12.2025.
Posjeta: 487 *