Divorce and Other Stories

Leopold von Sacher-Masoch—the famous Austrian writer, author of many novels and novellas—won love and popularity with a wide audience largely thanks to his boundless imagination and his skill at aesthetically formulating a passionate desire for pain and submission. His scandalous works shook his contemporaries so much that in 1880 the Viennese psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing proposed introducing the term “masochism” into scientific usage.