“Venus in Furs” is perhaps the best known work of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, who wrote a great many more novels, short stories and plays as well as works on history. A fair number people have heard of “Venus in Furs,” think they know something about it, but have not read it. Some know it only from the song by the Velvet Underground. They imagine it to be entirely, and tackishly pornographic, and pass judgment, either condemnation or simply the dismissive pigeon-holeing of Sacher-Masoch into the category of pervert. Those who have read the novel can see that he was in fact a pervert, but also a writer who could romanticize perversion and give it an enticing character with far more depth and grace than mere titillation. “Venus in Furs” is above all a romantic novel of the Nineteenth Century, having far more in common with Goethe’s “The Sorrows of Young Werther” than with Sade’s “120 Days of Sodom.”

Sacher-Masoch’s novel is part of an epic series he envisioned called “The Heritage of Cain,” which was to have had six parts, each containing a number of stories: Love, Property, The State, War, Work, and Death. “Venus in Furs” was part of Love, which contained five additional stories and was first published in 1870.

It is a novel that borrows heavily from Sacher-Masoch’s own life. The real-life Wanda von Dunajew was a woman named Fanny Pistor, herself a writer, who contacted Sacher-Masoch, then emerging as a new literary talent, for suggestions on her own chances for publication. When Fanny wrote to Leopold, she dubbed herself with a fictitious noble title, as the Baroness Bogdanoff. Inventing such a title for herself is telling of fanciful aspect of her character that would make possible the charming and outrageous nature of their love affair.

On December 8, 1869 Leopold and Fanny signed a contract making Leopold von Sacher-Masoch the slave of Fanny Pistor Bogdanoff for the period of six months, with the stipulation, doubtlessly at Sacher-Masoch’s suggestion, that the Baroness wear furs as often as possible, especially when she was in a cruel mood. Sacher-Masoch was given the alias of “Gregor,” and fitted out in disguise as the servant of the Baroness. The two traveled by train to Italy. As in the novel, he traveled in the third class compartment, while she had a seat in first class, arriving in Venice (Florence, in the novel), where they were not known, and would not arouse suspicion.

In the novel, Wanda has their portrait painted, reclining in furs with a whip, with Severin at her feet. In life they were photographed in much the same pose, complete with Fanny’s whip held casually in her hand. One doubts not that it was used occasionally to punish the craven servant when the fur-clad mistress became impatient with her slave.

As in the novel, the mistress acquires a lover to inspire the slave with the pangs of jealousy that would only heat the ardor of his passionate submission to her. In life it was an actor named Salvini, in the novel he is promoted from actor to cavalry officer, Alexis Popadopolis and given the change of nationality from Italian to Greek. He is also made the epitome of brutal, controlling, swaggering machismo.

The ending of the relationship between Leopold and Fanny differs from that of Severin and Wanda, in simply petering out, rather than in the novel’s dramatic conclusion.

The parallels of life and art hold more than the mere comparison of details, for it is very telling in the aesthetic of Sacher-Masoch, and perhaps hints at why this particular tale of the dozens of novels he wrote over the course of his life, has endured over time.

Sacher-Masoch’s imagination was very taken with romantizing life, not just in the characters in his writing, but in his own life. Through real-life events he created as much fanciful invention as in a novel, and in turn, in this novel, he takes his life and turns in back again, into a sublime example of creating a grand, romantic myth out of one’s own life. He was an impish dreamer, a poet of the perverse, so strange and misunderstood when lumped together with the prose-writers of the perverse.

It is this aspect of Sacher-Masoch that has made his novel a success, and his later marriage to Aurora Rümelin an utter failure. (Which can be read about in her rather mean-spirited “Confessions of Wanda von Sacher-Masoch.”)

As Sacher-Masoch's biographer, James Cleugh, perceptively points out: “Leopold’s mind instinctively rejected both the indifferent and the scornful attitude to life. He remained all his days an enthusiast, a builder of utopias.” It is in this spirit that “Venus in Furs.” is best understood: as Sacher-Masoch’s vision of the utopia-builders, the regal empress and the loyal slave at her feet, having created for themselves, against the conventions of their day, a utopia of two.