Chapter 3 Foreword - "Majestic Carpathians"

Sak-Mosok was born in 1836 in the Galician city of Lemberg, now Lviv, Ukraine, which lies near the 19th-century border between the Habsburgs and the Russian Empire.Lviv is a Polish name. Before being annexed by Austria for the first time in 1772, Lviv belonged to the Polish-Lithuanian Republic.Later the city became the administrative center of the Galician province of Habsburg.Sak-Mosok is the son of a police officer in the Habsburg province of German gypsy descent.In order to maintain Metternich's rule in Vienna, the gypsies obeyed Lemberg's laws and regulations.At that time, the city had about 50,000 inhabitants, and even counting the Austrian royal family officials, the number of ethnic minorities who moved to the city was increasing, but Poles still made up the majority.Whether for Ruthenians or Ukrainians or Jews, the city is becoming an ethnocultural center. In the 1830s, a group of priests from the Lemberg Orthodox or Greek Catholic seminary began promoting Ukrainian language and culture into the city.Habsburg officials, such as Sak-Mosok's father and his like, intended to restrict the entry of Ukrainian nationalism, which they saw as a balancing act against a conspiracy against the national movement of Pollus, who promoted the Polish (Galicia included) regained independence.

For his part, Sak-Mosok, despite leaving Galicia after the age of 12, remained curious and sympathetic to its people throughout his life, especially the Jews and Ruthenians.He was particularly touched by the Hasidic movement, which of course was undoubtedly a major event in the minds of Galician Jews.Sark-Mosok is so sympathetic to the Semites in his Jewish novels that he is as widely suspected of being a Jew as he is a nihilist and a communist.He describes the appearance of a group of women, the leader of the Hasidic sect and the spiritual leader of the district of Sadogna, and he cannot help focusing his eyes on their fur coats with fascination:

The spiritual leader's wife, daughter-in-law, daughter and niece were all present.I felt as if I were among the wives of the Sultan of Constantinople.Not one of these women is not beautiful, or not lovely.I was both shocked and delighted to see them all looking at us with large black velvet eyes.They all wore silk dressing-gowns, long-sleeved gowns with belts, either of silk or velvet, and trimmed with lace of costly furs.You can see fur in every color and style: yellow and pink silk, green, red and blue velvet, squirrel fur, ermine, sable and sable. It's easy to imagine how Zack-Mosok added this scene to his romantic fantasies, just imagine the Hasidic masochist's Hebrew-speaking concubine, but In the novel he restrains his literary nature and impulse.The Jews of Central Galicia were of secondary importance and never wore furs; a Jewish merchant sold Savunin a painting: Titian's Angel in the Mirror.Another Jew sold him a used book that apparently contained Casanova's memoirs.When he left Galicia, Savunin traveled in a third-class train carriage, playing the role of Wanda's servant.Along the way he had to endure the smell of onions with Polish peasants and Jewish vendors.In Sak-Mosok's works his fantasy is unrestrained, in fact his works accurately describe the people and places of Galicia.

Although he stresses that he is not Jewish, Sak-Mosok proudly claims to be of Ruthenian noble descent, as his mother is of Mosok descent.This may or may not be true, as his maternal grandfather Mosok was born in the Hapsburg province of Temesburg, which is part of modern-day Romania, and may have been of Czech or Slovak descent.Sark-Mosoke's national traits depend as much on his imagination as on his sexuality.He therefore imagined his Mosok ancestors to be Ruthenians, and likewise he imagined his Sark family to have come from the Hapsburgs of Spain. "Sak is often thought of as a Jewish name, when in fact it originated in the East," he wrote, insisting he was an exotic descendant of the Spanish Moores family. "There are all kinds of people who can imagine me, some think I'm Jewish, some think I'm Hungarian, some think I'm a gypsy, and some even think I'm a woman." 10 It is definitely not unusual for a family loyal to the Habsburgs in the kingdom of the Nation to have a bewildering and complex quality.Sark-Mossock has always loved the Habsburg dynasty, and he has explored the history of this dynasty in his works, ranging from the reign of Charles V to the reign of Maria Tietzer.Although he had always been cautious in signing contracts with his sexual partners, in 1880 Sark-Mosok had a dispute with his publisher over the contract and was sentenced to 8 days in prison.He asked his wife Wanda to go to Vienna to face King Franz Joseph to intercede for him, and the king canceled his sentence. In 1881, Sark-Mosok was sentenced to exile in Germany instead of being thrown into the prison of the Kingdom of Habsburg for indulging in bondage, whipping and abusive sex games.

In one book, Sac-Mosoc draws a divide between the Venus of northern Galicia and the Venus of the southern Mediterranean region.In the novel's opening pages, the marble Venus appears in a dream and sneezes hilariously a few times in the northern climate: "Her marble body, wrapped in a fur coat, looks very Solemn. She trembled and curled up like a cat.” Later, Savunin explained that the cold was not only cold in climate, but also in spirit, with a metaphorical element in it.Because the pagan Venus believed that "in the cold world of northern Christianity"13, she needed a fur coat to keep her warm.When Wanda and Savunin left Galicia for the South together, they found Italy with its pagan traditions and warm climate.Therefore, during the journey, Wanda had to put away the fur coat she brought from the north, and Savunin had to be her servant as a porter.Until the eighteenth century, Poland and Russia were geographically considered Northern Europe.They were later reclassified as what is now Eastern Europe, depending on their level of cultural development.The distinction between Western and Eastern Europe was originally made because the latter was more exotic and less civilized.Furthermore, Eastern Europe was seen as a place of slavery because both Russia and the Ottoman Empire were autocratic, and serfs lived in atrocious conditions in both Poland and Russia.Of course, there are times when people in Western Europe have a different opinion and think that Eastern Europeans actually like living in slavery societies. When the Marquis de Coustin published his famous travelogue in Russia in 1839, he did not hesitate to declare that Russia was "intoxicated with slavery." 14 and 19 century readers would accept these views when they appreciated them, and they might Savunin, who lives in Galicia, is fascinated by sex slaves.Sark-Mosock's first biographer, Karl Felix van Schlichtegerlo in 1901, described Galicia as "melancholy, strange, half-savage, half-excessive reclaimed" place.More recently, biographer Bernard Mack, writing in 1989 about Sark-Mosock, argued that the Galician landscape was a must for Sark-Mosoke because when placed in "a Far, exotic, backward places", the author's fantasy "is palpable" to the public. 15 Thus, when Sark-Mosok was writing in Germany, he offered readers a vision of Slavic exoticism that his contemporaries might have mistaken for Eastern European barbarism.Sac-Mosok was skeptical of the exoticism of his native Galicia, just as he imagined the woman of the spiritual leader of the Hasidic Sadogna region as a Turkish concubine.

When we consider why Sauunin wished so ardently to be a slave, it must be remembered that Sark-Mosok lived in a time when slavery did exist in the world.When it was published in 1870, the black slaves in the United States had just been freed from the "Emancipation Proclamation" in 1863 and the "Thirteenth Amendment" in 1865, and the serfs in Russia had just been liberated from slavery in 1861. come out.Serfdom was not fully abolished in the Habsburg Monarchy, including Galicia, until 1848.The novel is full of nostalgic thoughts about slavery.When thinking that "slavery no longer exists in our country", Wanda became "melancholy".Savunin responded: "Then let's go to a country where slavery still exists, such as the Eastern countries, to Turkey." Wanda rethought and suggested Italy: "Go to a place where everyone owns slaves. What do you mean? I hope I am the only one who owns slaves.” Once, during a stop in Florence, she not only owned a Slav slave, Savunin, but, interestingly, others also had him: “Three young, slender African In came the women—they were black as ebony, and wore red satin. Each woman carried a whip." At Wanda's command, they tied up Savunin and prepared to whip him, then suddenly disappeared, "It's like the earth swallowed them." Their almost supernatural presence and disappearance prompts Zak-Mosok to develop the theme of fantasy freedom, and the way men are enslaved changes.The contract signed by Savunin and Wanda specifically emphasized that "Wanda can not only punish the slave for even the slightest negligence and offense, but also abuse him for her own whim or just for entertainment, as long as it makes her happy." That's fine. She even has the right to kill him if she chooses. In short: he is Wanda's private property." 16 He was subjugated by a woman, which was perfectly legal, and this passionate act of self-destruction continued until 19 There was no departure from European and American social norms until the middle of the century.

When Sak-Mosok was 10 years old in 1846, Galicia experienced an episode of social unrest that was so traumatic that it awakened a sense of national responsibility among the Polish people, with effects that lasted well into the 19th century The end, while also impressing the son of the Lemberg officer.The outbreak of the Polish National Uprising in the Free City of Krakow ignited the flames of the Galician Uprising.The Habsburg regime tried to retain its hold on the province that supported, if not encouraged, the uprising.The Galician peasants complied with the Habsburg laws, even though their hatred of the local landowners far outweighed their Polish sense of national unity.After the massacre, the important leader of the peasant uprising in the minds of the Polish people, the famous Jakuba Szaro was received politely at the home of Lembergsak-Mosok, and he also became the object of the author's lifelong admiration.Thus from childhood, Sark-Mosok had to face the drastic social changes that would overthrow the Habsburg imperial rule in Galicia. In 1846 Jakubba Szaro glanced at him, and that glance was enough to upend the relationship between the aristocracy and the peasantry (classes with and without power). The tension of class relations in the 19th century was expressed by the inversion of the relationship between lovers, such as the aristocrat Saunen van Kuszymski or Leopold van Sack-Mosock completely by their Conquered by lovers.