About the work
Anatol is a cycle of seven independent one-act plays that Arthur Schnitzler wrote between 1888 and 1891; they first appeared together in print in 1893, introduced by a poem from the young Hugo von Hofmannsthal. The complete cycle reached the stage only on 3 December 1910, at the Deutsches Volkstheater in Vienna.
Plot
The scenes follow young Viennese Anatol through a string of love affairs: he has a lover hypnotized to test her fidelity but cannot bring himself to ask the decisive question, and he runs into former lovers who barely recognize him or whose keepsakes from other men unsettle him. The cycle ends, just as unresolved, on the morning of his own wedding.
Cultural significance
Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand attended the premiere, as Schnitzler noted in his diary. Anatol is regarded as Schnitzler's breakthrough and the prototype of the indecisive, love-shy man of Viennese Modernism; in 1921 Cecil B. DeMille turned the material into the Hollywood film The Affairs of Anatol.