About the work
“Gulliver's Travels” is a satirical novel by the Irish writer Jonathan Swift. It was published in 1726 in two volumes by Benjamin Motte in London under the title “Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World”, supposedly written by the ship's surgeon and captain Lemuel Gulliver. At the Vienna Burgtheater a musical stage version by Nils Strunk and Lukas Schrenk, who also directed it, opened on 16 November 2025; the music is by Strunk and the song lyrics by Schrenk.
Plot
The surgeon Lemuel Gulliver tells of four sea voyages, each of which strands him in an unknown land. In Lilliput he is a giant among tiny people, in Brobdingnag a dwarf among giants. The third voyage takes him, among other places, to the flying island of Laputa, the fourth to the land of the rational horses, the Houyhnhnms, alongside whom live the brutish human creatures, the Yahoos.
Cultural significance
The novel is one of the best known satires in world literature, targeting the politics, the faith in science and the image of humanity of its age, and it also belongs to the tradition of utopian writing. Toned down versions for children appeared early on, in German for instance by Erich Kästner (1939), so that today many know the book mainly as an adventure story.