The Story of San Michele

Under the title The Story of San Michele ( original English title: The Story of San Michele ) of the resident on Capri Swedish arms and fashion doctor Axel Munthe published his memoirs from the period around 1900, the book was published in 1929, In 1931 a German translation by Gudrun. Uexküll -Schwerin, wife of Johann Jakob von Uexküll. With about 30 million sold copies worldwide, it was one of the most successful books of the first half of the 20th century.

Munthe built in the first two decades of the 20th century in his Anacapri, today open to visitors as a museum, syncretic Villa San Michele. The history of this villa, this book is dedicated, among other things, that represents an aesthetically interesting, early form of literary syncretism, which is located between Fantastik and a sometimes harsh social realism, one often seen directly from the other. Already at the very beginning the narrator in a kind of pact with the devil is the later prophesied blindness.

In the book tells of the Munthe stages of his unusual career, from the rise of the fashion physician of European nobility, of his encounter with Louis Pasteur, but also from its use against rabies in Paris and cholera in Naples. The discovery of the famous, looking from the balustrade of the Villa San Michele on the Gulf of Naples red marble Sphinx is attributed to a box of dream Munthe, which he believes and follows, then, in reality, a repeat of the dreamed.

Actually, the book is a fantastic novel, light-footed and with elegant humor, sometimes with pathos and also told not without interspersed malice, approximately in the direction of various National " colonies " in Rome. Towards the end of the otherwise very bright book is very dark, which is related to the increasing blindness Munthe, which causes him to be similar to that of him finally revered Tiberius from the " luce " retire and move to Torre di Materita.

Expenditure

  • Axel Munthe: The Story of San Michele. Murray, London, 1929.
  • Axel Munthe: The Story of San Michele. Translated from English by Gudrun Uexküll -Schwerin. Ullsteinhaus, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-548-60929-4.

Filming

The book was in 1962 under the title Axel Munthe - filmed The doctor of San Michele with OW Fischer in the lead role.

  • Literary work
  • Literature ( English )
  • Literature ( 20th century)
  • Novel, epic
  • Autobiography
  • Capri
John Murray (publisher) O. W. Fischer
218309
de