In choosing the sequence of the chapters that make up Agathe, the editorial approach has been to favor narrative continuity over completeness. Episodes involving Ulrich and Agathe in chapters that include the cast of characters from earlier parts of the book have been left aside as their inclusion was not essential to creating a coherent continuous sequence and would have involved substantial editorial interference. One exception has been made in chapter 22 where the dialogues between Ulrich and Agathe seemed too important to leave out. Other than in this chapter, a minimal amount of editing of what Musil actually wrote has been necessary in order to avoid references to story lines and characters that are not included in our selection. Chapters 1 to 22 of Agathe are drawn from part 3 of The Man Without Qualities, which was published in 1933, during Musil’s lifetime. Chapters 23 to 30 are the first eight of the Druckfahnen (galley proof) chapters he withdrew from publication in 1938, in which he subsequently made stylistic and other revisions but which he did not alter drastically before he died. Chapters 31 to 36 are from the manuscript continuations of galley chapters that Musil reworked significantly in 1940–1942 during his exile in Switzerland; in fact he was working on Agathe’s chapter 36, “Breaths of a Summer Day,” on the day he died. Chapters 31 and 32 have not been translated in any previous English edition. It is important to emphasize that we do not know which of the posthumous chapters Musil himself might have chosen to publish had he lived to continue work on the sequence and there is no claim that chapter 36 was designed by Musil as a conclusion to the story of the siblings’ relationship, although it serves well as a resting point for the story.

The Agathe project was proposed to NYRB Classics by Nicholas Berwin, who would like to express his gratitude to George Steiner for a seminal conversation that suggested publishing the posthumous draft chapters as a way of introducing the English-speaking reader to Musil’s most exceptional writing.

—EDWIN FRANK

Editor, NYRB Classics

*Currently, the digital edition platform Musil Online is being prepared at the Austrian National Library in Vienna; a trial version will be available starting in December 2019. The plan is to make all 12,000 manuscript pages of Musil’s posthumous legacy accessible on the Internet as facsimiles with transcriptions, reading texts, and text-genetic dossiers, along with the entirety of the works published during his lifetime and an additional interdiscursive commentary.

AGATHE

1

THE FORGOTTEN SISTER

WHEN ULRICH arrived in —— toward evening of the same day and came out of the train station, a wide, shallow square lay before him that spilled out into streets at both ends and exerted an almost painful effect on his memory, as happens with a landscape one has seen many times and forgotten again.