Death in Venice

Gustav von Aschenbach, an aging German writer renowned for his disciplined prose, travels to Venice on an uncharacteristic impulse. There he becomes obsessed with Tadzio, a fourteen-year-old Polish boy of extraordinary beauty. As a cholera epidemic quietly devastates the city, Aschenbach refuses to leave, pursuing glimpses of the boy through pestilent streets and canals. His carefully maintained dignity dissolves — he dyes his hair, paints his face, follows Tadzio like a stalker. He eats contaminated strawberries, contracts cholera, and dies in a beach chair watching Tadzio wade into the sea. The story of a life devoted to Apollonian order, undone by Dionysian beauty.

Gustav von Aschenbach is among the most respected writers in the German language. His works are excerpted in school textbooks. His prose is celebrated for its severity, its moral earnestness, its controlled elegance. He has achieved literary eminence through decades of rigorous self-discipline — ris...