Volumes 9 and 10 contain descriptions of Casanova's first visits to England, Prussia, Russia, and Poland. In all these countries he gained access to the Courts. Frederick the Great of Prussia and Catherine the Great of Russia join the roster of potentates entertained and charmed by the adventurer. Though beginning to age, and ruing it, Casanova still manages to exert a powerful attraction on women.
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History of My Life
Volumes 9 and 10 contain descriptions of Casanova's first visits to England, Prussia, Russia, and Poland. In all these countries he gained access to the Courts. Frederick the Great of Prussia and Catherine the Great of Russia join the roster of potentates entertained and charmed by the adventurer. Though beginning to age, and ruing it, Casanova still manages to exert a powerful attraction on women.
Volumes 9 and 10 contain descriptions of Casanova's first visits to England, Prussia, Russia, and Poland. In all these countries he gained access to the Courts. Frederick the Great of Prussia and Catherine the Great of Russia join the roster of potentates entertained and charmed by the adventurer. Though beginning to age, and ruing it, Casanova still manages to exert a powerful attraction on women.
Giacomo Casanova was born in Venice in 1725. His parents, both actors, wanted him to become a priest, but their hopes were dashed when, at sixteen, he was expelled from seminary for immoral misconduct. Probably best-known for his reputation as a womanizer, Casanova was in turn a secretary, a soldier in the Venetian army, a preacher, an alchemist, a gambler, a violinist, a lottery director, and a spy. He translated Homer's Iliad into Italian and collaborated with Da Ponte on the libretto for Mozart's Don Giovanni. He retired in 1785 to the castle of a friend—Count Waldstein of Bohemia—in order to write his memoirs.
Now at last we can enjoy the wonderful History of My Life . . . as if we were reading an entirely new book . . . Few more extraordinary men have ever lived; an no memoirist gives us a more vivid impression of the social background of his period
Edmund Wilson
The Chevalier de Seingalt was a most remarkable man, who had some of the qualities of greatness... Has any novelist or poet ever rendered better than Casanova the passing glory of the personal life?—the gaiety, the spontaneity, the generosity of youth: the ups and downs of middle age when our character begins to get to us and we are forced to come to terms with it; the dreadful blanks of later years, when what is gone is gone. All that a life of this kind can contain Casanova put into his story. And how much of the world!—the eighteenth century as you get it in no other book; society from top to bottom; Europe from England to Russia, a more brilliant variety of characters than you can find in any eighteenth-century novel.
From the Publisher
Casanova is unsurpassed as the recreator of the daily talking interests of 18th-century Europe. He ranges from slut to patrician, from closet to cabinet, waterfront to palace. He is superior to all other erotic writers because of his pleasure in news, in gossip, in the whole personality of his mistresses.—V. S. Pritchett
The Chevalier de Seingalt was a most remarkable man, who had some of the qualities of greatness . . . Has any novelist or poet ever rendered better than Casanova the passing glory of the personal life?—the gaiety, the spontaneity, the generosity of youth: the ups and downs of middle age when our character begins to get to us and we are forced to come to terms with it; the dreadful blanks of later years, when what is gone is gone. All that a life of this kind can contain Casanova put into his story. And how much of the world!—the eighteenth century as you get it in no other book; society from top to bottom; Europe from England to Russia, a more brilliant variety of characters than you can find in any eighteenth-century novel.—Edmund Wilson
V. S. Pritchett
Casanova is unsurpassed as the recreator of the daily talking interests of 18th-century Europe. He ranges from slut to patrician, from closet to cabinet, waterfront to palace. He is superior to all other erotic writers because of his pleasure in news, in gossip, in the whole personality of his mistresses.
