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ROBERT MUSIL (1889-1942) was born in Celovac (Klagenfurt) in the family of an engineer and factory manager, Musil is one of the most significant Austrian writers, a well renowned novelist, writer of stories, essays and plays. Initially he was an officer in the army and enrolled in the studies of engineering following his father's wish. His doctoral thesis was on Contribution to Valuation of Mach's Theory. Undecided between the callings of a university professor and a free lance writer, he eventually opts for the latter. His first published works were psychological novellas and a novel,The Confussions of Young Torless (1906) and Unions (1911). Ever since its publishing, his novel The Man Without Qualities has been at the centre of discussion on the form of novel that would be adequate for our times. Until 1938, the novel was banned in Germany and Austria. That year Musil emigrated to Switzerland where he spent his last years in difficult conditions. The play Dreamers, published in 1921, brought him the Kleist Award. LETTING SPARKS FLY Marina Milivojević-Mađarev interviews The Enthusiasts director, Miloš Lolid Several love affairs intertwine in The Enthusiasts. Is The Enthusiasts a play about love? Let's start with this question: what do we mean when we say the word "love"? It's a complicated word that brings together many fairly different and contradictory feelings, isn't it? Some of them we would define as beautiful, some as ugly; the experience of love runs the gamut. That being the case, can there be just one thing called "love"? Love is more a process, a changeable constant that unifies many variables. The four protagonists of Musil's play would not disagree with that proposition, and that is why the play's title is in the plural; the enthusiasts. Thomas, Maria, Anselm, Regina are four people who grew up together and have known each other their whole lives, since they were children. What happens to them along the way? What - and how many - different dreams of love have managed to accumulate? When you know someone for so long and go through so many important phases of personal development together, does the question of love ever come up? Or do you take love or "not-love"for granted? Are they even relevant as terms to describe your experience? (...) Do you think the problems Musil's characters face are, to a certain degree, our problems, too? I believe that each person who sees the play will recognize some of his or her own nagging questions within the drama's sweeping spectrum of emotions. The text isn't just about love, after all. It's about imagination, contemplating the eternal paradoxes of life, those simple, everyday ones that everyone experiences and, from time to time, stops to think about. On stage are characters who, for thirty years, have been caught up in a game we can call love, but the game seeks its bounds when it comes to questions of freedom, responsibility, passion, loneliness, sacrifice... If it is really necessary to specify what group of people the drama addresses, then I would not single out the class to which the

THE ENTHUSIASTS