Thomas Mann's 1912 novella following Gustav von Aschenbach — a famous disciplined German writer — who travels to Venice, becomes obsessed with the beautiful Polish boy Tadzio, and remains despite a cholera epidemic, dying on the beach — the supreme literary treatment of beauty, Dionysian dissolution, and artistic self-destruction.
Dramatizes the Nietzschean thesis that Apollonian discipline and Dionysian ecstasy are in permanent tension — Aschenbach's entire career has been built on Apollonian self-mastery, and Venice is the Dionysian dissolution that both destroys and fulfills him — making the novella the most philosophically dense aesthetic text in German literature.
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