A Digital Edition of W. H. Auden's Letters to Stella Musulin
British-American poet Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-1973) counts among the most influential English-language writers of the twentieth century. From 1958 until his death in 1973, Auden spent up to six months of each year in the Lower Austrian village of Kirchstetten, where he wrote most of his late poetry. The Auden Musulin Papers scholarly digital edition presents previously unpublished personal letters, notes, literary papers, speeches, and official statements, as well as photographs in the estate of Auden’s close acquaintance Welsh-Austrian writer and journalist Stella Musulin (1915-1996). The three-year project (2021-2024) is supported by the FWF Austrian Science Fund under grant number P33754. This scholarly digital edition has been created at the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage (ACDH-CH) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
Auden in Austria: An Alternative Cartography
Auden’s life and work in Austria are still often treated as a footnote in Auden scholarship, which has tended to focus on the writer’s lengthy periods of residence in his native England and the United States, his adoptive home country from 1939. This project builds on the growing interest in Auden’s activities in Europe in the second half of the twentieth century and sets out to place the ‘Austrian Auden’ firmly on the map of Auden scholarship. It will help establish Austrian Auden Studies as a vibrant field of research that brings together local and international scholars in their reassessment of one of Auden’s most prolific creative periods. Shedding new light on the local and transnational artistic networks in which Auden moved, as well as on the poet’s ambivalent relationship with his host country, this project will add a vital chapter also to Austria’s complex political, social, and cultural history in the 1960s and 1970s.
The Digital Edition as a Life-Writing Project
Digital technologies lend themselves to depicting the non-linearity, fragmentedness, and relationality of lives, which seems particularly relevant in the case of W. H. Auden, who, throughout his life, kept straddling multiple cultural and linguistic contexts. We conceive of this scholarly digital edition as a form of life writing that presents a life in fragments at the interface of public and private spheres, individuals and communities, micro- and macro-environments. Situating Auden within networks of relationships sidesteps the ‘spotlight approach’ of traditional biography and allows for intriguing individuals to come into view, including Auden’s previously little regarded female collaborators Stella Musulin and Hilde Spiel. What is more, through the auto/biographical material in the Auden Musulin Papers, we encounter a range of Auden personae – public, private, poetic, and legal – as Auden constructs, negotiates, and aligns different versions of selfhood within diverse social, cultural, media, and industry frameworks during his life in Austria.
The Poet's Workshop: Material and Poetic Practices
This project takes advantage of innovative computer-vision technologies used in the research of 3D objects to provide new insights into Auden’s poetic practices of composition and revision as well as his material practices of writing. High-resolution Photometric-Stereo reconstructions of selected documents, imaged at the Computer Vision Lab (CVL) of TU Wien, contribute to our understanding of the relationship between, and the development of, texts written by Auden. It will also allow for a glimpse into the poet’s workshop with regard to the bodily practices and technologies of (type-)writing employed by W. H. Auden in his Austrian “Cave of Making”.
A First Step toward Auden in Austria Digital
The Auden Musulin Papers project pioneers methodological and technological approaches to researching and digitally editing Auden materials that will be continued, and further developed, in the 2024-2027 follow-up project Auden in Austria Digital (FWF P37139). The AAD project will result in a scholarly digital edition of all archival documents by, or related to, W. H. Auden from the period 1957-1973 held by Austrian archives, including the Auden Musulin Papers, and thus provide a unique and comprehensive resource for studying the poet’s later life and work in Austria.