His elder sisters, by contrast, are so severely dressed that they look like nuns. Aschenbach, startled, realizes that the boy is supremely beautiful, like a Greek sculpture.

Among them is an adolescent boy of about 14 in a sailor suit. Later, he has a disturbing encounter with an unlicensed gondolier-another red-haired, skull-faced foreigner-who repeats 'I can row you well' when Aschenbach orders him to return to the wharf.Īschenbach checks into his hotel, where at dinner he sees an aristocratic Polish family at a nearby table. While shipbound and en route to the island, he sees an elderly man in company with a group of high-spirited youths, who has tried hard to create the illusion of his own youth with a wig, false teeth, make-up, and foppish attire. Soon afterward, he resolves to take a holiday.Īfter a false start in traveling to Pula on the Austro-Hungarian coast (now in Croatia), Aschenbach realizes he was 'meant' to go to Venice and takes a suite in the Grand Hôtel des Bains on the island of Lido. He has a vision of a primordial swamp-wilderness, fertile, exotic and full of lurking danger. Aschenbach walks away, embarrassed but curiously stimulated. He is a man dedicated to his art, disciplined and ascetic to the point of severity, who was widowed at a young age.Īs the story opens, he is strolling outside a cemetery and sees a coarse-looking, red-haired foreigner who stares back at him belligerently.

The main character is Gustav von Aschenbach, a famous author in his early 50s who recently has been ennobled in honor of his artistic achievement (thus acquiring the aristocratic ' von' in his name). Tadzio was based on a real boy named Władzio whom Mann had observed during his 1911 visit to the city, but the story itself is fiction. It presents an ennobled writer who visits Venice and is liberated, uplifted, and then increasingly obsessed by the sight of a boy in a family of Polish tourists-Tadzio, so nicknamed for Tadeusz. Death in Venice ( German: Der Tod in Venedig) is a novella by German author Thomas Mann, published in 1912.

Death in venice novel