Lover, libertine, Czech librarian? Exploring Giacomo Casanova’s final years in Bohemia with Professor Leo Damrosch
The name ‘Casanova’ will most likely conjure up an image of an Italian adventurer, having numerous affairs with many women and getting into trouble with the law, not an image of a librarian in northern Bohemia. Yet this is in fact how the famous Venetian Giacomo Casanova ended up and lived out his final years.
To understand how the adventurer became the librarian, and to mark 300 years since Casanova’s birth on April 2nd 1725, Danny Bate spoke to Leo Damrosch, the Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature at Harvard University Emeritus, and author of Adventurer, a 2022 biography of Casanova.
Professor Damrosch, thank you so much for talking to me today.
“It's my pleasure, thank you.”
In 1785, Giacomo Casanova moves to Bohemia, and this is the place where he will live the final few years of his life and eventually die. Can you just tell us a little bit about who this person is? What has he achieved in his life so far?
“It would take a book to do that properly. In fact, I did write such a book. It's called Adventurer: The Life and Times of Giacomo Casanova. He was born in Venice in 1725. His parents were both actors. In a way, he was a lifelong role player, using aliases and impersonations all his life, and enjoying it.
“I called my biography Adventurer. That was actually a recognised type in eighteenth-century Europe. About sixty of them are known to scholars today. They were always on the move. They figured out ways to get rich in each new city. They often got kicked out of there and went on to the next one. That was the life he led.
“He was mathematically gifted. He became a very successful gambler. Of course, Venice had an official casino. It was legal in most places. At one point in France, he made a lot of money in a perfectly legitimate endeavour. He persuaded the government that a national lottery would work to their advantage, and it did, and it made him a lot of money. He always spent as much money as he got.
“Most interestingly, he was a self-styled ‘magus’. He claimed he had occult powers, based on alchemy. He knew it was a scam, but it worked, and he extracted a lot of money from some rich people who believed him.
“Eventually he wound up in Bohemia, just because he did get that job you mentioned as a librarian for a nobleman, and he spent a rather unhappy last thirteen years of his life in what he thought was a kind of exile.”
And when he moves to Bohemia, just how famous is he? Or should I say infamous?
“Well, neither, in fact. He usually went around, as I mentioned, under assumed names, though the police everywhere knew exactly who he was.
“We know him from his posthumous autobiography, published in the following century. It was written in French, because he wanted everyone in Europe to be able to read it, and Italian wasn't so widely understood. He called it L'histoire de ma vie (‘The story of my life’). It's a wonderful book.
“He did publish two narratives in his lifetime that were popular, about incredibly daring episodes. He was imprisoned for more or less political reasons in the Ducal Palace in Venice. After a year there, he became the first person ever to escape, by cutting a hole in the roof and finding a way to get down.
“In Poland, he fought a successful duel with pistols with a military officer who was a crack shot, but who suffered more than Casanova did. He loved risk taking. He liked the thrill of gambling his life and pulling it off. But those were the only ways anybody would have heard of him in his own lifetime.”
So why then this move to Bohemia? What drew him to this country?
“Just chance, really. He spent the last thirteen years of his life in Bohemia, very reluctantly.
“He had been banned, literally banned, from countries all over Europe. England was one, he'd spent a year there. Germany and Russia too, he spent a long time there. Spain, he spent a year there. In 1785, he was back in his native Venice. He'd been exiled from there for twenty years, but he got into trouble yet again and had to leave.
“He never learned one word of Czech, German, English or Russian”
“He went to Vienna, made friends there with an Austrian count named Waldstein, who had a chateau in Dux (Duchcov), where he liked to go hunting. He offered Casanova that job. It was really a sinecure, just make-work job as a librarian in that castle. That was where he spent his last thirteen years.
“But he didn't enjoy it there. It was a small town. He never learned one word of Czech, German, English or Russian. He only spoke French and Italian, and he did pick up some Spanish. So in Dux, he could speak French with visiting aristocrats, but he felt completely alienated from the town and had endless quarrels with the chateau staff. It was a discouraging conclusion to his life.”
He seems like a bit of an unwelcome guest from the perspective of the locals. Do we know more about what he thought about Bohemia? I can't help but think that, after all his adventures in Italy and France and everywhere else you've mentioned, this may have been a little bit of an anti-climax. Do we know about his psychological state?
“He grieved for the loss of his active, energetic life”
“It was a complete anti-climax. He was deeply depressed much of the time. He grieved for the loss of his active, energetic life, when he was young and popular, and successful at anything he turned his hand to.
“Stefan Zweig, who wrote a good article about him, said that all over Europe, he was as unwelcome as a louse, and he certainly was unwelcome in Dux. In fact, Count Waldstein only rarely visited. There was a spa nearby in Teplice, and aristocrats from elsewhere used to visit there. He was always very friendly with them.
“As much as he could, he got away to Dresden or Vienna. Somebody calculated that, out of the thirteen years when he was based in Dux, the months when he was away add up to fully four years.
“He did care about women. He liked them. They knew that he liked them”
“But his achievement, which was extraordinary, was to write that autobiography. He did a lot of other writing, either in Italian or French. Most of it never got published – it didn't deserve to get published. It's only been published by modern scholars. But to cheer himself up, he started reliving his past, and amazingly reliving it with a kind of joyfulness that you would not suspect, given the boredom and depression of the years when he was writing it. He was recreating the past. As somebody said of Rousseau, he dived back into his past. He could relive when he was really Casanova.
“He tells us more about himself, and more about the cultures he travelled through than anybody ever up to that time. One Casanova expert has called it his “hymn to life”. It's also, of course, full of those favourite sexual encounters, though they really are not the majority of the story. They're interesting too.
“He has a reputation as a kind of cynical Don Juan. It's true; he always moved on. Sometimes they were very brief encounters. Occasionally they were genuine love affairs. But he did care about women. He liked them. They knew that he liked them. There weren't a lot of men like that. Amazingly, he tells the story of over a hundred of these encounters, and every one of them is different. He gives you a sense of who that person is. He gives you a sense of who that person was in herself. I think there's something in a way admirable about that. He was not cynical about it.
“He also describes the gambling, the scams, the alchemy and all the rest of it in very rich detail. So that's his achievement, leaving this work, which I suppose he hoped would one day be published, was not in his lifetime.”
And, besides being a great benefit for himself, this is a great benefit for historians too, for understanding the era in which he lived?
“Absolutely. It's one of the richest possible sources because he goes into so much detail about aspects of life that most people didn't write down, because they took them for granted, and because he was so itinerant, always moving on. He was always interested in each new culture that he entered into, figuring out how it works, what the power structure is, and the rest of it.”
Finally, moving on to the most serious topic of all: could you tell me about the circumstances of his death, and also his burial?
“His death is sad. There's a portrait that was made of him as a frontispiece to one of his few published books that shows him haggard and worn out. Hard living really took its toll. He didn't want that concealed in that portrait. He said at one time, whenever I think of becoming an adventurer again, I look in the mirror and I burst out laughing.
“He was not an aristocrat by any means, but he exploited the aristocracy”
“He was also grieving that the world he knew was gone. He was not an aristocrat by any means, but he exploited the aristocracy. He wanted there to be a social ladder that he could climb up. The French Revolution had wiped out the culture he used to exploit in France. In fact, many of his friends went to the guillotine.
“Then most recently, Napoleon conquered Venice, which had been a free republic for fifteen hundred years, and then turned it over to Austria. So even Venice, with which he always identified, he felt just didn't exist anymore.
“He became increasingly ill, and probably died of an intractable urinary infection that would have been the result of many bouts of venereal disease over the years, but he was ready to let go.
“Then his burial was tragic. He was a Mason. At that time, Masons were considered politically radical. They were an international brotherhood who could count on each other's support wherever they went. He found it very useful to be a Mason. But the conservative governments all over Europe after the French Revolution feared the Masons. So Casanova's few friends in Dux buried him in an unmarked grave, outside the little St. Barbara chapel, because they feared that his corpse would be dug up and mutilated in revenge for his being a Mason. So, nobody even knows what became of his body.
A sad end to a very colourful life. That was illuminating. Thank you so much, Professor Damrosch.
“Thank you so much for inviting me.”
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