Robert Walser: the loneliest writer. The influence of his disease on his literary work

Abstract

Robert Walser (1878-1956) is an important but unknown European writer of the twentieth century. He was also a mysterious and solitary man who lived at the margins of society. After the questionable diagnosis of schizophrenia, he nearly stopped writing and spent almost three decades in two Swiss psychiatric hospitals. The originality of his work, undoubtedly conditioned by his mental disorder, renders interesting a review of his life and a discussion of the possible differential diagnosis of his disease.