Private Notebooks: 1914-1916 [paperback]

By Ludwig Wittgenstein
Edited and Translated by Marjorie Perloff 

"Private Notebooks: 1914-1916 is a strange and intriguing record — illuminating when it comes to Wittgenstein’s preoccupations, his sexual anguish, his continuous struggles with his ‘work’ in philosophy, along with his intermittent comments about his ‘job’ in the military... The war meant that Wittgenstein — and therefore his philosophizing — had changed... This transformation comes across as bewildering and almost unbearably moving. The notebooks show the circumstances in which Wittgenstein’s mystical turn toward the end of the ‘Tractatus’ was born — not in an attempt to escape that world, but in a determination to immerse himself in it."—Jennifer Szalai, New York Times

New Yorker • Best Books of 2022
Literary Hub • Most Anticipated Books of 2022

Written in code under constant threat of battle, Wittgenstein’s searing and illuminating diaries finally emerge in this first-ever English translation.

During the pandemic, Marjorie Perloff, one of our foremost scholars of global literature, found her mind ineluctably drawn to the profound commentary on life and death in the wartime diaries of eminent philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951). Upon learning that these notebooks, which richly contextualize the early stages of his magnum opus, the Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus, had never before been published in English, the Viennese-born Perloff determinedly set about translating them. Beginning with the anxious summer of 1914, this historic, en-face edition presents the first-person recollections of a foot soldier in the Austrian Army, fresh from his days as a philosophy student at Cambridge, who must grapple with the hazing of his fellow soldiers, the stirrings of a forbidden sexuality, and the formation of an explosive analytical philosophy that seemed to draw meaning from his endless brushes with death. Much like Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief, Private Notebooks takes us on a personal journey to discovery as it augments our knowledge of Wittgenstein himself.

Paperback
240 pages 
Liveright, 2025
6.3 x 9.4 inches 
ISBN 9781324096290  
Theory, Philosophy