SOURCE: Lehmann, Chris. “Modern Tales from Old Vienna.” Washington Post Book World (15 January 2002): C3.

In the following review of Night Games and Other Stories and Novellas, Lehmann maintains that Dream Story addresses concerns still relevant to today's readers.

Like his fellow Austrian—and his most influential contemporary admirer—Sigmund Freud, Arthur Schnitzler has become something of a quaint period figure, more frequently cited in the service of summoning the zeitgeist of turn-of-the-century Vienna than actually read. The broad outlines of his life story seem, indeed, to beg for such treatment. As he came of sexual age, for example, he was humiliated, in a scandalous and traumatic breach of high-bourgeois respectability, when his father happened on a diary in which young Arthur recorded the graphic details of his encounters with local prostitutes. Later, as a practicing physician, Schnitzler continued to keep dispassionate, clinical private accounts of his sexual adventures...