What is the novel on which Eyes Wide Shut is based?

What is the novel on which Eyes Wide Shut is based? It is Traumnovelle, Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 novella. The title is often translated into English as Dream Story or Rhapsody: A Dream Novel.

Schnitzler’s story follows Fridolin, a Viennese doctor whose wife, Albertine, confesses a powerful sexual fantasy. Over the next night, jealousy and curiosity lead him through encounters involving masks, secret desire, social status, and danger. The novella is set in early-20th-century Vienna during Mardi Gras.

Stanley Kubrick and screenwriter Frederic Raphael moved the story to contemporary New York for Eyes Wide Shut, released in 1999. The film retains the central marriage crisis, the husband’s nocturnal wandering, and the mysterious masked gathering, but substantially changes the setting, tone, details, and social world.

The most common confusion is treating Dream Story as a different book. It is the standard English title for Traumnovelle, not a separate source. The work was first published in installments in the magazine Die Dame between December 1925 and March 1926, followed by a book edition in 1926.