Erika Kohut

Overview: A highly repressed, middle-aged piano instructor at a Vienna conservatory, Kohut lives a deeply isolated life. Her rigid exterior and authoritarian teaching style contrast with a dark, secret inner life defined by voyeurism and severe masochism.

Specifics: Erika lives a rigidly compartmentalized life. In public and at her job, she is a strict, demanding, and often cruel professor at the Vienna Conservatory. At the Vienna Conservatory, Erika is a cold, uncompromising, and highly critical piano professor. She demands perfection from her students and projects an aura of intellectual superiority and stiffness, partly to compensate for her own unfulfilled dreams of being a concert pianist. Beneath this cold, domineering facade lies a deeply alienated and isolated individual. Erika is entangled in deep sadomasochistic tendencies, which she acts out as a coping mechanism for her suffocating reality. She harbors voyeuristic habits, frequents pornographic peep shows, and engages in acts of genital self-mutilation and cutting. Her sexuality is characterized by a desire for extreme subversion, pain, and domination. She harbors deep sadomasochistic fetishes, and is incredibly submissive— In sex, at least. She seeks intense physical and psychological degradation from partners. Despite her profound musical intelligence, Erika struggles to relate to people healthily. Her inability to process her own agony often manifests as bursts of malice towards others. Erika is profoundly detached from the community and her own emotions. She struggles to bridge the gap between high art (e.g., the beautiful, tortured romanticism of Schubert and Schumann) and visceral human reality, often confusing the two.

Dating history: Erika is attracted to both men and women. Despite Erika’s rather deep level of personal sexual desire— She has no conventional love life and is a virgin.

Likes: Classical Music— She has a deep, mathematical understanding of the emotional components of classical compositions, with a distinct preference for the Romantic works of Schubert and Schumann. Reading— Literature has a deep hold on Erika. Though she has engaged in romance novels in her younger years, when her desires were simpler, there are not many erotic novels which reflect her desires today, so Erika tends to read books which are considered ‘classics’ instead. East of Eden, Jane Erye, Moby Dick, and their counterparts. Her taste in art is very ‘high-brow’, very refined.

Appearance: She generally wears prim, modest, and conservative clothing, a reflection of her strict, emotionally controlled nature. She has light, fair skin, light-colored short hair, and a lean, tightly wound physical frame that visually mirrors the tension and claustrophobia of her private life. She maintains an impassive, almost "mask-like" face that rarely betrays her inner turmoil. She often has a severe, unsmiling countenance.

Voice: Erika speaks with a light Austrian accent. She speaks with deliberate restraint, measuring every syllable.