A. S. Dmitriev 1991
Author: A. S. Dmitriev;
Written: 1991;
First published: 1991 in Istoriya zarubeznoy literatury XIX veka, Moscow, Higher School, pp. 34-113;
Source: https://www.ae-lib.org.ua/texts/dmitriev__german_romantism__ru.htm
Translated: by Anton P.
The development of German literature in the 19th century. takes place in accordance with the laws of the European literary process.
The main factors that determined the character of the literary process at the end of the 18th and the first three decades of the 19th century were the influence of the French Revolution, the political fragmentation and economic backwardness of the country, the anti-Napoleonic liberation movement and the atmosphere of the general political reaction of the Restoration period without a previous revolution.
In the conditions of feudal absolutism, the authority and general aesthetic significance of the Enlightenment persisted in the 19th century. For all the differences and contradictions between Romantics and Enlighteners in Germany, German Romantics did not engage in such fierce battles with Enlighteners, as, for example, took place in the 1820s in France. On the contrary, it was the early German Romantics who created the true cult of Goethe in Germany, proceeding from his aesthetic positions in their creative practice. The historical principles of Herder’s thinking, his research in the field of folklore gave impetus to the future flourishing of German folklore studies in the activities of Romantics. Many significant aspects of the creative practice and aesthetics of both Schiller and Goethe indicate that German Romanticism had deep connections with the late Enlightenment and was formed in complex synchronous interactions with it.
The features of the transitional period from the Enlightenment to Romanticism marked the work of two outstanding writers of that time. The outstanding German poet Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) is essentially a Romantic, but not associated with the schools of German Romanticism due to his adherence to the peculiar ideas of Hellenistic utopia and some artistic principles of Classicism. He differed from the Romantics and from many of his other compatriots-contemporaries in that, having once enthusiastically embraced the ideas of the French Revolution, he remained faithful to them forever, although the turn of the revolutionary events in France towards Thermidor could not but introduce the elegiac intonation of disappointment into the poet’s work. His works in his early thirties are solemn and passionate hymns inspired by the ideas of the French Revolution. Both the hymns and the subsequent lyrics of Hölderlin – landscape, love, epic and, of course, philosophical proper – are remarkable for their distinctly philosophical sound, which has absorbed his serious hobbies for various philosophical systems, antiquity, Spinoza, Schiller; the friendship with Schelling and Hegel, classmates at the University of Tübingen, also affected him. This striving for the sphere of philosophy was embodied by Hölderlin in his individually peculiar romantic utopia – the Hellenistic ideal of harmony and beauty with a distinct civic humanistic emphasis. He makes extensive use of the possibilities of free verse, applying the norms of both ancient and modern German prosody.
In the mainstream of the genre of the “novel of growth” (Bildungsroman) widely established in German literature, a significant place belonged to Hölderlin’s novel Hyperion, in which the Hellenistic moral, ethical and social ideal, expressed to an even greater extent than in its lyrics, allows us to speak of Hölderlin as a poet and prose writer, whose work is associated with the emergence of an active romantic hero. In the same row is his dramatic fragment The Death of Empedocles.
Another significant German writer of the late 18th-early 19th centuries, typologically associated with romanticism, was the novelist Jean Paul (real name Johann Paul Friedrich Richter; 1763-1825). While condemning the Jacobin dictatorship, he, like Hölderlin, nevertheless remained faithful to the ideas of the French Revolution. A number of Jean Paul’s novels are characterized by Romantic features of a fantastic utopia (the novel Titan), combined with the sentimentalist line of the German and English Enlightenment (Lawrence Sterne). The type of hero of many of his novels – an eccentric character, over whom the author himself mocks – is close to E. T. A. Hoffmann’s eccentric enthusiasts. Without developing the theoretical foundations of romantic irony, Jean Paul widely used it in some of his works, anticipating the appeal of Romantics to it.
A sharp satire on the social order, sounding in the works of Jean Paul, who believed that literature should be closely connected with reality, an optimistic worldview and some other aspects of his ideological and aesthetic positions allow us to speak of him as an artist who shared the idea of the social significance of art.
To the same extent as on literary movements, the influence of the French Revolution affected the development of philosophical thought in Germany at that time. It is noteworthy that almost all known philosophical systems of Germany of the late 18th-early 19th century, aesthetics were their most important component. And Kant, Schelling, and Hegel in their interpretation of the system of the universe gave an important place to art.
The greatest representative of the philosophy of classical German idealism is Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), whom Heine called a “Robespierre in the kingdom of thought” and whose system Marx called the “German theory of the French revolution”. The unknowability of this world (a thing in itself), the existence of a priori, lying outside of sensory experience, forms of consciousness.
Another major German philosopher of that time, Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), a representative of the subjective-idealistic direction of philosophical thought, was significantly influenced by the French Revolution. Many of the main provisions of the philosophical and aesthetic system of the early German romantics were associated with Fichte’s ideas. Like Kant, the specific socio-political principles of the French Revolution were transformed by Fichte, in connection with the specifics of the social development of Germany, into an abstract philosophical and ethical plan outside of concrete social practice. However, it was precisely under the influence of the French Revolution that the concept of personal freedom, absolute free will, became one of the key provisions in Fichte’s teachings.
During the years of the Napoleonic occupation, Fichte acted as a passionate propagandist of liberation ideas (Speeches to the German Nation), although the appeals had a certain nationalistic connotation. This position of Fichte won him great popularity among the advanced intelligentsia, and especially among students. In 1810 he became the first rector of the newly founded university in Berlin.
Fichte rejected the Kantian dualism, denying Kant’s position on the existence of a thing-in-itself, that is, objective material world. Despite the fact that Fichte has some minor deviations towards objective idealism, on the whole he took consistent subjective-idealistic positions, arguing that the active activity of the absolute “I” is the original force that creates the entire universe.
To a much lesser extent, the influence of the French Revolution affected another prominent representative of German classical idealism, Schelling (1775-1854). In the late 1790s and early 1800s, Schelling took part in the development of the aesthetic program of Jena Romanticism. At the same time, Schelling created his main works: The Philosophy of Nature, The System of Transcendental Idealism and Philosophy of Art.
Schelling’s natural philosophy, which arose as an attempt to generalize the latest achievements of the natural sciences, had its positive aspects, consisting primarily in the fact that nature is viewed as a universal unity of various manifestations, as a unity that develops as a result of the collision of opposing forces.
Representing in classical idealism a kind of objective idealism, Schelling developed, in contrast to Fichte, the concept of idealistic monism. Removing the Fichtean antithesis of “I” and “not-I”, subject and object, Schelling asserted the unity of nature and creation. At an early stage of development, according to Schelling, only nature existed as the embodiment of the unconscious spiritual principle, which at subsequent stages evolved to its highest expression: human consciousness. A little later, the philosopher formulated this principle differently, as the identity of nature and consciousness. Therefore, Schelling’s system is often called the philosophy of identity.
Schelling’s aesthetic views were a vivid expression of the Romantic concept of art and beauty. In the Philosophy of Art, where Schelling’s path to religious mysticism is already tangibly outlined, the essence of art is interpreted as the most perfect expression of the world spirit, a synthesis of subject and object, consciousness and nature, that is, art is “the self-contemplation of the absolute spirit.” And the System of Transcendental Idealism states that art is “the eternal and genuine organon of philosophy.” The Jena school fully shared this concept of art as a kind of self-valuable and all-encompassing original beginning of all beginnings. Thus, the Jena romantics, like Schelling, believed that science arose in the bosom of art and there it will return in the coming harmonious universe. Unlike the enlighteners, who saw the task of art in imitating nature, Schelling believes that art is the expression of the absolute idea that lies in nature. And only the intuitive power of brilliant artistic insight, bestowed on the artist, allows him to grasp this absolute idea in nature. Therefore, in full agreement with the Romantic philosophy of the creative act in art, Schelling asserts the unconsciousness, the miraculousness of the creative process.
German classical idealism reaches its peak in the philosophy of Hegel (1770-1831). Reactionary idealistic features in the sociological, historical, legal and political concepts of Hegel’s philosophical system came into sharp conflict with his dialectical method. Deepening Schelling’s concepts, Hegel, from the standpoint of objective idealism, regards as the basis of being, both material and spiritual, an absolute idea, which in its development goes through three stages: logic, philosophy of nature and philosophy of spirit. The absolute spirit, the philosopher claims, is the highest stage in the development of the absolute idea, which has three stages of self-knowledge: in art, religion and philosophy.
The main features of Hegel’s system and dialectical method are defined in his main works: Phenomenology of Spirit and Science of Logic. Its aesthetic concept is presented mainly in Lectures on Aesthetics.
The development of art, according to Hegel, goes through three stages (forms) as three different incarnations of the ideal, that is, the sensual, figurative expression of the absolute idea in reality. Of these three forms (the first two are symbolic, to which oriental art corresponds, and classical with antique art), the last one, the romantic, most fully embodies the realization of the idea. But unlike classical art, in which the form is in full accordance with the content, romantic art is characterized by the predominance of content (ideas) over form. Hegel included both medieval and contemporary art as a romantic form.
Such a picture of the development of art is, of course, conventional and built according to an idealistic scheme. Fruitful, however, is the principle of historicism, according to which Hegel considers the change of styles and genres as a natural process.
The variety of German literary movements in the 1830s undoubtedly reflected significant shifts in the country’s economic and socio-political development of those years.
The news of the revolutionary explosion in July 1830 in Paris, like a refreshing, life-giving whirlwind, swept across Germany, backwater and fragmented, deceived in its bright hopes, generated by the patriotic enthusiasm of the liberation war against Napoleon. These events were received with particular enthusiasm by the German youth, whose moods were very vividly expressed by Heine. Upon learning of the revolution in France, he wrote in his diary: “Lafayette, the tricolor banner, the Marseillaise ... I feel like I’m intoxicated. Bold hopes are passionately rising, like trees with golden fruits, with thriving branches, stretching their foliage to the very clouds ... I am all joy and song, I am all sword and flame!”
The July Revolution in France was the impetus that caused revolutionary outbreaks in Germany, prepared by the internal development of class contradictions in the country. These events reflected the growth of the class consciousness of the German bourgeoisie, its desire to eliminate the political fragmentation of the country, which hindered the development of trade and the economy.
The opposition movement generated a wave of repression from the ruling circles of Germany.
Shifts in the economic and socio-political life of the country were not slow to affect various forms of public consciousness, in particular philosophy and literature. The philosophical movements of the 1830s in Germany were reflected in the formation of German realism.
In the 1830s, sharp contradictions were identified in the camp of Hegel’s followers – a group of Old Hegelians or Right Hegelians (Gubler, Hinrichs, Erdmann) and a Left Hegelian wing, or Young Hegelians (Bruno and Edgar Bauer, David Friedrich Strauss, Max Stirner) stand out. From the position of radical republicanism, the Hegelian left had a negative attitude towards Prussianism and sharply criticized the dogmas of the Christian religion.
The character of German literature of this decade changes sharply in comparison with the literature of the 1810-20s. In his famous work The Romantic School, Heine emphasized: “With the death of Goethe a new literary era begins in Germany; with him went to the grave old Germany, the age of aristocratic literature has come to an end, the democratic age begins.”
Indeed, the main phenomena in German literature of the 1830s testify to its certain democratization in comparison with the previous stage of development. Moreover, these new tendencies were reflected primarily in the ideological and aesthetic evolution of Heine.
The process of the formation of realism in German literature of the 1830s was clearly manifested in the work of Georg Büchner (1813-1837), and above all in his drama Death of Danton (1835). Socio-political issues under the influence of the July Revolution and internal German contradictions, which actively saturated the German literature of the 1830s, were most radically interpreted by Büchner, who directed the activities of one of the secret revolutionary organizations, the Human Rights Society in Hesse.
The dramatic events of the French Revolution at the end of the 18th century allowed Büchner to artistically solve the problem of revolutionary violence, to reveal the role of the leader and the people in the revolution. The writer, naturally, took into account the experience of the events of July 1830 in Paris, clearly showing the limitations of the bourgeois revolution.
Qualitatively new trends in the German literary process of the 1830s had an active impact on the creative evolution of Karl Immermann (1796-1840), a writer who made a significant contribution to the development of German progressive literature, in particular to the development of the social novel genre. Immermann’s creative quest led him to close personal friendship, and at times to active creative collaboration with Heine, despite the differences in their political views. His most significant works, which played a role in the subsequent development of German literature, were the novels Epigones (1836) and Munchausen (1835-1839). These novels reflected some of the most important moments of the socio-political development of modern Germany: the gradual ousting from the historical arena of the feudal nobility by a new emerging class, the bourgeoisie.
The playwright Christian Dietrich Grabbe (1801-1836), whose work played a significant role in German literature of the 1830s, was close to Immermann in aesthetic positions. The central work of Grabbe, which most fully embodied his social and aesthetic principles, is the drama Napoleon, or One Hundred Days (1831). The events of the play, especially the battle scenes, reminded the Germans of the recent struggle for national liberation, aroused opposition sentiments. It is no coincidence that this play was approved by the Young Germans.
A leading place in German literature of the 1830s, along with Heine, was taken by Ludwig Boerne (1786-1837), a consistent in his convictions and active participant in the social and political struggle, a representative of the radical wing of the German petty middle class, a talented publicist.
Boerne’s activities, which had a wide resonance in Germany, reflected a certain stage in the development of German bourgeois democracy. The process of economic development of the country, intensifying in the first half of the 19th century, entailed an ever greater deepening of the class differentiation of the third estate. Boerne was precisely the ideologist of the most leftist part of the German bourgeoisie, which protested both against the feudal regime and against the power of the emerging industrial and financial tycoons.
A significant part of Boerne’s articles was devoted to theatrical life. “Dramaturgical sheets”, which later compiled a separate collection, were written by the pen of a militant revolutionary publicist. Boerne uses the form of theatrical review to sharply criticize the social life of the then Germany. After the July Revolution, Boerne, impelled by the intensifying persecution against him, moved to Paris.
Among Boerne’s works, the Paris Letters (1830-1833), which painted a vivid and broad picture of the life of France in the early years of the July Monarchy, had a particularly great influence on the literary and social life of Germany in the 1830s.
Incorruptible honesty and consistent struggle against the feudal monarchy and big business, the outstanding talent of a publicist made Boerne one of the leading figures of the progressive camp in Germany. Young Engels called him “the standard-bearer of German freedom, the only husband of Germany in his time.”
However, Boerne’s positive socio-political program was marked by the stamp of utopia, for many representatives of the then German democracy, which was based on the petty bourgeoisie and the artisan proletariat. Boerne and his associates strove to achieve the establishment of a republic of small owners, the economic basis of which would be universal material equality. In his passionate struggle for the fastest solution of topical political issues (the elimination of estate privileges and the overthrow of feudal regimes in Germany), Boerne did not see real prospects for historical development, and sometimes he treated art issues in a vulgar way.
The turning point in the development of German literature was vividly expressed in the work of the literary group, which already in the 1830s was called Young Germany. The core of this group were the writers Karl Gutzkow, Ludolf Winbarg, Heinrich Laube, Theodor Mundt, Gustav Kuehne.
Young Germans opposed the tradition of Romanticism, sought to bring literature closer to reality, to social and political life.
As a single literary group or school, Young Germany existed for a very short time. If at the beginning of the 1830s there was some ideological and aesthetic unity in the literary works of a number of young writers, then after the decision of the Union Parliament and the unfolding censorship and political persecutions, the Young Germans, with the exception of Winbarg and to some extent Gutzkow, turned out to be, in essence, renegades in relation to their former ideals, hurrying to testify their allegiance to the Prussian monarchy. On the whole, however, the impact of Young Germany as a general trend on German literature continues until about the turn of the 1830s-40s. And, of course, the Prussian king Frederick William IV was well aware of the complete harmlessness of the former Young Germans for the Prussian government when in 1842 he lifted the censorship restrictions directed against these writers.
The defeat of the revolution of 1848-1849 dramatically changed the nature of national literature in Germany. German literature is rapidly losing the broad international authority that it gained from the late 18th century and the first half of the 19th century, especially during the era of Goethe and the Romantics. Fearing the activity of the social lower classes, the cowardly German liberal capitalist class did not achieve either the elimination of the feudal-monarchical regime or the national unity of fragmented Germany in the course of the revolution. Having betrayed the ideals of the revolution, the liberal burghers chooses the path of compromise with the feudal-Junker elite, who retained in their hands and consolidated political power. At the same time, this compromise gave impetus to the rapid development of the capitalist mode of production, and national unity was achieved by “iron and blood” – the Bismarckian “revolution” from above under Prussian rule in 1871.
In such a political environment, philosophical thought loses its former optimistic and humanistic orientation. In this regard, the enormous popularity that the pessimistic work of Arthur Schopenhauer The World as Will and Representation (1818-1844) receives among the German intelligentsia of the second half of the 19th century is noteworthy.
Some representatives of German literature fundamentally dissociate themselves from a great social and ideological content (the Munich literary circle – Paul Heyse, Emanuel Geibel, etc.). The so-called trivial literature is becoming widespread – entertainment and adventure (Kurt May), vulgar sentimental (E. Marlit) novels, literature that asserted the imperial ideas of Pan-Germanist chauvinism (F. Dahn, E. Wildenbruch, and others).
German literature finds itself within the narrow framework of provincialism, the so-called regionalism, developing a range of topics related only to the living conditions of a particular province. The term “critical realism” (for all its inadequacy), with which we designate the defining direction in the literatures of France and England after 1830, is completely inapplicable to the literature of these decades in Germany (and especially after 1848), where one can speak only in connection with the work of Theodor Fontane, a novelist of the 1870s. And although the leading German prose writers of the 1840-60s considered themselves (and with sufficient reason) realists, they, again, with no less reason, both in theory and in their work, asserted their understanding of realism, designating it as “poetic realism” (the term of Otto Ludwig), who set himself the task not of a merciless analysis of reality, but of its idealization, softening of its contradictions. It is in this vein that many features of the work of Theodor Storm, Wilhelm Raabe, Otto Ludwig are determined.
The founders of the school of Jena romanticism were the brothers Schlegel, Friedrich and August Wilhelm, who settled in Jena in 1796. At the University of Jena, the Schlegel brothers, Fichte and other young teachers are fighting the routine professorship, and in the Schlegel house a kind of center of ideological opposition is formed. Frequent visitors to this house are Novalis (pseudonym of Friedrich von Hardenberg), physicist Ritter, naturalist Steffens, philosophers Schelling and Fichte; an aspiring young writer Ludwig Tieck often comes here from Berlin. Tieck, in turn, was associated through close personal friendship and shared views on literature and art with W. G. Wackenroder and the Berlin pastor and theologian F. D. Schleiermacher. Goethe is also a guest of this house. At first, Schiller maintained close personal and creative contacts with the Schlegel brothers, especially with the elder August.
The beginning of the publication of the Athenaeum magazine in 1797 strengthened the organizational foundations of the Jena school and at the same time made its activities even more strongly opposed to modern reality, but not so much to its socio-political as to some ideological aspects.
Jena Romanticism developed in an atmosphere of advanced socio-political ideas that the revolution of the late 18th century put forward and sought to carry out. in France, and he could not help but experience their fruitful influence. Novalis and Friedrich Schegel originally welcomed the revolution, while Tieck dreamed of becoming a volunteer in the French Republican army and fight against the European coalition. At the same time, rejecting not only the results of the French Revolution, but also the paths of development in general, the Jena Romantics in the conditions of the feudal backwardness of Germany thereby remained outside the forces of social progress, carrying in their worldview and social positions the potential for rapprochement with the camp of reaction. They were alien to the belief in the implementation of the advanced ideals of the French Revolution in the future. They were neither reactionaries nor restorers of medieval relations, but their search for a just non-bourgeois ideal became retrospective and often expressed itself in the idealization of the distant past, usually the Middle Ages, which they nevertheless strove to correlate with modern social development (Novalis’ utopia). At the same time, in the utopian ideal of the Jena Romantics, the emphasis was not on the social, but on the aesthetic side.
But in the new artistic vision of the world, which the Jena Romantics asserted, their inevitable losses arose in comparison with classicism and the Enlightenment. They consisted primarily in adherence to the so-called disinterested art, which has no tasks outside of itself. The implementation of this principle carried not only a denial of the flat utilitarianism of the epigones of the Enlightenment, but ultimately also a rejection of the high civic educational mission of art. Denying the social and political practice of the developing bourgeois society, the Jena Romantics came to a conscious separation of art from social and political life in general.
The aesthetic system of the Jena Romantics, taken in its entirety, is characterized, first of all, by a subjective vision of the world, a desire to get away from depicting real concrete historical reality. But if one examines the entire completeness of the content of this system, taking into account all its tendencies, then one cannot fail to notice that the leading points just noted are by no means exhaustive for it. As a concrete analysis of the aesthetic positions of the Schlegel brothers, Wackenroder, Tieck, and even Novalis, the most subjectivist of the Jena Romantics, shows, their theoretical searches contain certain potential prospects for an objective reflection of reality. It is no accident that it was the Jena romantics who were the first to make a significant contribution to the development of the theory of the novel, and from their subjective-Romantic positions they foresaw its rapid flourishing in the literature of the XIX century.
But the very subjective psychologism of the Jena Romantics, their appeal to the disclosure of the wealth of the inner world of man, to a large extent prepared the subsequent realistic development of characters.
Each national literature had its own preconditions for the emergence and development of Romanticism, but the activities of the Jena Romantics are largely at the origins of the development of European Romanticism. It is them who have the priority and the greatest depth in the development of the theory of Romanticism. The ideas of the Jena school, especially thanks to the activities of August Schlegel, had a wide resonance outside Germany and in a number of cases had a huge influence on the aesthetics of romanticism in almost all countries of Europe and the USA; the aesthetic thought of Russia also responded to the activities of the Jena Romantics.
In their philosophical quests, the Jena Romantics turned primarily to Kant, since he emphasized the primacy of personality in his ethics.
As we know, the main contradiction of the Kantian philosophical concept lies in its dualism – in the assumption of the existence of a thing in itself, the material world, regardless of the existence of the subject as a carrier of a priori thinking. This incompleteness of the subjectivism of the Kantian system did not satisfy the romantics who strove to assert the total role of the “I” in the universe. Therefore, their quest was much more consistent with the ideas of Fichte, set forth in his Science Teachings (1794). Many of the main provisions of the philosophical and aesthetic system of the early Jena Romantics turned out to be connected with these ideas.
Compared with the philosophical concept of Kant, Fichte deepens and makes much more consistent the subjectivist concept of the universe, freeing it from Kantian dualism. Denying Kant’s proposition about the existence of a thing-in-itself, i.e. objective real world, Fichte argues that the activity of the absolute “I” is the original force that creates the entire universe. Fichte’s “I” is the “I” taken to the highest degree of generalization of this concept, as a certain initial philosophical principle of the existence of all that exists.
Perceiving the general model of Fichte’s absolute “I” and its creative role in the universe, the Jena Romantics made certain adjustments to this model, trying to remove the contradictions of Fichte’s subjectivism in relation to idealistic monism. Therefore, they make a conscious substitution of Fichte’s absolute philosophical “I” by the concrete empirical “I” of an individual person.
This substitution was combined with the belief of the Jena Romantics in the primary role of art in human existence, in the universe as a whole.
Towards the end of the existence of the Jena community, some of its members showed a certain departure from the subjectivist concept of Fichte towards the ideas of objective idealism in the spirit of Schelling, who at the beginning of his career was in close personal and creative contacts with the writers of this group. Many of Schelling’s early ideas were formed in an atmosphere of active spiritual communication and exchange of thoughts with other members of the Jena group. Both sides strove to overcome both the Kantian dualism and the dualistic contradictions of Fichte’s subjectivism.
Soon after the death of Novalis in 1801 and as a result of some other circumstances, the Jena group ceases to exist, which does not prevent its former members from maintaining their creative activity. However, all the most significant and constructive was created by them during the existence of the Jena school.
One of the most talented theorists of Jena Romanticism was Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829), who underwent a noticeable evolution in his aesthetic and social positions. Having perceived the educational ideology and the advanced ideas of the French Revolution (the most significant work of this plan is the article “Georg Forster”, 1797), he focused on the development of Romantic theory. After the dissolution of the Jena circle, Schlegel shows interest in mysticism and religion. He converts to Catholicism, his social and political views become reactionary. At this time, he creates a number of interesting works.
The concept of a new romantic literature was developed by Friedrich Schlegel in his Fragments (published in 1798 in the Athenaeum magazine).
Considering Romantic literature a new stage in the literary process, Friedrich Schlegel, as one of its characteristic features, notes that it is in constant development, and therefore he calls it progressive. Another distinctive feature of the new literature, Schlegel considers its universality, which, in his opinion, means the creation of a kind of syncretic genre of literature, which should include not only all literary genres that have existed until now, but also philosophy and rhetoric. This principle of universalism was not characteristic of the subsequent development of German literature, except for the prose of Heine. Attempts to create such universal works by the Jena Romantics themselves bore the stamp of experiment. The range of contradictions of Schlegel’s romantic aesthetics is very wide, without losing interest in civic ideas, in the ideals of the French Revolution, recognizing a social function for universal poetry, he still focuses on the subjective factor, from a subjective standpoint, comprehending the principle of freedom in this literature; relying on the philosophical system of Fichte, Schlegel puts the personality of the artist as the central figure of all that exists (“What kind of philosophy falls to the lot of the poet? A creative philosophy based on the concept of freedom and faith in oneself, showing how the human spirit dictates laws to everything that exists and that the world is a work of his art”).
Friedrich Schlegel is also of great importance in the development of the theory of Romantic irony, which occupies one of the most important places in the circle of questions characterizing the programs of the Jena school. The role of this theory in the complex of their philosophical and aesthetic ideas is determined by two main factors: its most important value for the subsequent development of romanticism and of philosophical and aesthetic thought in general, and the fact that it most vividly expresses the romantic interpretation of the personality in the universe. Schlegel emphasizes that the philosophical measles of irony is directly and directly related to Fichte’s concept.
For Fichte, the author of Science Teachings, the concept of freedom, equivalent to that ethical ideal, towards which the absolute “I” strives, realizing itself in constant action, is fundamental in his system. Just as Fichte’s absolute “I” strives for an endless realization of itself in the ethical ideal of freedom and never comes to the end of this process, so the personality of the artist in Friedrich Schlegel, being limited in its capabilities, constantly strives to reveal itself in the ideal, “to the fullness of the statement,” while realizing the impossibility of achieving this fullness. It is the awareness of this insoluble contradiction that gives rise to the so-called ironic act, which entails self-parodying, buffoonery and “genuine transcendental buffoonery” as a consciousness of one’s own powerlessness.
At the same time, an ironic act, contradictory in its essence, demonstrates not only the artist’s understanding of the insolubility of a contradiction, but also the strength of this artist, which consists in the full manifestation of the freedom of his personality, since the very awareness of the insolubility of a contradiction gives him the opportunity to rise “above all conditioned”, i.e. .e. objective, real world, which includes the personality of the artist, and his work, and the squalor of provincial philistine Germany.
Irony itself is interpreted by Friedrich Schlegel as a predominantly philosophical and aesthetic category, as a kind of play of the spirit, free from the expression of any social, civic functions of literature. Revealing his understanding of irony in works of art, Schlegel carries out an idea that is important both for this theory and for the worldview positions of the Jena Romantics in general. This is the antithesis between art and everything “conditioned”, that is, concrete, real world, real social relations.
A bright and original theorist, Friedrich Schlegel was little gifted as an artist. Of the few works of art he wrote, the story Lucinde (1799) deserves attention. It is a kind of experimental work, written according to the prescribed recipes of Romantic aesthetics, as it was presented by Friedrich Schlegel. The story affirms the Romantic ideal of an independent free individual. Moreover, this personality appears in its main modification for Romantics: the heroes of the story, Julius and Lucinde, are artists by vocation, and not by their social status, not by profession. The idea of the artist’s complete freedom is brought to the maximum expression in these characters. Julius and Lucinda live only for themselves, they are completely satisfied only with mutual communication. They have no conflicts with reality. Real life-affirming intonations play an important role in the characteristics of the heroes of the story, in its entire philosophy of being. “We live in the most beautiful of worlds” – this idea is affirmed in various versions in Lucinde. But the appeal to real life is limited in Lucinde by a very narrow framework, for the portrayal of the relationship between Julius and Lucinde outside any social context is, of course, an artificial construction.
Friedrich Schlegel’s story was a kind of gospel of a new Romantic ethics. In Lucinde there was a stormy Romantic protest against the official, philistine, generally accepted norms of morality and marriage. The free relationship of Julius and Lucinda, not sanctified either by the church or by other official institutions, was contrasted by the author with the immorality of most legal marriage unions.
To the same extent as the ethical concept of Lucinde opposed generally accepted norms, its artistic and aesthetic principles, which were demonstratively opposed to the aesthetics of classicism and the Enlightenment, were completely new and unusual – the novel completely rejects the completeness of the artistic form, logical composition and other usual formal components of prosaic storytelling.
The most gifted artist in the Jena circle, an original and profound thinker was Novalis (real name Friedrich von Hardenberg) (1772-1801), who was the most characteristic and vivid exponent of the entire aesthetic, philosophical and ideological system of the Jena Romantics. Disappointment in the French Revolution led him to idealize the institutions of the obsolete feudal system, with which he connects his idea of a perfect social order. These ideas are developed in his publicistic works – fragments of Faith and Love (1798) and the article Christianity or Europe (1799). Novalis went further than Schlegel in asserting the principle of subjectivity. He dreamed of such complete freedom and such a perfect strength of the human spirit, when the entire external world would correspond to the will of man. Consciously replacing Fichte’s absolute (philosophical) “I” with the empirical “I” of a specific individual, Novalis, in the spirit of Fichte’s subjectivism, develops his theory of “magical idealism” as an expression of faith in the unlimited creative potential of an individual. At the same time, he puts forward the concept of “romanticizing the world” – combining the real with the ideal, transcendental categories with the concepts of life practice, raising the ordinary to the transcendental.
Novalis’ aesthetics is in full accordance with his philosophical positions. He sees the meaning of poetry in prophecy, absolutizes art, taking it beyond the rational, beyond the determinism of reality. He sees the essence of Romantic poetics in “the art in a certain way to achieve attraction with mystery, to make an object mysterious and at the same time familiar and tempting.” Novalis admits the possibility of poetry, devoid of content, poetry, consisting only of “euphonious, full of beauty words, but without any meaning and connection.” True poetry, in his opinion, can only be a great allegory. “The novel should not have any purpose, it is absolute in its intrinsic value.” The spirit of poetry, according to Novalis, can only be embodied in the fabulously miraculous. He identifies the whole real world with a fairy tale.
The poet is the central figure of such a universe, only he can access the innermost secrets of existence. The poet is a chosen person, endowed with the gift of providence and true all-pervading wisdom. “A poet understands nature better than a scientist. Only an artist can comprehend the meaning of life.” The poet and the priest are combined for Novalis in one person. All these ideas are contained in the fragments of Novalis’ Flower Dust.
Novalis took a prominent place in the development of German lyrics as the author of the deeply inspired poetic cycle Hymns to the Night (1800). In it, he develops his monistic concept of being and death. The philosophical understanding of the problem of life and death has here a certain religious-church coloring and is directly linked in the fifth hymn with the myth of Christ. This poetic cycle is permeated with yearning for death-night. The author is burdened by earthly existence, strives for unity with his beloved Sophie (who had died just 15 years old) beyond the threshold of earthly existence. But the antithesis of day and night, life and death, or rather, what will happen after death, should be understood in the Hymns not at all as a denial of earthly being, but as a desire to affirm the infinity of human existence, not limited only by his earthly hypostasis.
Novalis embodied his main aesthetic ideas in the novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1800; of the two outlined parts, the second was just begun).
Novalis chose the minnesinger of the early thirteenth century as the historical prototype for his hero. The main ideas and the whole concept of the novel are revealed as an expanded aesthetic utopia, the meaning of which is concentrated in the allegorical tale of the protagonist Klingsor. Novalis projects his aesthetic utopia into Germany’s feudal past. But it would be completely wrong to believe that in the novel he idealizes the feudal Middle Ages and calls for its restoration. Germany at the beginning of the 13th century in the novel has little in common with the Germany of that time. Novalis sets his task in the novel not so much to show the picture of feudal relations in an idealized light as to create a romantic atmosphere of a poetic half-fairy idyll, which supposedly was the German Middle Ages – “a thoughtful Romantic era, concealing greatness under a modest dress”.
Novalis’ novel is far from the chaotic and fragmentary composition of Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde. Its construction is well thought out and has a harmonious logical character. Heinrich von Ofterdingen is a clear and deliberate antithesis to Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meister. Novalis opposes the philosophical and aesthetic principles of Jena romanticism to the Enlightening understanding of the tasks of art. However, the authority of Goethe as the most significant German writer of those years remained unshakable in the eyes of Novalis. Recreating the image of Goethe in the image of Klingsor, the author portrays the latter as the greatest poet. Heinrich is his student. Novalis’ novel became, in a sense, a classic work of romantic literature, because it especially clearly sounded the idea of striving for a vague and indefinite romantic ideal, symbolized in the image of the “blue flower”. This symbol, in turn, merges with the ideal lover, which Heinrich finds in Matilda, then, having lost her, finds again in her reincarnation – in Cyan. But the symbol of the “blue flower” in the novel has a much broader meaning than the association with the beloved. The ideal is not only love. This is the path of knowledge through which the hero of Novalis must go. The beloved is only a part of this ideal, only a milestone on this grandiose path of comprehending truth and beauty.
Unlike most members of the Jena community, Ludwig Tieck (1773-1853) was not well disposed to theoretical pursuits, but had a bright creative talent, which was most fully manifested precisely in the years of his “Jena” youth. Lyrics, novels, dramas, short stories are genres developed by the young writer. As the author of wonderful romantic novellas, the novel about an artist (Kuenstlerroman) The Wanderings of Franz Sternbald (1798), Tieck has retained its readers to this day. His best dramatic work, included in the gold fund of German national drama, was the comedy Puss in Boots (1797), in which the author ironically and ingeniously mocks the vulgar rationalism of Berlin’s philistine theater-goers, brought up on the models of epigone-enlightenment plays. Tieck’s comedy has become a classic. an example of the embodiment of the theory of romantic irony.
The significant changes that the stormy era of Napoleonic and anti-Napoleonic wars brought about for Germany, as well as for all of Europe, brought new features to the character of German romanticism. Along with the further development of the romantic tradition inherent in the activities of the Jena romantics, the anti-Napoleonic liberation struggle of 1806-1813 played an important role here. Theoretical searches, philosophical and aesthetic problems, which so saturated the searches of the early romantics, are now receding into the background. Late romanticism enters the stage of more concrete artistic thinking, reflecting at the same time the general tendency of romanticism to embrace the objective phenomena of reality. One of the central accents is the national German tradition associated with the patriotic rise of the national self-consciousness of the German people in the struggle against foreign occupation. It was the late Romantics who enriched the German national culture, drawing from the treasury of national legends, tales and songs. Based on folk song tradition, German lyric poetry experiences a complete renewal and extraordinary flourishing in the works of Brentano, Müller, Eichendorf, Heine, Uhland, Chamisso. The tradition of German novelism, which goes back to the works of the early Tieck, is brilliantly developed in creativity.
At the same time, national orientation often entailed nationalist tendencies, idealization of feudal vestiges, the idea of a peculiar feudal-patriarchal nationality.
The late romantics Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim formed the nucleus of what became known as the Heidelberg Romantics. The brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, and Joseph von Eichendorf were close to them.
Clemens Brentano (1778-1842) wrote a bright page in the history of German Romanticism. It is noteworthy that, being a passionate adherent of the early romantics and being in close personal contacts with them, Brentano, as an artist, left the bosom of Jena Romanticism, but laid new qualities in the further development of this trend. Thus, in his novel Godwi (1801), the influence of the romantics of the Jena school is clearly perceptible, and at the same time the beginning of a new modification of the German Romantic novel is already opening here, which in the Heidelberg romantics is noticeably closer to objective reality.
Even more significant was Brentano’s contribution to the development of German lyric poetry. His merit in this area lies in the fact that, picking up the undertakings of the Sturmers, he enriched German poetry with elements of folklore. The Romantic reform of German verse, which was initiated by Brentano, of course, largely deprived German lyrics of the breadth of social content, aimed at philosophical saturation (over time, these losses will be made up for in Heine’s romantic poetry). But in return, German poetry will become simpler, more democratic, more accessible to a wide range of readers, and its national orientation will increase.
In many aspects of his lyrics, Brentano is a typically Romantic poet. In particular, he is exclusively subjective, his poems are deeply personal in nature, which is felt sometimes even where an objectively narrative folk ballad beginning gets a strong sound. It is no coincidence that almost all of his early lyrics are love lyrics. But as social relations are disharmonious, so is love devoid of harmony. Together with joy, she inevitably carries in herself suffering, the caresses of the beloved are changeable and fickle. In a number of Brentano’s love poems, an irrational interpretation of love arises.
As in his poetic vision of the world, Brentano departs more and more from the Jena Romantics, he seeks to more actively saturate his lyrics with folk motives, increasingly uses the techniques of national German folklore. Among the poems of Brentano, written in the folk tradition, one should especially note Lorelei – a song that the main character Violetta sings at the end of the novel Godwi. Having no direct source in folk poetry, being completely the fruit of Brentano’s fantasy, this song nevertheless gave rise to an independent romantic legend that organically fits into the national German culture. Becoming a kind of symbol of Romantic lyrics, Brentano’s Lorelei even created a certain poetic tradition in German romanticism, but the basis of which arose the poetic masterpiece of European romanticism: the immortal Lorelei by Heine.
Brentano’s influence on the subsequent development of Romantic lyrics in Germany is associated not only with his personal creative activity as a poet, but also with the collection of German folk songs, to which, together with his friend Arnim, he devoted much effort. The collection of folk poems, songs and ballads The Boy’s Magic Horn (1806-1808) includes materials related to the 16th-18th centuries, including, in addition to direct sources, some poems by a number of famous German poets of that time, and a number of original poems by Brentano himself.
Not being the fruit of strictly scientific folkloristic studies, The Boy’s Magic Horn achieved its main goal: it gave the reader a broad understanding of the high aesthetic merits of the social consciousness of the German people. And this was done at a time when the question of national unity was for Germany one of the most pressing socio-political issues.
However, traces of a certain bias in the selection of the songs of The Magic Horn are quite palpable. In the collection, the spirit of anti-feudal protest is completely muffled, only in very few songs can you find such intonations. On the contrary, the compilers assert feudal morality and legitimacy: anyone who dares to protest against those in power will face a cruel punishment. When you get acquainted with the collection, the abundance of spiritual songs is clearly striking. Songs for soldiers, songs with a military theme compete in their number with spiritual songs, which to some extent reflected both the nature of the historical position of Germany in those periods and, at the same time, its modern military-political situation. This is especially true of military songs, in which patriotic intonations are clearly heard (Song of the Battle). However, other war songs idealize outright military robbery (Old Landsknecht).
At the beginning of their career, the brothers Grimm, Jacob (1785-1863) and Wilhelm (1786-1859) were close to the Heidelberg romantics, who made a major contribution to the development of German philological science and folklore. The fruit of their folkloristic research was the collection Children’s and Family Tales in three volumes, published in 1822.
The bright and deeply dramatic talent of Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811) demonstrates the profound transformation of German Romanticism.
Coming from a poor noble family of a hereditary Prussian officer, at 22, Kleist boldly breaks with family traditions, forever parting with the officer’s uniform. He becomes an eternal homeless wanderer, often for no apparent reason changing his occupation and temporary refuge, nowhere finding a place for himself. And always and everywhere – a bright creative burning and an ambitious dream “to pluck the laurel crown from Goethe’s brow.” But instead – just a chain of bitter disappointments. Having achieved neither fame nor material well-being, dreaming only that each written work would provide him with the most modest opportunities to work on the next one, having met, in his sincere and deep patriotism, only cold hostility from King Frederick William III and his court, Kleist decides on suicide, the thought of which had occurred to him more than once before.
The most striking accomplishments of the creative spirit of Kleist relate to drama and short stories.
His time, associated with the replacement of crumbling feudal foundations with new bourgeois-capitalist social relations, Kleist perceived as an era of collision of irrational forces beyond the control of human will and reason. He considers the absurd misunderstandings and everyday conflicts in his private life to be a manifestation of the fatal nonsense that prevails in the world. Hence the dominant idea of some of his dramas is the idea of fate. It was in this spirit that Kleist’s dramatic first-born, The Stroffenstein Family (1803), a kind of classic example of “tragedy of fate”, was written.
The breadth of Kleist’s creative range and at the same time the complexity of his creative method manifested itself, in particular, in the fact that two comedies, The Broken Jug (1805) and Amphitrion (1807) are adjacent to his experiments in the field of romantic drama, the first of which is included among the masterpieces of German classical drama and to this day has been successfully staged on the stages of German theaters. It can hardly be assumed that Kleist set out to show the social contrasts of the German countryside in this comedy. But it must be admitted that the characters in the play are clearly divided into two groups according to social criteria: judges and peasants. Moreover, the entire group of the latter is outlined with the author’s undubted sympathy.
A keen perception of the contradictory German reality, as it were, switches Kleist into a completely different moral and psychological atmosphere, so opposite to the elements of cheerful laughter in The Broken Jug and Amphitryon: he abandons the enlightened and pure, harmonious in its integrity and morality, image of the female images of Eve and Alcmene, and creates, perhaps, the most controversial of his works, the drama Penthesilea (1808), in which he uses one of the versions of the ancient myth about the queen of the Amazons who took part in the Trojan War on the side of the Trojans, as is mentioned in the Iliad. The clash of violent passions underlying the drama is given not only to the highest degree of tension, which is in itself generally characteristic of romanticism, but also in such a qualitative expression that is inherent in Kleist. The hypertrophy of romantic passion gets a manifestation that goes beyond the norm.
The Jena catastrophe of 1806 caused a sharp change in public attitudes and creative orientation of Kleist. Previously, he considered himself, in the traditions of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, a citizen of the world, sought to abandon any socio-political topicality, directed his searches into the sphere of pure science, into the area of Rousseauist denial of modern civilization, as an artist gravitated towards abstract moral and ethical problems (The Stroffenstein Family, to a large extent The Broken Jug, The Marquise of O), to the fabulous mythological plots of Amphitryon and Penthesileia. Now the poet feels inextricably linked with the fate of his homeland, experiences its humiliation hard, becomes a hater of the French occupiers, a Prussian-German patriot, whose patriotism sometimes borders on chauvinistic hatred of the French. This tendency towards French-eating is very noticeable in the drama The Battle of Hermann (published 1821). National-German problems in drama, short stories and lyrics express the general ideological orientation of his artistic work. It is no accident that now Kleist pays great attention to journalism. These new tendencies bring him closer to late German Romanticism. In this regard, the periodization of the writer’s creative path is quite clearly defined. The first period (approximately) lasts from 1801 to 1807, the second from 1808 to 1811.
The Romantic idea of all-consuming passion received a different embodiment in the drama Kaethchen of Heilbronn (1810), a work more significant than Penthesilea both in the coverage of the phenomena of reality and in the degree of artistic completeness. The German Middle Ages is an organic ideological and artistic component in this drama, in contrast to the role of a purely conditional props, which does not contribute anything to the disclosure of national problems, which is assigned to it in Kleist’s creative firstborn The Stroffenstein Family. The spirit of the times and the leading ideological and aesthetic tendencies of late romanticism were reflected here in the writer’s appeal to the traditions of national folklore. The plot basis of the drama is gleaned by the author in the motive of the true and false bride, widespread in the fairy tales of different peoples, which existed in the German fairy-tale and folklore heritage. Kleist embodies this motif in the genre of “knightly drama”, as evidenced by the subtitle: “A great historical performance from the times of knights.” This genre had a rich tradition in German literature, born more than thirty years earlier by Goethe’s drama Goetz von Berlichingen and developed in its own way by the later romantics. Following some principles of their worldview and aesthetics, and to some extent paying tribute to fashionable literary tastes, Kleist introduces a mystical element into the development of a folklore motif, which is of no small importance both for the plot of the drama and for the image of the main character.
Kleist embodied in Kaethchen his ideal of a woman, infinitely devoted to a man, but deliberately shifted the emphasis in her characterization. Annoyed by the slavish obsession of the girl who follows him everywhere, sleeping with his horses, the count kicks her, prostrating at his feet like a dog, which does not make the mystically obsessed Kaethchen less devoted to the count. The author, perhaps, was aware of the incompatibility of this scene with the real plan of the narrative. If Penthesileia, which manifests itself completely incongruous with the logic of the female character, was placed by Kleist in the atmosphere of myth, so his Kaethchen is shown in a widely represented fairy-tale frame. It is no coincidence that her antipode Kunigunde is a character already completely constructed according to the canons of a fairy tale.
In the socio-critical tendency of the drama, Kleist clearly gravitates towards a realistic manner, not always organically and consistently combining it with the Romantic basis of the conflict and the central image.
In the drama The Battle of Hermann, Kleist, carefully recreating the historical and national flavor, successfully drawing signs of the way of life and customs of the ancient Germanic tribes, creates a poignant political pamphlet in a dramatic form that raises pressing issues of our time. The legions of the Roman emperor Augustus occupying German lands are associated with the Napoleonic army conquering modern Germany.
Singing in this drama the patriotic feat of the leader of the Cherusci, Hermann (Arminius), who, thanks to the alliance with Marbod, completely defeated the Roman legions of Varus in the Teutoburg Forest, Kleist at the same time, in the image of Hermann, painted the ideal figure of that Prussian monarch who, sacrificing all his personal property, would lead to a decisive struggle against Napoleon of other German princes. The Prussian king Frederick Wilhelm III was, as is known, very far from this ideal. In the fight against the enslavers, the author justifies any means – deception, betrayal, provocation, murder of the defenseless. This can also explain the presence in the play of naturalistic scenes of the cruel, inhuman massacre of the Romans by the Cherusci.
German history also draws the plot of Kleist’s last drama Prince Friedrich of Homburg (published 1821), a talented and brilliant work that had considerable stage success after the death of the author and appears in modern theatrical repertoires.
The drama Prince Friedrich of Homburg, similar in its ideological sound to The Battle of Hermann, arose in the same political atmosphere of the defeats of Austria and Prussia, passionately and persistently expressing the author’s hope for an active struggle for national liberation. If in the first drama this hope is associated with a nationwide unification of Germans under the leadership of one leader, then in Prince Friedrich of Homburg the main political idea is concentrated in the image of an ideal monarch. Kleist belonged to those who were in Germany both before the defeat of Jena and after him expected active military and political actions from Frederick William III. Hence the writer’s sharply critical attitude to the Prussian king, which was already preceded by his Rousseauist denial of noble privileges, rejection of the modern Prussian military and state apparatus.
However, it would be a mistake to interpret this work only as an expression of a certain political idea through artistic means. In this sense, with all its topical tendentiousness, Prince Friedrich of Homburg is still less a purely propaganda play than The Battle of Hermann. Kleist significantly deepens the psychological motivation of the image of the main character here, a whole group of main characters is more subtly and versatile individualized, the dramatic collision of the play is developed more thoroughly and deeper.
Prince Friedrich of Homburg by its aesthetic nature, by the nature of the ideological and artistic embodiment of the main conflict, is a romantic drama, reproducing the characteristic romantic antithesis of the hero and society. The young prince is a further development of the Kleistian romantic character, various aspects of which were already embodied by the writer in the images of Penthesilea, Alcmene and Kaethchen. Just like these characters, who are guided in their actions by the dictates of passion, of their heart and, by virtue of this, come into conflict with generally accepted norms, the Prince of Homburg is, as it were, immersed in the inner world of his soul. Despite the warning of his subordinates, the prince during the battle violates the disposition and thereby the will of the Elector, placing himself, his desire, his impulse over them. And the author fully justifies his hero, because, in his opinion, it is precisely this self-will that leads him to victory. True, trying not to make a rebel out of his hero, Kleist admits a completely different interpretation of the prince’s act. Like Kaethchen, he is prone to somnambulistic trance. And at the time when the disposition is dictated, he almost does not hear it, being immersed in the memories of a sweet dream, of glory and his beloved, of whom he dreamed in this trance.
Moreover, painting the image of an ideal monarch and, in accordance with this, confronting the prince and the elector in conflict, Kleist in every possible way avoids belittling the latter. The character of the prince is carefully developed in the drama, given in evolution (Kleist takes him through a deep crisis) and in sharp moral and psychological contradictions.
The antipode of the prince elector is also revealed in the evolution of his character. If not with a predetermined author’s intention, then at least objectively this image sounded like an instructive example to Frederick William III. Kleist’s “Great Elector” not only bravely and energetically leads the armed struggle for national independence and further strengthening of his state, but also, being fully autocratic ruler, he listens to the advice of his assistants, is able to deviate from the letter of the law, if necessary for the good of the homeland. He revokes the death sentence of the prince and solemnly awards him, awaiting execution, with a laurel wreath of the winner with a gold chain. The call to arms on the battlefield, to the destruction of all enemies of Brandenburg is the final powerful and acutely relevant chord of the drama for the then historical conditions (in the Russian translation of Boris Pasternak, the finale is weakened by the removal of this last call).
Despite the fact that Kleist’s creative talent was most clearly manifested in drama, his short stories made a significant contribution to the development of this genre in German literature.
Not all short stories (Kleist has eight of them) are equal in their artistic merit. Among them there are those that are insignificant both in the nature of the plot and in the depth of its development (The Beggar from Locarno), with an unnecessarily complicated, intricate plot (The Duel). In these and some other novellas, irrational factors, the element of the miraculous, play a significant, and sometimes a decisive role in the development of the action (Saint Cecilia, or the Power of Music). The action of most of Kleist’s short stories, as a rule, takes place outside Germany and in a more or less distant past, starting with the Middle Ages. The events described in the short story The Marquise of O are attributed to the end of the 18th century, and in the short story Betrothal in Santo Domingo to the beginning of the 19th century. In this regard, it should be noted that in his short stories, Kleist, in the spirit of romantic aesthetics, pays significant attention to historical themes. At the same time, as in traditional German romanticism, he is not attracted here either by a large-scale historical background, or significant events or social conflicts of the past. Social problems almost everywhere play a purely peripheral role and are not for Kleist the main task of artistic embodiment. Moral and ethical conflicts, the struggle between good and evil, the clash of the Rousseauian ideal of natural human relations, passions with social conventions – the development of these themes is devoted to both short stories and many of Kleist’s dramas.
One of the masterpieces of Kleist’s work and of all German prose in the genre of the novella is his story Michael Kohlhaas. The philosophical and ethical issues underlying all of Kleist’s work are also developed in this story, which interprets the idea of duty and justice. And although this philosophical and ethical concept plays an essential role here, it is relegated to the background, giving way to its widespread social embodiment.
As in the Romantic dramas of the writer (Kaethchen, Amphitryon, Penthesileia, Prince Friedrich of Homburg), the hero of the novel Michael Kohlhaas is a modification of the Kleistian romantic character, constructed and revealed again according to the Rousseauian principle, the essence of which is collision of natural human impulses with social conventions. The initial possibility, rather even the inevitability of this conflict is laid down in the very first paragraph of the novel, which gives a brief description of the moral character of Kohlhaas. From it we learn that he is an honest and God-fearing worker who loves his home and family, who is always ready to help his neighbor, a model of a loyal subject. And further, in the course of events, Kohlhaas is revealed as a person whose spiritual appearance is determined by one dominant passion – a highly developed sense of justice that determines all his actions.
The main character and conflict, conceived as Romantic, in this story, like in no other work of Kleist, receive such a deep social and concrete-historical determinism that the whole work is perceived as a whole as realistic, despite the romantic, irrational and mysterious story with a gypsy woman. into which the wife of Kohlhaas Liesbeth, killed by the landsknecht, is reincarnated. The idea of romantic passion, revealed in conflict, is realized in the story as a consistent and uncompromising struggle of a representative of the third estate for his rights against his social antagonists, the feudal nobility. When Kohlhaas exhausts all legal means to achieve justice, he enters into an open armed conflict with his opponents, becoming for some time the leader and banner for the oppressed. And it is not so important that the author himself not only does not share, but condemns these methods. It can be considered that Martin Luther is the mouthpiece of the author’s positions on this issue in the story (an episodic figure, outlined rather schematically). Kleist, with the objective sound of the story, was able to show, albeit in a relatively narrow historical aspect, the irreconcilable acuteness of class contradictions at a certain stage in the historical development of Germany. In this connection, the role of Kleistian historicism is especially strengthened. With the very first phrase of the story, he precisely defines the place and time of its action: “On the banks of the Havel in the middle of the sixteenth century lived a horse dealer Michael Kohlhaas.”
The main characters are clearly divided into social groups: the feudal chivalry with their minions and the third estate. And there is no need to guess at whose side the author’s sympathies are.
Michael Kohlhaas is the only one of all Kleist’s works that, in terms of its political relevance, echoes his later dramas. It is with this aspect in mind that its finale and some of the political nuances of the story, already veiled for the current reader, but well understood by the writer’s contemporaries, are fully revealed. This is primarily the antithesis of Brandenburg and Saxony, consistently passing through the entire story. The Brandenburg resident Kohlhaas is deprived of his legal rights in Saxony, where he cannot find justice. Although the court environment of the Brandenburg Elector is portrayed in a negative light, the latter helps the hero to achieve the truth. And although Kohlhaas is executed according to the Brandenburg legal regulations for the lawlessness committed by him on Saxon land, his claim against the Junker Tronk is fully satisfied, the offender is punished to the fullest extent of the law, and the sons of the executed Elector of Brandenburg are knighted. It is he who is the supreme bearer of justice, which Kohlhaas fully recognizes. So retrospectively, in the development of a historical plot from the 16th century, Kleist testified to his political condemnation of Napoleon’s ally of Saxony and exalted in Brandenburg the contemporary Prussia, in which he wanted to see the main force in the fight against foreign occupation.
Among the writers of late German romanticism, one of the most prominent figures was Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann (1776-1822). Hoffmann is a European writer whose work outside his homeland has received a particularly wide response in Russia.
He was born into the family of a Prussian royal counsel. From his youthful years, a rich creative talent awakens in Hoffmann. He reveals considerable talent as a painter. But his main passion, to which he remains faithful throughout his life, is music. Playing many instruments, he thoroughly studied the theory of composition and became not only a talented performer, conductor, but also the author of a number of musical works.
Despite his varied interests in the field of art, at the university, Hoffmann was forced for practical reasons to study law and choose a profession that is traditional in his family. He studies law diligently and with great success. After becoming an official in the legal department, he displays outstanding professional training, earning a reputation as an executive and capable lawyer.
After graduating from the university in 1798, the agonizing years of service as an official of the judicial department in various cities of Prussia began, years filled with a passionate dream to devote oneself to art and the painful consciousness of the impossibility of realizing this dream.
In 1806, after the defeat of Prussia, Hoffmann lost his job, and with it, his livelihood. After Berlin, Bamberg, Leipzig, Dresden are the milestones of the thorny path along which, accompanied by various everyday misfortunes and rare glimpses of luck, Hoffmann walked, working as a theater conductor, decorator, teacher of singing and playing the piano.
And only in 1814, when Napoleon was expelled from Germany, for Hoffmann the years of joyless wanderings come to an end. His hopes of getting a well-paid position in Berlin, in which he could apply his knowledge and talent in the field of music or painting, did not come true. The desperate financial situation forces him to accept the position procured by his close friend Hippel in the Ministry of Justice in the Prussian capital, which for Hoffmann was tantamount to, as he himself wrote about it, “returning to prison.” He fulfills his official duties, however, flawlessly and in 1818 he was appointed to a responsible post. But not success in the service, but the lively artistic and literary life of Berlin is primarily of interest to Hoffmann. In literary and musical Berlin, Hoffmann is a recognized figure.
At this time, changes are taking place in his social positions. In connection with the revival of the opposition movement, mainly among students, Hoffmann in 1820 was appointed a member of the commission to investigate political crimes. While very skeptical and mocking at the nationalist student unions, Hoffmann, however, as a lawyer and as a citizen is imbued with the spirit of those new advanced norms of bourgeois law and political ideas brought to Prussia from across the Rhine, which, overcoming the stubborn resistance of the old social and legal institutions, little by little suppressed police arbitrariness and limited personal royal interference in judicial procedures and court decisions. Being extremely dissatisfied with his new appointment, with which he associated “disgusting arbitrariness, cynical disrespect for all laws”, the writer demonstrated considerable civic courage by openly protesting in his appeals to the Minister of Justice against the lawlessness imposed by the commission. And his persistent demarches were not unsuccessful. But when it became known that in his fantastic novel Lord of the Fleas under the name of a certain crook Knarrpanti, Hoffmann ridiculed the chairman of the Kamptz commission, a prosecution was instituted against him under the obviously far-fetched pretext of divulging judicial secrets, which threatened the suspect with heavy punishment. And only agitated public opinion and active efforts of friends helped to terminate the case against the writer on condition that he removed a criminal place from the novel. Meanwhile, a rapidly developing serious illness – progressive paralysis – made it impossible for him to move independently. Hoffmann died on January 25, 1822.
Having entered literature at a time when the Jena and Heidelberg Romantics had already formulated and developed the basic principles of German romanticism, Hoffmann was a romantic artist. The nature of the conflicts underlying his works, their problems and the system of images, the very artistic vision of the world remain with him within the framework of romanticism. Like the Jena Romantics, the majority of Hoffmann’s works are based on the artist’s conflict with society. The original romantic antithesis of the artist and society is at the heart of the writer’s worldview. Following the Jena school, Hoffmann considers the creative personality to be the highest embodiment of the human “I” – an artist, an “enthusiast”, in his terminology, who has access to the world of art, the world of fairy-tale fantasy, those only spheres,where he can fully realize himself and find refuge from the real philistine everyday life.
But the embodiment and resolution of the Romantic conflict in Hoffmann is different from that of the early romantics. Through the denial of reality, through the artist’s conflict with it, the Jena Romantics rose to the highest level of their perception of the world – aesthetic monism, when the whole world became for them a sphere of poetic utopia, a fairy tale, a sphere of harmony in which the artist comprehends himself and the Universe. The romantic hero of Hoffmann lives in the real world (starting with the gentleman Gluck and ending with Kreisler). For all his attempts to break out of it into the world of art, into the fantastic fairy kingdom of Jinnistan, he remains surrounded by real concrete historical reality. Neither a fairy tale nor art can bring him harmony to this real world, which ultimately subjugates them. Hence the constant tragic contradiction between the hero and his ideals, on the one hand, and reality on the other. Hence the dualism, from which Hoffmann’s heroes suffer, the dualism in his works, the insolubility of the conflict between the hero and the outside world in most of them, the characteristic two-dimensional nature of the writer’s creative manner.
One of the essential components of Hoffmann’s poetics, like that of the early Romantics, is irony. Moreover, in Hoffmann’s irony as a creative device, which is based on a certain philosophical, aesthetic, worldview position, we can clearly distinguish two main functions. In one of them, he appears as a direct follower of the Jena Romantics. We are talking about those of his works in which purely aesthetic problems are solved and where the role of romantic irony is close to that which it plays among the Jena romantics. The romantic irony in these works of Hoffmann gets a satirical sound, but this satire has no social orientation. An example of the manifestation of such a function of irony is the short story Princess Brambilla, brilliant in its artistic performance and typically Hoffmannian in demonstration of the two-dimensional nature of his creative method. Following the Jena school, the author of the novel Princess Brambilla believes that irony should express “a philosophical view of life,” that is, be the basis of a person’s attitude to life. In accordance with this, like the Jena Romantics, irony is a means of resolving all conflicts and contradictions, a means of overcoming the “chronic dualism” from which the protagonist of this novel, actor Giglio Fava, suffers.
In line with this basic tendency, another and more essential function of his irony is revealed. If among the Jena Romantics, irony as an expression of a universal attitude towards the world became at the same time an expression of skepticism and refusal to resolve the contradictions of reality, then Hoffmann saturates irony with a tragic sound, for him it contains a combination of the tragic and the comic. The main bearer of Hoffmann’s ironic attitude to life is Kreisler, whose “chronic dualism” is tragic, in contrast to the comical “chronic dualism” of Giglio Fava. The satirical beginning of Hoffmann’s irony in this function has a specific social address, significant social content, and therefore this function of romantic irony allows him, a romantic writer, to reflect some typical phenomena of reality (The Golden Pot, Little Zaches, The Life and Views of the Cat Murr are works that most characteristically reflect this function of Hoffmann’s irony).
Hoffmann’s creative individuality in many characteristic features is already determined in his first book Fantasies in the manner of Callot, which included works written from 1808 to 1814. The novella Cavalier Gluck (1808), the first of Hoffmann’s published works, outlines the most essential aspects of his worldview and creative manner. The novel develops one of the main, if not the main idea of the writer’s work – the insolubility of the conflict between the artist and society. This idea is revealed through the artistic device that will dominate in all subsequent work of the writer – the two-dimensional narrative.
The subtitle of the short story Remembrance of 1809 has a very clear purpose in this regard. He reminds the reader that the image of the famous composer Gluck, the main and, in fact, the only hero of the story, is fantastic, unreal, because Gluck died long before the date indicated in the subtitle, in 1787. And at the same time, this strange and mysterious old man is placed in the setting real Berlin, in the description of which one can catch specific historical signs of the continental blockade: the disputes of the inhabitants about the war, carrot coffee steaming on the tables of the cafe.
For Hoffmann, all people are divided into two groups: artists in the broadest sense, people who are poetically gifted, and people who are absolutely devoid of poetic perception of the world. “I, as the supreme judge,” says the author’s alter ego Kreisler, “divided the entire human race into two unequal parts: one consists only of good people, but bad or non-musicians at all, while the other consists of true musicians.” The worst representatives of the category of “non-musicians” Hoffmann sees in the philistines.
And this opposition of the artist to the philistines is especially widely revealed by the example of the image of the musician and composer Johann Kreisler. The mythical unreal Gluck is replaced by the very real Kreisler, a contemporary of Hoffmann, an artist who, unlike most of the same type of heroes of the early romantics, lives not in a world of poetic dreams, but in a real provincial philistine Germany and wanders from city to city, from one princely court to another, driven by no means a Romantic yearning for the endless, not in search of a blue flower, but in search of the most prosaic daily bread.
As a Romantic artist, Hoffmann considers music to be the highest, the most romantic kind of art, “since it has only the infinite as its subject; the mysterious proto-language of nature expressed in sounds, filling the human soul with endless longing; only thanks to her ... man comprehends the song of songs of trees, flowers, animals, stones and waters.” Therefore, Hoffmann makes the musician Kreisler his main positive hero.
Hoffmann sees the highest embodiment of art in music primarily because music can be least of all connected with life, with real reality. As a true romantic, revising the aesthetics of the Enlightenment, he rejects one of its main provisions – about the civil, social purpose of art: “...art allows a person to feel his higher purpose and from the vulgar vanity of everyday life leads him to the temple of Isis, where nature speaks to him in sublime, never heard, but nevertheless understandable sounds.”
For Hoffmann, the superiority of the poetic world over the world of real everyday life is beyond doubt. And he sings this world of a fairytale dream, giving it preference over the real, prosaic world.
But Hoffmann would not have been an artist with such a contradictory and in many respects tragic outlook if this kind of fabulous story determined the general direction of his work, and did not demonstrate only one of its sides. Basically, however, the writer’s artistic perception of the world by no means proclaims the complete victory of the poetic world over the real. Only madmen like Serapion or philistines believe in the existence of only one of these worlds. This principle of a double world is reflected in a number of Hoffmann’s works, perhaps the most striking in their artistic quality and most fully embodying the contradictions of his worldview. First of all, such is the fairy tale The Golden Pot (1814), the title of which is accompanied by the eloquent subtitle A Tale from New Times. The meaning of this subheading isthat the characters in this tale are Hoffmann’s contemporaries, and the action takes place in real Dresden at the beginning of the 19th century. This is how Hoffmann re-interprets the Jena tradition of the fairy tale genre – in its ideological and artistic structure the writer includes the plan of real everyday life. The hero of the novel, student Anselm, is an eccentric loser, endowed with a “naive poetic soul,” and this makes the world of the fabulous and wonderful available to him. Faced with it, Anselm begins to lead a dual existence, getting from his prosaic existence into the kingdom of a fairy tale, adjacent to ordinary real life. In accordance with this, the story is also compositionally built on the interweaving and interpenetration of a fantastic plan with the real one. Romantic fairy tale fantasy in its subtle poetry and grace finds here in Hoffmann one of its best exponents. At the same time, the real plan is clearly outlined in the short story. Not without reason, some researchers of Hoffmann believed that this novel could be used to successfully reconstruct the topography of the streets of Dresden at the beginning of the last century. Realistic detail plays a significant role in characterizing the characters.
A wide and brightly developed fairy tale plan with many bizarre episodes, so unexpectedly and seemingly randomly intruding into the story of real everyday life, is subordinated to the clear, logical ideological and artistic structure of the novel, in contrast to the deliberate fragmentariness and inconsistency in the narrative manner of most early romantics. The duality of the creative method of Hoffmann, the duality in his perception of the world was reflected in the opposition of the real and the fantastic and in the corresponding division of characters into two groups. Conrector Paulman, his daughter Veronica, registrar Geerbrand are prosaic-minded inhabitants of Dresden who, according to the author’s own terminology, can be classified as good people, devoid of any poetic flair. They are opposed by the archivist Lindhorst with his daughter Serpentine, who came to this philistine world from a fantastic fairy tale, and the dear eccentric Anselm, whose poetic soul opened the fabulous world of the archivist.
In the happy ending of the novel, which ends with two weddings, she receives a full interpretation of her ideological plan. The registrar Geerbrand becomes the court counselor, to whom Veronica gives her hand without hesitation, having renounced her passion for Anselm. Her dream is coming true, “she lives in a beautiful house on the New Market”, she has “a new-style hat, a new Turkish shawl,” and, having breakfast in an elegant negligee by the window, she gives orders to the servants. Anselm marries Serpentine and, becoming a poet, settles with her in the fabulous Atlantis. At the same time, he receives as a dowry “a pretty estate” and a gold pot, which he saw in the archivist’s house. The golden pot, this kind of ironic transformation of Novalis’ blue flower, retains the original function of this romantic symbol. It can hardly be consideredthat the end of the Anselm-Serpentine storyline is a parallel to the philistine ideal embodied in the union of Veronica and Geerbrand, and the golden pot is a symbol of philistine happiness. After all, Anselm does not abandon his poetic dream, he only finds its fulfillment.
The philosophical idea of the short story about the embodiment, the kingdom of poetic fiction in the world of art, in the world of poetry, is affirmed in the last paragraph of the novel. Its author, suffering from the thought that he has to leave the fabulous Atlantis and return to the miserable squalor of his attic, hears Lindhorst’s encouraging words: “Haven’t you yourself just been to Atlantis and do not you own there at least a decent manor as a poetic property? your mind Isn’t the bliss of Anselm nothing more than life in poetry, which reveals the sacred harmony of all things as the deepest of the secrets of nature!”
Not always, however, Hoffmann’s fiction has such a bright and joyful flavor as in the novel under review or in the fairy tales The Nutcracker and the Mouse King (1816), Alien Child (1817), Lord of the Fleas (1820), Princess Brambilla (1821). The writer created works that are very different in their attitude to the world and in the artistic means used in them. Gloomy nightmarish fantasy, reflecting one of the sides of the writer’s worldview, dominates in the novel Elixir of the Devil (1815-1816) and in Night Tales. Most of the Night Tales, such as The Sandman, Mayorat, Mademoiselle de Scuderi, which, unlike the novel Elixir of the Devil, are not burdened with religious and moral problems, compare with it in artistic relation, perhaps, primarily becausethat they do not have such a deliberate whipping up of a complex plot intrigue.
The collection of short stories The Serapion Brothers, four volumes of which appeared in print in 1819-1821, contains works of unequal artistic level. There are purely entertaining, plot stories (Signor Formica, The Interdependence of Events, Visions, Doge and Dogaress, etc.), banal edifying (The Player’s Happiness). Nevertheless, the value of this collection is determined by such stories as The Royal Bride, The Nutcracker, Artus’ Hall, Falun Mines, Mademoiselle de Scuderi, which testified to the progressive development of the writer’s talent and contained in itself, with high perfection of artistic forms significant philosophical ideas.
The name of the hermit Serapion, a Catholic saint, calls itself a small circle of interlocutors who periodically organize literary evenings, where they read their stories to each other, from which the collection is compiled. Sharing subjective positions on the issue of the relationship between the artist and reality, Hoffmann, however, through the lips of one of the members of the Serapion Brotherhood, declares the absolute denial of reality to be illegal, arguing that our earthly existence is determined by both the inner and the outer world. Far from rejecting the need for the artist to turn to what he himself saw in reality, the author resolutely insists that the fictional world be depicted as clearly and clearly as if it appeared before the artist’s eyes as the real world. This principle of the likelihood of the imaginary and the fantastic is consistently implemented by Hoffmann in those stories of the collection, the plots of which are drawn by the author not from his own observations, but from the works of painting.
“Serapion’s principle” is also interpreted in the sense that the artist must isolate himself from the social life of our time and serve only art. The latter, in turn, is a self-sufficient world, rising above life, standing aloof from political struggle. With the undoubted fruitfulness of this aesthetic thesis for many of Hoffmann’s works, one cannot but emphasize that his work itself, in certain of its strengths, did not always fully correspond to these aesthetic principles, as evidenced by a number of his works of the last years of his life, in particular the fairy tale “Little Zaches, nicknamed Zinnober” (1819), noted by the attention of Karl Marx. By the end of the 1810s, new significant tendencies were outlined in the writer’s work, expressed in the strengthening of social satire in his works, an appeal to the phenomena of modern social and political life (Little Zaches. The Life and Views of the Cat Murr), from which he continues in principle fenced off in their aesthetic declarations, as we saw in the example of the Serapion brothers. At the same time, one can state more definite exits of the writer in his creative method to realism (Master Martin the Bochard and his apprentices, 1817; Master Johannes Wacht, 1822; Corner Window, 1822). At the same time, it would hardly be correct to raise the question of a new period in the work of Hoffmann, for simultaneously with social satirical works in accordance with his previous aesthetic positions, he writes a number of short stories and fairy tales that are far from social trends (Princess Brambilla, 1821; Marquise de La Pivardier, 1822; Errors, 1822). If we talk about the writer’s creative method, it should be noted that, despite the significant gravitation in the above-mentioned works towards a realistic manner, Hoffmann continues to create in a characteristically romantic way in the last years of his work (Little Zaches, Princess Brambilla, Royal bride from the Serapion cycle; the romantic plan clearly prevails in the novel about Cat Murr).
Vissarion Belinsky highly appreciated Hoffmann’s satirical talent, noting that he was able to “portray reality in all its truth and to castigate the philistinism ... of his compatriots with poisonous sarcasm.”
These observations of the remarkable Russian critic can be fully attributed to the fairy tale Little Zaches. In the new fairy tale, Hoffmann’s double world is fully preserved in the perception of reality, which is again reflected in the two-dimensional composition of the novel, in the characters of the characters and in their arrangement. Many of the main characters in the tale-novella Little Zaches have their literary prototypes in the short story The Golden Pot: student Baltazar – Anselm, Prosper Alpanus – Lindhorst, Candida – Veronica.
The two-dimensional nature of the novel is revealed in the opposition of the world of poetic dreams, the fabulous country of Jinnistan, the world of real everyday life, that principality of Prince Barsanuf, in which the novel takes place. Some characters and things lead a dual existence here, since they combine their fabulous magical existence with existence in the real world. Fairy Rosabelverde, she is the canoness of the shelter for noble maidens Rosenschen, patronizes the disgusting little Zaches, rewarding him with three magical golden hairs.
In the same dual capacity as the fairy Rosabelverde, she is the Canoness Rosenschen, the good wizard Alpanus also appears, surrounding himself with various fabulous wonders, which the poet and dreamer student Baltazar sees well. In his everyday incarnation, only accessible to philistines and sober rationalists, Alpanus is just a doctor, inclined, however, to very intricate quirks.
The artistic plans of the novels being compared are compatible, if not completely, then very closely. In their ideological sound, for all their similarity, the novellas are quite different. If in the fairy tale The Golden Pot, which ridicules the worldview of philistinism, satire has a moral and ethical character, then in Little Zaches it becomes sharper and gets a social sound. It is no coincidence that Belinsky noted that this short story was banned by the tsarist censorship for the reason that it contained “a lot of mockery of the stars and officials.”
It is in connection with the expansion of the address of satire, with its strengthening in the novel, that one significant moment in its artistic structure changes – the main character becomes not a positive hero, a characteristic Hoffmannian eccentric, a poet-dreamer (Anselm in the short story The Golden Pot), but a negative hero, the disgusting freak Zaches, a character who, in a deeply symbolic combination of his external features and internal content, first appears on the pages of Hoffmann’s works. Little Zaches is even more a “fairy tale from new times” than The Golden Pot. Zaches is a complete insignificance, devoid of even the gift of intelligible articulate speech, but with excessively inflated arrogant pride, disgustingly ugly outwardly – due to the magical gift of the fairy Rosabelverde looks in the eyes of those around him not only a stately handsome man, but also a person endowed with outstanding talents, bright and clear mind. In a short time, he makes a brilliant administrative career: without completing a law course at the university, he becomes an important official and, finally, the all-powerful first minister in the principality. Such a career is possible only due to the fact that Zaches appropriates other people’s works and talents: the mysterious power of three golden hairs makes blinded people attribute to him everything significant and talented done by others.
So within the limits of the Romantic worldview and the artistic means of the Romantic method, one of the great evils of the modern social system is depicted. However, the unfair distribution of spiritual and material wealth seemed fatal to the writer, arising under the influence of irrational fantastic forces in this society, where power and wealth are endowed with insignificant people, and their insignificance, in turn, with the power of power and gold turns into an imaginary brilliance of mind and talents. The debunking and overthrowing of these false idols in accordance with the nature of the writer’s worldview comes from outside, thanks to the intervention of the same irrational fairy-magical forces (the sorcerer Prosper Alpanus, in his confrontation with the fairy Rosabelverde, patronizing Balthazar), which, according to Hoffmann, gave rise to the social phenomenon. The scene of the indignation of the crowd bursting into the house of the all-powerful minister Zinnober after he lost his magical charm, of course, should not be perceived as an attempt by the author to seek a radical means of eliminating the social evil that is symbolized in the fantastic and fairy-tale image of the freak Zaches. This is just one of the minor details of the plot, by no means having a programmatic character. The people are not rebelling against an evil temporary minister, but only mocking the disgusting monster, whose appearance finally appeared before them in its original form. The death of Zaches, who, fleeing from the raging crowd, is drowning in a silver chamber pot, is grotesque within the framework of the fairy tale plan of the novel, and not socially symbolic.
Hoffmann’s positive program is completely different, traditional for him is the triumph of the poetic world of Balthazar and Prosper Alpanus not only over evil in the person of Zaches, but in general over the ordinary, prosaic world. Like the fairy tale The Golden Pot, Little Zaches ends with a happy ending: a combination of a loving couple, Balthazar and Candida. But now this plot finale and the embodiment of Hoffmann’s positive program in it reflect the deepening contradictions of the writer, his growing conviction in the illusory nature of the aesthetic ideal that he opposes to reality. In this regard, the ironic intonation is strengthened and deepened in the story.
A great social generalization in the image of Zaches, an insignificant temporary leader who rules the whole country, a venomous irreverent mockery of crowned and high-ranking persons, “mockery of the stars and ranks”, of the narrowness of the German philistine, are added in this fantastic tale into a vivid satirical picture of the phenomena of the socio-political structure of the modern Germany.
If the short story Little Zaches has already been marked by a clear shift in emphasis from the world of the fantastic to the world of the real, then to an even greater extent this tendency manifested itself in the novel The Life and Views of the Cat Murr, coupled with fragments of the biography of Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler, which accidentally survived in junk sheets (1819-1821). Illness and death prevented Hoffmann from writing the last, third volume of this novel. But even in its unfinished form, it is one of the most significant works of the writer, representing in the most perfect artistic embodiment almost all the main motives of his work and artistic manner.
The dualism of Hoffmann’s worldview remains and even deepens in the novel. But it is expressed not through the opposition of the fabulous world and the real world, but through the disclosure of the real conflicts of the latter, through the general theme of the writer’s work – the artist’s conflict with reality. The world of magical fiction completely disappears from the pages of the novel, with the exception of some minor details associated with the image of Maester Abraham, and all the author’s attention is focused on the real world, on the conflicts occurring in contemporary Germany, and their artistic interpretation is freed from the fabulous shell. This does not mean, however, that Hoffmann becomes a realist who takes the position of the determinism of characters and the development of the plot. The principle of romantic convention, the introduction of conflict from the outside, still determines these basic components. In addition, it is reinforced by a number of other details: this is the story of Maester Abraham and the “invisible girl” Chiara with a touch of romantic mystery, and the line of Prince Hector – the monk Cyprian – Angela – Abbot Chrysostomos with extraordinary adventures, sinister murders, fatal recognitions, as it were moved here from Elixir of the Devil.
The composition of the novel is peculiar and unusual, based on the principle of duality, the opposition of two antithetical principles, which in their development are skillfully combined by the writer into a single line of narration. A purely formal technique becomes the main ideological and artistic principle of the embodiment of the author’s idea, philosophical understanding of moral, ethical and social categories. The autobiographical narrative of a certain learned cat Murr is interspersed with excerpts from the biography of the composer Johannes Kreisler.
Already in the combination of these two ideological plot plans, not only by their mechanical connection in one book, but also by the plot detail that the owner of the cat Murr, Maester Abraham, is one of the main characters in Kreisler’s life, a deep ironic parodic meaning is laid. The life of the “enlightened” philistine Murr is opposed to the dramatic fate of a true artist, a musician, tormented in an atmosphere of petty intrigue, surrounded by the high-born nonentities of the chimerical principality of Sieghartsweiler. Moreover, such an opposition is given in a simultaneous comparison, for Murr is not only Kreisler’s antipode, but also his parody double, a parody of the romantic hero.
Irony in this novel acquires an all-encompassing meaning, it penetrates into all lines of the narrative, defines the characteristics of most of the characters in the novel, appears in an organic combination of its various functions – both an artistic device and a means of sharp satire aimed at various phenomena of social life.
The entire cat and dog world in the novel is a satirical parody of the estate society of the German states: the “enlightened” philistine burghers, student unions (Burshenschafts), the police (the yard dog Achilles), the bureaucratic nobility (Spitz), the highest aristocracy (the Scaramouche poodle, Salon of the Greyhound Badina).
Murr is, as it were, the quintessence of philistinism. He considers himself an outstanding personality, scientist, poet, philosopher, and therefore he leads the chronicle of his life “for the edification of promising feline youth.” But in reality, Murr is an example of that “harmonic vulgarity”, which was so hated by the Romantics.
But the satire of Hoffmann becomes even more acute when he chooses the nobility as its object, encroaching on its upper strata and on those state-political institutions that are associated with this class. Leaving the ducal residence, where he was the court kapellmeister, Kreisler goes to Prince Irenaeus, to his imaginary court. The fact is that once the prince “really ruled a picturesque mistress near Sieghartsweiler. From the belvedere of his palace, he could, with the help of a telescope, survey his entire state from end to end ... At any moment it was easy for him to check whether Peter’s wheat was harvested in the most remote corner of the country, and with the same success to see how carefully they cultivated their vineyards Hans and Kunz”. The Napoleonic wars deprived Prince Irenaeus of his possessions: he “dropped his toy state from his pocket during a small promenade to a neighboring country.” But Prince Irenaeus decided to preserve his small court, “turning life into a sweet dream in which he and his retinue were,” and good-natured burghers pretended that the fake glitter of this ghostly court brought them glory and honor.
Prince Irenaeus, in his spiritual poverty, is not an exclusive representative for Hoffmann; of their own class. The entire princely house, starting with the radiant dad Irenaeus, are poor-minded and flawed people. And what is especially important in the eyes of Hoffmann, the high-ranking nobility, no less than the enlightened philistines from the burgher class, is hopelessly far from art: “It may well be that the love of the greats of this world for the arts and sciences is only an integral part of court life. The regulation obliges to have pictures and listen to music.”
In the arrangement of the characters, the scheme of contrasting the world of poetic and the world of everyday prose, characteristic of Hoffmann’s two-planarity, is preserved. The main character of the novel is Johannes Kreisler. In the writer’s work, he is the most complete embodiment of the image of an artist, a “wandering enthusiast”. It is no coincidence that Hoffmann gives Kreisler many autobiographical features in the novel. Kreisler, Maester Abraham and the daughter of counselor Bentson Julia make up a group of “true musicians” in the work, opposing the court of Prince Irenaeus.
In the old organ maker Abraham Liskov, who once taught music to the boy Kreisler, we are faced with a remarkable transformation of the image of the kind wizard in the work of Hoffmann. A friend and patron of his former student, he, like Kreisler, is involved in the world of genuine art. Unlike his literary prototypes, the archivist Lindhorst and Prosper Alpanus, Maester Abraham does his entertaining and mysterious tricks on the very real basis of the laws of optics and mechanics. He himself does not experience any magical transformations. This is a wise and kind person who has gone through a difficult life path.
Notable in this novel and Hoffmann’s attempt to imagine the ideal of a harmonious social order, which is based on a general admiration for art. This is Kanzheim Abbey, where Kreisler is seeking refuge. It bears little resemblance to a real monastery and rather resembles the Theleme monastery of Rabelais. However, Hoffmann himself is aware of the unreal utopian nature of this idyll.
Although the novel is not completed, the reader becomes clear about the hopelessness and tragedy of the conductor’s fate, in the image of which Hoffmann reflected the irreconcilable conflict of a true artist with the existing social order.
Hoffmann’s artistic talent, his sharp satire, subtle irony, his lovely eccentric characters, enthusiasts inspired by a passion for art have won him the strong sympathy of the modern reader.
The complex deep process of transformations in the mainstream of Romanticism, noticeably slowed down in German conditions, clearly manifested itself in poetry and in the prose of another remarkable master of words, Adelbert Chamisso (1781-1838). An impoverished French aristocrat-emigrant, having hardly won a place for himself in society, completely devoid of class prejudices, he organically blended into the spiritual and social life of his second homeland, Germany.
Chamisso’s creative debut was his fantastic story Peter Schlemil (1814), translated into almost all European languages shortly after its publication and had great success with readers.
The plot of the story is based on the fantastic story of a young man who sold his shadow to the devil – “the man in gray” – for an inexhaustible purse, as well as the ordeals that he endured as a result. However, the traditional romantic fiction in this story by Chamisso is filled with a completely new functional content for German romanticism – the central positive hero loses his sublime exclusivity, and the incredible incidents that happen to him are devoid of mystical and mysterious interpretation. So, for example, the devil himself in the guise of a “man in gray” appears to the reader as an ordinary businessman in his bourgeois-mercantile guise, and all fantastic accessories are perceived in a very everyday real-everyday context. Through the motive of the loss of the shadow, which turns out to be something much more significant than powerful gold, Chamisso reveals in the story the conflict between man and his environment characteristic of romantics. A positive way out of this conflict is clearly outlined, which is also not characteristic of the traditional Romantic consciousness – not wanting to remain dependent on the devil, Schlemihl throws an ominous purse into the abyss and voluntarily refuses all material benefits that he brought him. Finding himself without money and without a shadow, thus excommunicated from human society, he goes into the world of science and becomes a natural scientist.
With the poetry of Chamisso (as well as his contemporary Wilhelm Müller), real concrete historical democracy, which was formed under the noticeable influence and impression of his trip around the world, which the poet made in the Russian brig Rurik (1815-1818).
The traditional Romantic system of his early poems (Spring, Evening, The Miller, etc.) includes completely new themes, new intonations that take both Chamisso’s Romanticism and German literature onto new paths. Chamisso’s socio-political credo is clearly expressed in his famous poem Castle Boncourt. In the recollections of the poet’s distant childhood, a picture of a majestic family castle with its towers, a stone bridge, a noble coat of arms, and the graves of ancestors appears. But the castle has long been destroyed by a wave of revolution, and the poet, without regret, blesses the plow of a peasant who plows the land on which this castle once stood.
The theme of lost illusions, characteristic of European Romanticism, sounded clearly in one of the most talented poems by Chamisso, A Disabled in a Home for the Insane. In a masterly poetic form, it expresses the bitterness of the deepest disappointments of the advanced part of the German nation. Struck down by a heavy saber blow to the head in the famous battle of Leipzig – the “Battle of the Nations” in 1813 – a German soldier who believed that he had fought for freedom wakes up in a madhouse. And when he, bound, in a rage shouts about freedom, the caretaker begins to beat him.
Among the political poems of Chamisso, satire occupies a significant place – a satire on the Restoration regime (Song of the Night Watchmen), on a cowardly German burgher (French Song). And, of course, Chamisso the poet could not ignore the Byronic theme – the theme of the national liberation struggle in Greece (the cycle of poems Chios, The Last Love of Lord Byron, etc.).
The democratization of poetry, asserted by the Romantics, was, following Uhland, deepened and concretized by Chamisso, who began to widely introduce into German literature the image of a new hero: a representative of the urban and rural social lower classes, and showed him in the context of the topic of acute social inequality.
In the cycle The Exiles, consisting of two poems: Voinarovsky (transcription of Ryleev’s thought) and Bestuzhev, the poet turns to the images of the Russian Decembrists. The Russian theme attracted Chamisso’s attention not only in the political aspect. He translated into German the satirical story Shemyakin Court and Pushkin’s poem Two Crows.
For all the acuteness of a number of socio-political poems in his positive program, Chamisso did not go further than calls for an improvement in public mores. Nevertheless, his work in many ways prepared the German political revolutionary poetry of the 1840s.
In the work of Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), to a greater extent than in the works of Hoffmann, Kleist, Chamisso, the process of evolution of German Romanticism was reflected. Many complexities of this process are associated with the deep contradictions of the writer’s creative method, which, in particular, was expressed in the connections of the romantic Heine with the aesthetic principles of the early German romantics, in relation to whom he was not only a critic and subverter, but also a worthy successor.
The greatness of Heine the artist is determined by the fact that he combined outstanding creative talent with the breadth of public outlook. Declaring himself an adherent of the “free song of Romanticism”, he gave a sober analytical assessment of his time, in his work he reflected its most important laws.
Having comprehended the revolutionary meaning of Hegel’s dialectics before many others, he became one of the foremost thinkers of Europe. This brought Heine to a rapprochement in the 1840s with Marx and made him the greatest political lyricist in Germany of that time. It was then that Engels rightly called him the most outstanding “of all modern German poets”
Heine was born in Dusseldorf into a poor Jewish family. Proximity with France contributed to the most widespread dissemination of advanced revolutionary ideas in this province from across the Rhine. In the profession of a businessman, for which his parents began to prepare the boy, he did not find anything attractive for himself: more and more he was fond of poetry.
The desire to securely secure the future of their son makes the parents turn to his uncle, the wealthy Hamburg banker Solomon Heine, for help. In 1816 Heine moved to him. The position of a poor relative in the luxurious house of the moneybag, the huckster, calculating and businesslike atmosphere of the merchant city, the unwillingness to do business oppressed Heine. Even more suffering was brought to the young man by an unrequited feeling for his cousin Amalia. Like a true daughter of her father, she preferred a rich Prussian landowner to the poor poet. This love, the bitterness of which Heine felt until the end of his life, became the main theme of his early lyrics. In Hamburg, the first publications of Heine’s poems began to appear in the local periodicals.
After much hesitation, convinced at last by the persistent requests of his nephew, and also seeing that the “stupid fellow” is not making progress in commerce, the Hamburg banker agrees to pay him maintenance for his university education, making it an indispensable condition to study law as a field of knowledge, which, in his opinion, most realistically can provide an independent financial position.
In 1819 Heine entered the University of Bonn, then continued his education at the University of Göttingen and Berlin. Heine the student is interested in literature and history much more than legal sciences. With enthusiasm he listens to the brilliant lectures of August Wilhelm Schlegel in Bonn. In his student years, Heine’s poetic talent was formed, from that time he began an active creative activity.
The general periodization of Heine’s creative path is as follows.
The first stage, 1816-1831, before emigrating to Paris. The formation of the romantic method mainly in lyrics and partly in fiction.
The second stage, 1831-1839, until the book Ludwig Boerne. Development and deepening of social and political journalism.
The third stage, 1839-1848, flourishing of political lyrics. New topics in journalism (Lutetia).
The fourth stage, 1848-1856, post-revolutionary creativity, which caused new motives and ideological and aesthetic aspirations in the poet’s activities.
As a student in Bonn, where he enjoyed the benevolent attention of August Wilhelm Schlegel, who helped him in mastering the metric of German verse, Heine wrote a short article Romanticism (1820), which became the aesthetic program of the beginnings of the poet, in which he reveals his understanding of romanticism. Remaining an adherent of romanticism, he does not accept its vagueness and believes that “the images that should evoke genuine romantic feelings should be as transparent and as clearly outlined as the images of plastic poetry.” With equal decisiveness, he rejects all attempts to strengthen the influence of medieval Christian-knightly ideas on literature.
The author of the article closely connects his aesthetic ideal with the ideas about civil liberties in Germany, which existed more in his dreams than in reality.
The Book of Songs (1816-1827), on which Heine worked for over ten years, reflected the development of the poet’s social consciousness, the formation of his creative method, the enrichment and individualization of his lyric palette. Based on the most vital traditions of early romanticism associated with folk poetry, with the lyrics of Buerger and Goethe, Heine preserves the foundations of the romantic worldview in the Book of Songs. For him, one of the fundamental romantic principles remains in force: the antithesis of “I” and “not-I”. Love is the fundamental principle of being for the author of the Book of Songs, but this fundamental principle is interpreted by him not so much in the general philosophical, as in the individually eventual, subjective romantic plane.
At the same time, Heine introduced completely new elements into Romantic lyricism in expanding the thematic range, in the interpretation of traditional themes of romantics (love, nature), in the ideological and aesthetic interpretation of folklore and, finally, in the artistic manner itself.
The Book of Songs consists of several poetic cycles: Youthful Suffering (1816-1821; this cycle includes the following groups of poems: Dreams, Songs, Romances, Sonnets); Lyric Intermezzo (1822-1823); Back at Home (1823-1824); From a journey through the Harz (1824); North Sea (1825-1826). With significant artistic differences of these cycles, they represent an ideological and stylistic unity as a lyrical confession that reveals the formation and development of the poet’s personality.
In Youthful Suffering, the pain of the poet’s unrequited love for his cousin Amalia is especially acute. The rejected feeling becomes the source of a sharp conflict between the poet and reality, which he perceives mainly through the prism of his heart drama. This narrow emotional aspect sometimes acquires rather clear social outlines (“I dreamed of a dandy, dressed up ...”), the theme of rejected love is concretized – the beloved gives preference to the rich.
Heine discovers the greatest closeness to the traditional poetic world of the romantics in Dreams. He makes extensive use of science fiction, through it expressing his feeling of reality hostile to him. But earthly reality perceptibly makes itself felt in Heine’s fantastic visions, in which the real poetic image of the beloved, a concrete earthly ideal, constantly appears.
Songs and Romances are sustained in calmer and lighter colors. In Romances, Heine is actively developing a new ballad genre for him. The poet’s attraction to the ballad was not only a manifestation of the individual characteristics of his creative manner. The much greater role of the objectively narrative moment both in lyrics and in prose is generally more characteristic of late German romanticism than of early one.
Among Heine’s youthful ballads, the poems The Grenadiers and Belshazzar should be noted above all.
They feel the tread of time, the tread of history. The well-known ballad The Grenadiers, written in 1816 and testifying to the high poetic talent of the young poet, reflected his passion for Napoleon. A public demonstration of such feelings for the defeated emperor, who had recently asserted bourgeois transformations on German lands, was tantamount to protesting against the restored German princes and monarchs.
The main idea of the ballad Belshazzar is the doom of tyrants and the inevitability of their death.
The most characteristic of the poet’s romantic love lyrics are the cycles Lyrical Intermezzo and Back at Home. In these cycles, the principles of perceiving song folklore in Heine’s lyrics are clearly defined, which largely determined the nature of the innovation of his Book of Songs.
The same theme of unrequited love develops in Lyrical Intermezzo and Again in Homeland. But the poet’s heartache itself is revealed here in a different way. The painful longing of the early verses is filled; enlightened sadness, soft sadness of a rejected feeling, often giving way to joyful coloring. Intermezzo opens with a poem “Wonderful bright May day...”, in which the poet unassumingly and truthfully tells about the birth of his love, rejoicing in the awakening spring. In these cycles, Heine most fully embodies his ideal of “plastic poetry”, glorifying earthly love in all the real life charm. All the power of poetic dreams pales before the appearance of the poet’s real beloved, to whom “earthly delight is dear” (“If you ask, my gentle friend...”).
Naturally, the story of rejected love gives rise to themes of suffering, loneliness, separation (No. 39, 49, 51, etc. in Intermezzo), a tragic image of a double appears (No. 20 Back at home).
The concrete historical features of the social environment in which the poet’s love feeling develops are clearly indicated. In this regard, the Book of Songs outlines the line of socio-political satire, which will become the leading one in the poet’s work in the 1840-50s.
The poet’s healthy, natural feeling opposes the sanctimonious morality of the the nobility and bourgeoisie of his age:
At the tea table in the living room
The controversy about love has gone.
Refined were the men
The delicate floor is sensitive.
“Platonic love is necessary!” –
The counselor pronounced the verdict
And he was immediately a reward
Spouses mocking eyes.
The priest remarked: “With love,
Until her ardor is exhausted
We harm health.”
The girl asked: “How so?”
“Love is a fatal passion!” –
The Countess said
And a cup of hot tea
She gave it to the Baron, sighing.
I missed you at the table
Would you, my dear friend,
Rather, she told about love,
Than this whole chosen circle.
Poems sound like miniature lyrical satires, in which Heine mockingly speaks of the scholastic professor who claims to know the unity of the world (No. 58, 79 Back at home), about the sugary-sentimental philistines, indignant at the rudeness and baseness of the poet’s verses (No. 79 from Intermezzo), about the Sunday entertainments of the philistines (No. 37 Back at Home).
The cycle Back at Home also includes one of the best poems of early Heine, his famous ballad Lorelei, whose popularity was so great that it became a folk song. In Heine’s ballad, the epic narrative beginning is given not so much through the image of the action as through a poetic image, through a poetic description: a golden-haired beauty against the background of the evening sky, over the majestically picturesque Rhine, in the setting gold of the sun. But the content of the ballad is essentially lyrical: it is not in the development of action, but in the expression of feelings, in the tragic impulse of the Boatman, who is enchanted by the beauty of Lorelei and is doomed to die.
If in the early cycles of the Book of Songs up to the Lyrical Intermezzo there is no appeal to nature, now for the author nature becomes the most important means of seeing and knowing the world, revealing his own soul. For the romantic Heine, nature is that necessary aspect of the universe, the role of which is determined by the Rousseauian concept of human unity with it, opposing the natural simplicity of nature to the corrupting urban civilization.
Most poems are characterized, for example, by the parallelism of the poet’s mood and the state of nature. The organic fusion of nature with the thoughts and state of mind of man, which so often appears in the Book of Songs, has a certain pantheistic coloring, which would be characteristic of Heine’s lyrics at the beginning of the 1830s. Moreover, this pantheistic tendency in Heine goes back to Goethe’s pantheism and to pantheistic elements in the worldview of the Jena romantics.
According to the originality of their creative manner, a somewhat isolated place in the Book of Songs is occupied by its two last cycles under the general title North Sea (1825-1826), which are a kind of synthesis of sublimely pathetic intonations with narrative-colloquial, ironic ones.
The rhythms of free verse turned out to be the most consistent with the poet’s desire to convey a deep feeling of the grandiose grandeur and originality of the sea, its unbridled strength and power. The theme of love in these cycles loses its former dramatic tension, it no longer determines the ideological and semantic character of the cycle, becoming only one of its peripheral motives.
It is easy to see that in the poems of the cycles North Sea (Night on the Shore, Sea Vision, Peace, etc.), empathetic elation is often organically combined with an ironic manner, which has become an integral feature of Heine’s creative handwriting in Lyrical Intermezzo and Back at home. He uses this device to ridicule the sentimental dreams of the German philistine. Gradually, his irony becomes sharper, aimed at the most characteristic manifestations of German squalor, German reaction, transforming into political satire in the lyrics of the 1840-50s.
The poet turns his ironic passages against himself, against his own illusions and hobbies. His poetry is characterized by psychological nuances, reflecting not only contradictions, but also their awareness, which led to their overcoming in the future.
Many poems from the Intermezzo, from Back at home and from North Sea are characterized by an unexpected ironic ending in the finale, and sometimes only in the last line, which, as it were, with one discordant chord removes the serious, sublime lyrical mood of the whole poem.
The immediacy of feelings, the smooth melodiousness of the rhythms of the Book of Songs attracted many composers. Schubert, Schumann, Liszt, and behind them Grieg created music to the words of Heine. In Russia, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin, Rachmaninov turned to the poems of the Book of Songs. Romances to the words of Heine became the favorite songs of the German people.
Heine’s fictional prose of the 1820s, Travel Pictures (1824-1830), reflected new significant moments in the development of his worldview and creative talent. Social and political problems are posed here more sharply and broader than in the Book of Songs. Heine consciously chooses prose as a genre that gave him the opportunity to embrace the phenomena of social life more broadly.
The Journey through the Harz is written in the form of travel sketches that already had their own tradition in German literature. Traveling around the country, Heine sees that unsightly, squalor, which brings his homeland fragmentation into dwarf states. The book is imbued with a passionate protest against the feudal-monarchical regime and the clerical oppression that fetters the free minds of Germany. Talking about the cities and villages that he met on the way, he noticed some features of the backward Germany, mired in philistinism and petty passions.
The satirical description of Göttingen, which opens the essays, immediately gives the reader an idea of the philistine backwater, which was the modern poet’s homeland.
Talking about the Göttingen professors, sketching the satirically grotesque image of Dr. Saul Ascher “with his abstract legs, in a tight transcendental gray coat”, Heine laughs at the sterile scholastic science. In the tradition of the early romantics, he scoffs at the German philistine for his smug pretensions to enlightenment, which are shown to him by “a well-fed man from Goslar ... with a foolishly intelligent face...”
The cheerful and thoughtful wanderer observes with great sympathy the life of the workers whom he happened to meet on the way. He accurately documents the silver mines in Clausthal, draws attention to the difficult working conditions of the miners, bitterly speaks of the submission of the German workers to their fate, of their loyal attitude towards the princes.
The lack of social and political institutions in the country does not rob the author of The Journey of faith in social progress, does not overshadow the beauty of life before him. Against the background of a new socio-political upsurge in Europe, still full of echoes of revolutionary events in France, Heine comprehends his time as an era of transformations. A characteristic feature of Traveling in the Harz is a light optimistic flavor. It is no coincidence that the author’s travel impressions are given against the background of beautiful pictures of nature: the sun pours its festive rays, forest birds chirp merrily, streams murmur affectionately, “Ilsa falls naturally and gracefully from the bizarre cliffs ... and below she runs over small stones like a playful girl”...
Heine’s prose is Romantic in its lyricism, in the widespread use of an arsenal of various Romantic pictorial means: dreams, ghosts, nightmares and fantastic adventures, folk legends and tales, the Rousseauist opposition of nature and “natural” man to urban civilization. Finally, following the Romantics, remaining a poet in prose as well, the author pays great attention to the rhythmic structure of the phrase. In particular, here the author uses the technique that has developed in his poetic manner, when the thought contained in the first half of the phrase is sharply ridiculed with an ironic ending. Heine’s prose is characterized by the widespread use of unexpected metaphors. A sudden satirical effect is also created by a combination of completely different concepts: “... the two universities differ from each other by the simple fact that in Bologna the smallest dogs and the greatest scientists, and in Göttingen, on the contrary, the smallest scientists and the largest dogs.”
The revolutionary character of the romanticism of the young Heine was clearly manifested in the second part of Travel Pictures, Ideas. The Book of Le Grand (1826), in which the question of revolution is raised. The author urged to follow the example of the French. Drummer Le Grand, personifying the heroic French people who made the revolution, and the theme of the “red march of the guillotine” are at the center of the entire book. The romantic exaltation of Napoleon as the bearer of the ideas of the French Revolution was in Germany at that time an expression of opposition and even revolutionary sentiments. Heine was aware of the limitations of Napoleon’s “revolutionary” character. Already in his Journey from Munich to Genoa, he says that he “loves” Napoleon until the 18th Brumaire, before he betrayed his freedom.
It is characteristic that the title of the book, Le Grand (the great one) does not refer to Napoleon, but to the ordinary soldier, representing the democratic masses of France.
The final part of Travel Pictures, the English Fragments, is notable for the fact that Heine seeks to comprehend the contradictions of constitutional democratic society. Arriving in England hoping to see freedom in a country of parliamentary democracy, the poet was deeply disappointed. He was struck by the contradiction between luxury and poverty, so characteristic of this constitutional democratic country.
The English Fragments already gravitates more towards journalism proper than to fictional prose. Here are the stylistic features of essay reporting that will become characteristic of Heine’s correspondence in the 1830s and 1840s.
In the hot days of early August 1830, while on the island of Heligoland, Heine receives the first news of the July events in Paris, in his own figurative expression, “these rays of the sun wrapped in newsprint.” The poet makes the final decision to leave his homeland, where he was more and more persistently pursued by the reaction. In Paris, Heine found himself at the center of the socio-political and cultural life of Europe. He quickly settled into the atmosphere of a noisy, beautiful, heroic city. In one of his letters to his homeland, the poet jokingly remarked that when a fish in the water is asked how it feels, it replies: like Heine in Paris.
The emergence of the French working class, numerous conspiracies and uprisings in Paris, organized by various secret societies, the strengthening of the opposition in Germany, the events of 1830-1831. in Poland, the struggle of the Chartists in England, these significant shifts in the social and political life of Europe had a great impact on the ideological and aesthetic evolution of the poet. In addition, the whole atmosphere of public and cultural life in Paris contributed to the expansion of his horizons. Among his new acquaintances are the leaders of the Saint-Simonist movement Chevalier, Bazare, Enfantin. With suspicion of the political side of their teachings with his idea of reconciling entrepreneurs and workers and the peaceful reconstruction of society on a classless socialist basis, Heine is greatly influenced by the philosophical and aesthetic concepts of Saint-Simonism. The deification of nature, the cult of a healthy sensual beginning in human life, or, as the Saint-Simonists said, “emancipation of the flesh”, these ideas of new friends found a lively response from the life-loving poet.
A significant role in the further spiritual development of Heine was also played by his communication with a number of prominent writers, composers, artists and critics. Among them are Balzac, Beranger, Georges Sand, Musset, Chopin, Berlioz, Liszt. The letters of recommendation from the Hamburg uncle give Heine access to the houses of the largest bankers of the July monarchy, Rothschild and Lafitte. He was adopted by some ministers, he is familiar with the hero of the French liberals: Lafayette.
The 1830s in Heine’s work, reflecting some general laws of advanced German literature, are almost exclusively associated with prose, mainly publicistic. The poet’s focus is on questions of aesthetics, philosophy, history, social thought of the past and present. At the same time, speaking of this period of Heine’s ideological and aesthetic evolution, one cannot ignore some of his significant works in the field of poetry and fiction.
Among the few works of fiction written by Heine during these years, the novel Florentine Nights (1836) is interesting. In its subtle, graceful style, romantically unsaid character characteristics, mysterious omissions of plot lines, and deep melancholic tonality that often grows into tense, this romantic novel is close to the Book of Le Grand from the second part of Travel Pictures.
In all his most significant works of these years, Heine’s focus was on socio-political issues in its various aspects. Evidence of this, in particular, is the “French affairs”, the Parisian correspondences of 1831-1832, for the Augsburg Universal Gazette. In them, Heine talks about his first impressions of the July Monarchy, the social system that was established in France after the July events. With bitterness, the poet is convinced that the tricolor banner and the Marseillaise, which were born in the glorious revolutionary battle of the end of the last century and had recently called the people to fight the Restoration, have now become the official attributes of the power of the money bag. For all the contradictions in the political positions of the author of the essays, in the foreground here are deep sympathy for the people and anger against the bourgeoisie and its king that betrayed them after the revolution. With these correspondences, as well as with his subsequent works, Towards a History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany (1834) and The Romantic School (1836), Heine strove to bring the peoples of France and Germany closer together.
Talking in the book about the history of the culture of his homeland, about the state of modern German literature, Heine interprets these issues in an acute socio-political plane, constantly opposing the ideology of the reactionary ruling classes in Germany. Thus, these works were even more addressed to the Germans than to the French.
His attack on philosophical idealism in the essay On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany echoes the critical assessment of the activities of German romantics in the book The Romantic School.
Heine criticizes the aesthetic concepts and creative practices of many German romantics for their connection with the ideology of absolutism and the Catholic Church, in essence, exaggerating their significance. This characteristic of the romantic school, as a whole, underlies the assessment of individual romantic writers, for example, the work of Novalis, Arnim.
However, Heine also showed the complex inconsistency of the paths of development of German Romanticism. He appreciated the considerable creative talents of some talented writers and romantic poets (in particular, Uhland), noted the great merits of the late romantics in the study and propaganda of the treasures of German folk poetry, enthusiastically responding to the collection of folk songs by Arnim and Brentano The Magic Horn of a Boy. In this connection, one cannot fail to mention the warm characterization of German folk songs contained in the beginning of the third book of The Romantic School.
With deep respect and even admiration, Heine wrote about Lessing, because “a great social idea lives in all his works,” because “Lessing was fascinated by politics more than was supposed, a property that we absolutely do not find among his contemporaries.” The struggle for progressive social and political ideals is for Heine one of the main criteria in evaluating a writer. Therefore, in the work of Schiller, as well as in the activities of Lessing, Heine emphasizes a great humanistic, social pathos, a close connection with the urgent needs of our time.
Heine pays especially a lot of attention to Goethe, the greatest writer and thinker in Germany. “The King of Our Literature”, the brilliant author of Faust (a work to which several pages in the Romantic School are devoted) deserves, however, according to Heine, condemnation for his political indifference, for ignoring urgent problems of social and political life.
From the end of the 1830s to the beginning of the 1840s, Heine entered a new, third stage of his ideological and aesthetic development, which continued until 1848. Philosophical and literary and aesthetic questions faded into the background in his work. Heine’s talent as a political poet-satirist is now developing widely.
The first work of Heine, which reflected the new ideological and aesthetic tendencies of his work, was the book Ludwig Boerne (1840). Boerne’s characterization essentially served as material for posing a whole range of major socio-political problems.
Having met Boerne in 1819 in Frankfurt am Main, when he was already a well-known progressive publicist, Heine in France became close to this talented journalist, an incorruptibly honest fighter for republican democratic ideals. However, Boerne’s socio-political outlook did not go beyond the ideologue of the petty-bourgeois opposition. The egalitarian republic of small proprietors, for which Boerne so passionately stood up, did not suit Heine, who, having become close to the Saint-Simonists, more and more thought about the forms of social reorganization of society. In addition, the extreme of Boerne’s vulgar radicalism often manifested itself in his assessment of certain major phenomena of philosophical thought, literature and art. A controversy began, which did not stop until Boerne’s death. Three years after his death, In Boerne, Heine came out against his opponent and his associates. The publication of the book caused a scandal inflated by bourgeois radicals. The personal attacks on Boerne contained in the book also spoke in no way in favor of the author. Heine subsequently greatly regretted this and intended to exclude these pages from the revised collection of his works that was being prepared.
Having resumed his cooperation in the Augsburg General Gazette, Heine published on its pages a new series of correspondence on the social and political life of Paris, much later, in 1854, publishing them as a separate book called Lutetia. (This was the name of an ancient settlement on one of the Seine Islands in the 1st century BC, which laid the foundation for the future Paris.)
Repeating the genre terms of the French Affairs, Lutetia was in many ways a continuation of the correspondence of the early 1830s. Beginning in Lutetia with criticism of bourgeois relations, which takes on an increasingly concrete and broad character in comparison with Ludwig Boerne, Heine moves on to the question of the general prospects for the development of bourgeois society. The question of the inevitable fall of the power of the bourgeoisie, of the victory of the proletariat comes to the fore. And Heine was right when he said that the real hero of this book is the social movement.
Heine believed in the reality of communism. However, the poet felt a clear fear of it. Communism for Heine is a “terrible antagonist” of the capitalist system, a “gloomy hero”. In communism, he saw only destructive force. Heine based his ideas about the future communist society on naive utopian teachings which were then widely circulated among the workers and democratic circles of France.
To an even greater extent than in Lutetia, the complexity and contradictions of Heine’s ideological and aesthetic views were reflected in his other work, written at the same time, the poem Atta Troll (1843).
The poem was written at a time of fierce attacks on its author by German liberals and radicals. In the author’s preface to it, Heine himself mentioned the hail of rotten apples that fell on him at that time. This prolonged persecution, of course, embittered the poet and intensified his enmity towards the German bourgeois opposition. As an artist, Heine, at the same time, felt especially keenly the empty phrase-mongering of a significant part of the literature of bourgeois radicalism, the mediocrity of “political poetry”, which he ridiculed in the foreword to the poem Atta Troll. He gave his satire on bourgeois radicalism an unusual poetic form that went beyond the new “tendentious” poetry. The Rhine Newspaper, which was published at that time under the editorship of Marx, reprinted Heine’s poem on March 17, 1843, preceded by an editorial note, which emphasized that the newspaper does not see in this poem a betrayal of progressive ideas.
The “audacity” of the new humor, both poetic and acutely political, lay in the fact that in the image of Atta Troll it was easy to recognize the generalized features of the German radical – smug, limited, ignorant. With remarkable perspicacity, Heine showed that just as a German philistine from bourgeois radicalism can quickly pass to militant nationalism, so the funny and amusing Atta Troll becomes frightening when an enraged German philistine who is becoming a man-hater appears in him.
“The last free song of Romanticism” Heine called his poem. Indeed, the posing of topical socio-political issues in the poem, the features of “modern humor” are uniquely combined in it with the “old romance”, with the poetry of beautiful sublime images, with bizarre ups of fairytale poetic fantasy, allegedly not subject to any rules and requirements, except for the will of an artist.
The increasingly noticeable activation of the social movement in Heine’s homeland and in other European countries in the 1840s contributed to the poet’s rapid creative and political growth. The tasks of the approaching revolution demanded that literature perform agitational functions. Therefore, the 1840s saw the heyday of German political lyrics.
By the mid-1840s, Marx and Engels were turning their attention to Heine as the most important of all the progressive German writers of the time. All the previous struggle for democratic ideals, the desire to comprehend the course of historical development led Heine to a rapprochement with Marx. They met in Paris at the end of 1843, but their close contact was short-lived, since under pressure from the Prussian government, Marx was expelled from the capital of France by order of the then Premier Guizot. The materials of the correspondence between Heine and Marx that have come down to us testify to the exceptional warmth and cordiality of the relations established between them. The poet was a frequent visitor to Marx’s family, read his poems to him and listened attentively to his remarks. The rapprochement with Marx is also strengthened by the fact that Heine collaborates in the same leading German publications, in which Marx’s works are published, in the German-French Yearbooks, published by Marx and Ruge, and in the newspaper of German emigrants in Paris, Vorwaerts.
The very nature of the socio-political situation in pre-revolutionary Germany and on the European continent as a whole determined Heine’s turn to the genre of political poetry. The previous decade passed for him under the sign of disappointment in the lyrics, but now, in the 1840s, Heine firmly defines his new creative positions. The genre of political satire, the emergence of which was already outlined in Travel Pictures, acquired its clearest revolutionary orientation and high artistic form precisely during the 1840s in the form of a satirical poem and a political poem dedicated to topical problems of German modernity.
In 1844 Heine published the collection Modern Poems, which revealed his poetic talent in a new way. The collection was composed of poems written mainly in the period 1842-1844. The very title of the collection emphasizes its social meaning: the concept of Zeitgedichte in the German literary tradition not only has the meaning of “modernity”, but also indicates the social nature of the assessment of contemporary events.
These poems more fully than in all previous works of Heine, more fully than in all German literature of the 1840s, reflected the social and political struggle in Germany, the main contradictions of German reality.
The poems of the 1840s can be conditionally divided into two groups: works calling for revolutionary action, and satirical ones, ridiculing the old feudal Germany. Among the first are such poems as Silesian Weavers, Doctrine, Trend, Just Wait. The most characteristic of this group is the political poem Silesian Weavers.
In Heine’s poem, the rebellious weavers are not bread-hungry rebels, but potential fighters for a new life. According to Engels, this poem “in the German original is one of the most powerful poetic works”.
The poem Doctrine had a programmatic meaning, where those drums of the revolution sound, the rumble of which was heard by the young Heine in the stories of the drummer of the Napoleonic army Le Grand.
Comparing the poet to a warrior, Heine sees poetry as a formidable weapon: it can call forward like a drum, at the hour of a decisive onslaught, strike like a volley of buckshot, destroy like a ram.
The poems The Chinese Emperor and The New Alexander are a satire on monarchical Prussia and its ruler Frederick William IV. Against Bavaria as the main support of the monarchical-Catholic reaction in Germany and the reactionary Ludwig I of Bavaria, who threw off the mask of a liberal after the July Revolution of 1830, Songs of Praise to King Ludwig were directed.
A significant place in the cycle is devoted to criticism of the liberal illusions of some political poets, in particular Herweg and Dingelstedt (Georg Herwegh, On the arrival of the night watchman in Paris, Night watchman, Political poet).
True, Heine did not free himself from the thought that there were no forces in Germany capable of really making a revolution. In the poem Calm the poet doubts that Brutus could be found in Germany, who would dare to thrust a dagger into the chest of the tyrant Caesar.
From these doubts, poems were born, full of longing and gloomy forebodings (Life’s Path, Night Thoughts), painful memories of friends whom the author, a political exile, had not seen for many years; many of them are no longer alive, and the lines of Night Thoughts sound like a requiem for these untimely departed sons of Germany.
The new content of the lyrics of the 1840s, its great political tasks led to a change in Heine’s stylistic manner.
The poet’s creative achievements of these years were most vividly reflected in his wonderful work, the poem Germany. A Winter’s Tale (1844). It embodied all the previous experience of the ideological and artistic development of Heine, a prose writer, publicist, political lyricist. A Winter’s Tale, more than any other work of Heine, is the fruit of the poet’s deep thoughts about the development of Germany. Here his desire to see his homeland as a united democratic state was most fully expressed.
In the poem Germany, which, like early fiction, is a travel diary, the author draws a broad generalizing picture of old Germany, poses with all his sharpness the question of revolution, of two possible ways of developing his homeland. In the system of artistic means of the poem, this theme is expressed in a sharply alternative form: either the guillotine (a conversation with Friedrich Barbarossa), or that terrible stinking pot that Heine saw in Hammonia’s room.
The main object of the political satire of the poem is the pillars of political reaction in Germany: the Prussian monarchy, the nobility and the military. Approaching the borderline on a cold November day, the poet with excitement hears the sounds of his native speech. This beggar girl sings in a false voice to the accompaniment of a harp an old song about the renunciation of earthly goods and about heavenly bliss in heaven. The words of the song of this poor harpist speaks that old wretched Germany, which her rulers lull with the legend of heavenly joys, so that the people would not ask for bread here on earth.
The political circles against which the poem’s sharpest stanzas are directed are the Junkers and the cowardly German bourgeoisie, which supported the aspirations of the German aristocracy to reunite Germany “from above”, that is, through the revival of the “German Empire” designed to continue the traditions of the “Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation.”
The exposure of the deep reactionary nature of this theory is given in those chapters of the poem (Chapter XIV-XVI), where Heine tells about Barbarossa, “Kaiser Rothbart”. The image of the old emperor, sung in folk tales and dear to the heart of conservative romantics, is in the poem one of the sharpest methods of satire on the supporters of “empire”, on the champions of “reunification from above”. Heine himself, from the very first lines of his poem, advocates a different path of German reunification: the revolutionary path leading to the creation of the German Republic.
Rejecting the feudal-monarchical principle of the reunification of Germany, the poet does not accept the bourgeois system either. He speaks twice (Chapters V and VIII of the poem) about his disappointment with the results of the bourgeois revolution in France. Through many chapters of the poem passes the image of the poet-citizen, an active participant in the revolutionary struggle. In the Cologne episode (chapters VI and VII), the poet acts as a punishing judge who condemns the representatives of the old, reactionary Germany to physical extermination, and in chapter XII in an allegorical form the author speaks of his loyalty to revolutionary convictions.
Where the poet actively calls for the fight against reaction, a deeply ambiguous interpretation of the image of a revolutionary fighter arises. On the one hand, Heine emphasizes the need for the poet’s effective participation in the revolutionary struggle. But as soon as the punishing sword falls, he wakes up from a terrible pain in his chest: a blow to the old world wounds the poet himself.
The artistic method of the poem is characterized by the successfully found unity of the revolutionary-romantic and realistic principles. The poem is characterized by an organic combination of acute journalism, pamphlet sarcasm with poetic pathos, with lyrical spontaneity and sincerity.
Heine’s work in the last stage (1848-1856) is determined by the situation resulting from the unfavorable outcome of the revolution of 1848-1849. The reaction that came in Europe after the defeat of the revolutionary movements in France, Germany, Austria and other European countries left a strong imprint on the character of Heine’s works in recent years.
In May 1848 Heine leaves the house for the last time. From that time on, the years of the “mattress grave”, as he himself called this terrible agony that lasted for eight years, began for him. Almost blind, Heine continues his intense creative work.
Heavy doubts and serious contradictions that tormented the poet in the last years of his life were reflected in his publicistic works. The poems of this period, although they contain motives of grief and disappointment, nevertheless retain an active anti-feudal orientation, hostility of political and spiritual reaction. The experience of the 1848 revolution, the bitterness of defeat, reflected in these verses, did not break the poet’s fighting spirit – he calls for the continuation of the revolutionary struggle.
The contradictory worldview of Heine in these years was reflected, in particular, in his religious sentiments. We are talking about the afterword to Romancero (1851) and a significant part of the confession book Confessions (1854). In the afterword to the Romancero, the poet says that he “returned to God like the prodigal son, after grazing pigs among the Hegelians.” However, he immediately categorically refutes the rumor that he allegedly entered the bosom of any church.
The Confessions and the preface to Lutetia (1855) show that the problem of attitudes toward the proletariat became even more acute for Heine in the 1850s than in the preceding period.
For all its contradictions, Heine’s journalism at this stage retains its fighting spirit. Here, too, he is merciless towards his enemies, the Prussian nationalists, clerics, reactionary romantics and philistines.
A remarkable example of Heine’s poetry of the last stage is the collection of poems Romancero, composed mainly from the poems of 1848-1851. Along with the Book of Songs and the poem Germany, this collection occupies a prominent place in the poet’s creative heritage. In a number of poems of this collection (Spanish Atrids, Fitzliputzli, Dispute, Yehuda ben Halevi, Biminia, Poet Ferdowsi, etc.) the poet appeared in a new genre, in the genre of a historical realistic story in verse, a kind of historical poetic short story.
The main direction and nature of the entire cycle are determined by Heine’s determined desire to contrast the post-revolutionary political reaction in Europe with the traditions of revolutionary struggle. The best poems of the cycle are directed against the monarchy, nobility and clergy.
In Romancero much attention is paid to the compositional structure of the collection. According to the generality of themes and tonality, all the poems in it are divided into three books.
Among the best poems in the first book are Charles I and Marie Antoinette. Both poems are relevant. The idea of the poem Marie Antoinette is that the monarchical principle has long outlived its usefulness. As a reaction to the unsuccessful outcome of the 1848 revolution, the first book sharply sounds the motive of the death of true heroes and the triumph of all kinds of rogues (Valkyries, Battlefield at Hastings, The Moorish King). This topic takes on the character of tragic pessimism. The defeat of the revolution raises in Heine temporary doubts about the possibility of the victory of the progressive forces.
The second book of Romancero, the Lamentations, is valuable primarily for poems that are a direct response to the course of revolutionary events.
The poem In October 1849 sounds truly dramatic. It is imbued with deep spiritual sorrow over the defeat of the revolution in Hungary, the death of its heroes, and passionate hatred against reaction.
Despite the motives of grief prevailing in the book, they are, however, far from the main one here. It is no coincidence that the book ends with the poem Enfant perdu, one of the best and strongest works by Heine in its fighting, optimistic spirit. The poet, suffering both physically and spiritually, retained the will to fight, faith in victory over reaction.
The Lamentations contain a number of poems that are brilliant examples of Heine’s social and political satire.
There is also intimate and everyday lyrics in which the motives of grief and pessimism sound darkly. However, in these verses, the tragic image of the sick and old poet looms, tirelessly fighting for the ideas of the revolution and remained completely alone in the face of reaction.
In the third book, Jewish Melodies, the poet turns to the motives of Jewish folklore, to themes from the history of the Jewish people.
Among Heine’s later poems, of course, there are many sad ones, filled with thoughts of death, motives of melancholy and loneliness.) In some, one can hear the groans of a sick poet in physical pain (“Oh, how slowly he crawls ...”, “Three spinners are sitting at crossroads”, etc.).
Heine the poet had a powerful and lasting influence on German literature, captivating with the sincerity of his poetry, and the striking power of his satire, and the art of irony, and the militant pathos of revolutionary poetry. No less significant was Heine’s influence on German realistic prose.
A native of the social bottom (the son of a bricklayer and a laundress), Christian Friedrich Hebbel (1813-1863), thanks to his extraordinary talent and hard work, at the cost of many hardships, barely crossed the threshold of the third decade of his life, becomes one of the most significant figures in German literature. The lessons of the romantics (in particular, Uhland) organically entered the ideological and aesthetic consciousness of Hebbel, whose work, like many of his fellow writers, became one of the links in the development of the literary process in Germany. Where Hebbel clearly develops the principles of realism, they tend to coexist with Romantic poetics or grow out of it. But on the whole, Hebbel, an artist of the second half of the century, is noticeably less connected with the traditions of Romanticism than most of his immediate predecessors.
Hebbel entered literature as a gifted original playwright in the early 1840s, during the years of social upsurge that preceded the revolution. By this time, the complete inconsistency of the basic positions of the ideological, aesthetic and philosophical program of the romantics became apparent – the hope for the reorganization of the world by the forces of one genius personality, or at least the transformation of the reality they rejected (also unknown in what ways) into a kind of aesthetic utopia (early romantics); the patriarchal communal people of Heidelberger turned out to be just as ghostly utopia. And then it began to seem that the romantic ideal had completely exhausted itself, and with it “fine art”, the main component of which was considered poetry, also exhausted itself. Now it is contrasted to prose, mainly publicistic, and what is required from literature is not art, but actuality and topicality.
Publicistic topicality was equally alien to both Hebbel the poet and Hebbel the playwright, which, however, does not mean at all that he worked in complete isolation from life, from modern reality. On the contrary, for Hebbel, the revolution of 1848, like for most German writers of that time, was an important milestone in his ideological and aesthetic development. Both the breath of the “pre-March” and the atmosphere of the post-revolutionary triumph of the feudal-Junker reaction were reflected in the work of Hebbel. Accordingly, his work is divided into two periods. In the first, before 1848, the plays Judith, Genoveva, Diamond (comedy), Mary Magdalene, Tragedy in Sicily and Julia were created; in the second, Herod and Mariamne, Ruby (comedy), Michelangelo, Agnes Bernauer, Gyges and his ring, the trilogy Nibelungen and Demetrius (not finished).
Hebbel’s first original tragedy Judith (1840) on a well-known biblical subject, marked by the brilliance of his original talent, brought its author a well-deserved success. The influence of the pre-revolutionary upsurge is clearly heard in the drama Mary Magdalene (1844), the only play by Hebbel, directed to concrete real modernity. In this tragedy, which Hebbel himself called “the first sign of a new spring,” a rebellious protest is expressed against the inert, obsolete philistine morality, which are expressed in the play by the carpenter Anton and the victim of this morality, his daughter Clara, who commits suicide ... As in Judith, Hebbel demonstrates here an outstanding skill of deep psychological analysis, which will become a characteristic feature of the playwright’s artistic manner in all his subsequent dramas, in which he acts as a follower of the romantics. However, already in this drama – a characteristic work of German critical realism – Hebbel’s tendency (so far only a tendency) to transfer the real social conflicts of our time into the field of moral and ethical abstractions, into the sphere of mythology, manifested itself. It is this tendency that should explain the replacement of the original title of the tragedy Clara (an obvious tradition of Schiller’s realistic bourgeoise drama Luisa Miller) with the biblical-allegorical name Mary Magdalene. But even in this concrete historical social drama, Hebbel is very far from consistent conclusions about a radical reorganization of the social system.
Most of Hebbel’s dramas develop historical and historical-mythological subjects. Therefore, many thoughts of Hebbel the theorist are aimed at comprehending the essence of the historical process and historical drama. Tragedy, Hebbel believes, is not only the pinnacle of art, but also the pinnacle of historiography, since it is designed to depict life in the highest tension, revealing its contradictions and deep processes, which, in turn, determine the relief and significance of the characters’ characters. Hebbel portrayed history in drama in its two main aspects: statically, as “what is”, and in historical perspective, as “what should become.” Hebbel the artist is magnificent and vivid in depicting a concrete historical real background in his dramas, in revealing the momentary interconnection of situations and characters. But he is metaphysical in the interpretation of history as a process, because the development of history for him is only a change of ideas, and he likens the social process to the laws of the development of nature. Taking revolution as a historical necessity in resolving the contradictions of historical development, Hebbel at the same time denied the possibility and expediency of new forms of social relations, the possibility of social progress in general. The conviction of the beneficialness of firm, unshakable foundations for the individual and society leads Hebbel to accept the idea of uniting Germany from above, under the auspices of post-revolutionary Bismarckian Prussia, which, however, did not at all make him an apologist for the bourgeois-Junker social order, many of the private aspects of which he sharply criticized, although expressed in an allegorical form.
In the historical and mythological dramas of Hebbel, broad historical and life horizons are revealed, they are about the clash of civilizations (Gyges and His Ring), (Herod and Mariamne), about the antithesis of paganism and Christianity, about the death of the patriarchal tribal system (Nibelungen). And here, as in pre-revolutionary dramas, with various intonations and accents, Hebbel asserts the humanistic idea of the sovereign rights of the individual human person. Filigree psychological drawing in the disclosure of characters, the psychological acuteness of conflict situations coexists with a carefully written concrete historical background.
The contradictions in the social positions of Hebbel after the revolution were most vividly reflected in his historical tragedy Agnes Bernauer (1851), which he himself, not without reason, considered his best drama. The play develops a real plot, gleaned by Hebbel from the history of Bavaria in the 15th century. The young Crown Prince Albrecht fell in love with the daughter of the Augsburg pharmacist and surgeon, the beautiful Agnes. Having corrected all class prejudices and feudal-monarchical institutions, he marries her. This is how the knot of acute social and moral-ethical contradictions is tied. The interests of Agnes and Albrecht, defending their right to personal happiness, clash with the highest state interest, the carrier of which is Albrecht’s father, the stern Duke Ernst. In the name of love for Agnes, Albrecht is not only ready to forget his high estate position and right to the throne, but even raises the townspeople and peasants against his father. Then, in the name of the interests of the dynasty and the state, Duke Ernst and his Chancellor Preising pronounce a death sentence on Agnes; she was forcibly taken out of the castle and drowned in the Danube.
The contradictions between Hebbel’s social and philosophical consciousness are felt most sharply in this drama. It is quite obvious not only the humanistic idea of the drama, associated primarily with the superbly developed full-blooded psychologically and historically determined character of Agnes and a number of other characters representing the lower strata of the medieval estate hierarchy, but also the sharp socio-critical plan of tragedy, revealing a gloomy picture of the German feudal Middle Ages with robbery, the arbitrariness of the feudal lords and the complete lack of rights of the burghers and the peasantry. At the same time, on the other hand, the bearer of the “higher truth” in the tragedy is still Duke Ernst as the guardian of state interests: through him, Hebbel asserts his idea of the individual’s rejection of personal interests in the name of conservative state institutions.
In the trilogy Nibelungen (1861) – Siegfried, Death of Siegfried, Krimgilda’s Revenge – Hebbel, like many of his predecessors, refers to the ancient Germanic epic. The choice of this material was influenced by the fascination with the national past characteristic of the ideological atmosphere of Germany in the 1850s. But the elements of modernization inevitable in such a case, as well as the concrete historical problems of the Middle Ages, are comprehended by Hebbel in great philosophical and psychological generalizations. One way or another, contemporaries already saw in the trilogy a call for the unification of Germany on the basis of the Christian religion and general German statehood, that is, essentially a Bismarckian idea. In any case, the triumph of Christianity in a clash with obsolete institutions and ideas of the tribal system is the general idea of the trilogy, embodied with great artistic conviction. However, in compositional harmony, in the depth and completeness of the development of the main images, in the dynamics of the development of the plot and situations, this trilogy is noticeably inferior to most of Hebbel’s previous dramas.
Bright talent and high humanistic pathos of the drama and poetry of Hebbel put him in the vanguard of German national literature, and in his philosophical and psychological drama he was the forerunner of the philosophical drama of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. (Ibsen, Shaw).
The phenomenon of the creative genius of Richard Wagner (1813-1883) is one of the many convincing refutations of straightforward inflexible schemes that we sometimes impose on the development of art, for both his creations and his aesthetics testify that Romanticism, in particular in German literature and music (despite the anti-Romantic reaction noted above), in its later modifications, through a number of phenomena in the literature of the 1830s and 1840s, came to a new powerful upsurge. Wagner’s work is evidence of this. It should be emphasized that, unlike the connections with the traditions of Romanticism among the Young Germans, Wagner’s interpretation of them did not have the slightest shade of epigonism. Indeed, many, if not all of the basic principles of his aesthetics, consistently embodied in his practice, are developed on the basis of the aesthetics of the early Romantics, and fruitfully develop its provisions. Wagner’s progressive-Romantic worldview, associated with the ideas of revolutionary republicanism, was sometimes complicated by various philosophical, aesthetic and socio-political influences – left Hegelians, Feuerbach, mysticism and pessimism (Schopenhauer), ideas of nationalism and monarchist ideas, but its foundation always remained the original.
By his example of the creative personality of a genius playwright and composer, he simultaneously demonstrated the early romantic idea of the synthesis of arts. In his program of reform of operatic art – the theory of musical drama (Opera and Drama, 1851) – he substantiated this synthesis. The strongest philosophical influence that Wagner experienced was the teachings of Feuerbach. Both Wagner’s social and moral-ethical utopia is based on Feuerbach’s anthropologism. Art of the future in the name of a beautiful and strong man will come, according to Wagner, only through the revolution (Art and Revolution, 1849). And although these rebellious ideas of Wagner underwent a certain transformation over the course of his work, he never renounced them altogether. The humanistic pathos of his utopia, his aesthetics and creative practice, more concretely and convincingly than that of romantics, reveals its anti-bourgeois orientation.
Richard Wagner was born in Leipzig. Already in his youth, he developed a great interest in theater. Philosophy and aesthetics, which he studied at the University of Leipzig, although they did not pass without leaving a trace for Wagner, were nevertheless pushed into the background by his awakened attraction to music, and already in the early 1830s some of his early compositions received critical acclaim. He acts as an opera conductor in a number of cities, but he is haunted by severe material hardships. A striking and by no means accidental episode in the life of the young Wagner was his participation in the May 1849 uprising in Dresden. At this time, he was under the influence of the anarchist ideas of one of the leaders of the uprising, Mikhail Bakunin. Years of emigration to Switzerland followed after the defeat of the uprising.
Although Wagner himself in his Memoirs considers 1842 to be the beginning of the second, mature stage of his work, in fact, his wonderful Romantic musical drama The Flying Dutchman (1840) lays the solid foundations for the reform of operatic art that he consistently pursued. 1842, when he received the position of court conductor of the Dresden Opera, was the beginning of a very fruitful “Dresden period” in the work of Wagner. At this time (until 1848) he created two major Romantic operas, Tannhäuser and the Singers’ Competition in Wartburg (1845) and Lohengrin (1848). In working on them, the basic principle of the creative laboratory of the playwright and composer was clearly defined: first, the text was created, and then the music. Carrying out a reform in the field of operatic art, Wagner radically changes the genre principles of opera: vocal parts, arias become a monologue-story, a confession, the dominant role is played by the orchestral-symphonic beginning, which in traditional opera played only a secondary role of accompaniment, introductory and connecting links between vocal parts, which, for example, is typical for Verdi’s operas.
In the drama-opera Lohengrin, the Romantic beginning appears in a combination of high enlightened humanism, embodied in the image of the title character, and the folklore-mythological legendary basis of the legend about the mysterious knight, one of the keepers of the holy grail with the blood of Jesus Christ in the magical castle of Monsalvat...
Wagner’s monumental creative achievement was his grandiose romantic tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen: The Gold of the Rhine (1854), The Valkyrie (1856), Siegfried (1871), The Death of the Gods (1874).
The appeal to ancient legends, myth, folk tales, the national heroic epic, of course, was an expression of romantic rejection of the Junker-bureaucratic-capitalist path of Germany, a departure from modernity, but at the same time, this appeal to the heroic national past, to the richest treasures of folklore was also a response to a new wave of national upsurge associated with the revolutionary events of 1848. The work on the tetralogy, which lasted more than 20 years (from its concept, formed on the eve of the revolution, to its completion already during the time of the German Empire), could not fail to reflect the changes in the social positions of Wagner himself, who became disillusioned with the possibilities of the revolution, who sometimes made compromises, which, in particular, was reflected in the tetralogy in the confrontation between the light optimistic principle and the motives of hopelessness and tragic pessimism. At the same time, however, the anti-capitalist protest, the ideals of humanism remained unchanged in him.
The enchanted gold and the insidious and evil dwarfs Nibelungs who guard it in the gloomy depths of the Rhine, who gave this gold the power of money, embody the evil acquisitive principle, under whose rule the gods – the inhabitants of the cloudy palace of Valhalla, fall. But neither gold nor the Nibelungs are subject to the mortal man Siegfried – the bearer of a bright humanistic principle, the best moral qualities that allow him to perform many feats in the struggle against the forces of evil. The gods themselves and their head Wotan want, sacrificing their immortality, to acquire human rights to freedom of choice, to love. Thus Valhalla perishes. But Siegfried also dies, struck by the intrigues of those people who are connected with the forces of evil.
Such outstanding works of Wagner as the musical dramas Tristan and Isolde (1859), and especially Parsifal (1882), where the material of the ancient myth about the magic cup of the Grail (the motive already sounded in Lohengrin), interpreted in the spirit of Christian dogmas and abstract philosophical doctrines, in essence, completely displaces connections with reality.
At the same time, chronologically between Tristan and Parsifal, the basically realistic opera The Meistersingers of Nuremberg (1862) reproduces the concrete historical world of the 15th-century burghers and artisans of Nuremberg, among whom is the bright figure of the shoemaker Hans Sachs.
Wagner is undoubtedly a unique phenomenon both as a playwright, and especially as an opera composer in scale, in the strength of his talent, in his originality. Echoes of Wagner’s aesthetic concepts are easy to catch in Brecht, Sartre, in the music of Tchaikovsky and Richard Strauss.