Plan

Introduction

The creative path of E.T.A. Hoffmann

"Double World" Hoffmann

Conclusion

List of used literature

Introduction

Hoffmann belongs to those writers whose posthumous fame is not limited to numerous editions of collected works.

His fame is rather light and winged, it is poured into the spiritual atmosphere that surrounds us. Whoever has not read the "tales of Hoffmann" will sooner or later hear them, or see them, but will not pass by! Let us recall at least The Nutcracker ... in the theater on the ballets of Tchaikovsky or Delibes, and if not in the theater, then at least on theater poster or on a television screen. The invisible shadow of Hoffmann constantly and beneficially overshadowed Russian culture in the 19th, and in the 20th, and in the current, 21st, century ...

This paper examines the life and creative path of the writer, analyzes the main motives of Hoffmann's work, his place in contemporary literature for him - and for us. . The issues related to Hoffmann's dual world are also considered.

The creative path of E.T.A. Hoffmann

Hoffmann took up literature late - at the age of thirty-three. Contemporaries met the new writer with caution, his fantasies were immediately identified as romantic, in the spirit of the then popular mood, and after all, Romanticism was associated primarily with the generation of young people infected with the French revolutionary virus.

Entering 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 artistic vision of the world itself remain within the framework of romanticism. Like the Jensen, most 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 attitude. Following the Jens, Hoffmann considers the creative person 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 are the only areas 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 are different than in the early romantics. Through the denial of reality, through the artist's conflict with it, the Jensen rose to the highest level of their worldview - aesthetic monism, when the whole world became for them the sphere of poetic utopia, fairy tale, the sphere of harmony in which the artist comprehends himself and the Universe. The romantic hero of Hoffmann lives in the real world (beginning with Gluck's gentleman and ending with Kreisler). With all his attempts to break out of it into the world of art, into the fantastic fairy-tale realm of Jinnistan, he remains surrounded by real, concrete historical reality. Neither a fairy tale nor art can bring him harmony in 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 two worlds in his works, the insolubility of the conflict between the hero and the outside world in most of them, the characteristic duality of the writer's creative manner.

Hoffmann's creative individuality in many characteristic features is already defined in his first book, Fantasies in the Manner of Callot, which includes works written from 1808 to 1814. significant aspects of his worldview and creative manner. The short story 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 become dominant in all subsequent work of the writer - the two-dimensionality of the narrative.

The collections of short stories "Fantasy in the manner of Callot" (1814-1815), "Night stories in the manner of Callot" (1816-1817) and the Serapion brothers (1819-1821) are considered the most significant; a dialogue about the problems of theatrical business “The Unusual Sufferings of a Theater Director” (1818); a story in the spirit of a fairy tale "Little Tsakhes, nicknamed Zinnober" (1819); and two novels - "Devil's Elixir" - about the irrationality of everyday life (1816), a brilliant study of the problem of duality, and "Everyday views of the cat Murr" - a satire on the German bourgeoisie (1819 - 1821), partly an autobiographical work, full of wit and wisdom. Among the most famous stories of Hoffmann, which were included in the mentioned collections, are fairy tale The Pot of Gold, the gothic story Mayorat, a realistic psychological story about a jeweler who cannot part with his creations, Mademoiselle de Scuderi, and some others.

Eight years after the release of Fantasies, Hoffmann died. He was already dying as a writer, not exactly famous, but very popular. During these eight years, he managed to write surprisingly much, this is evidenced by the above list of just a few, the most significant, works.

Brilliant fantasy, combined with a strict and transparent style, provided Hoffmann with a special place in German literature. Germany appreciated this much later, already in the 20th century ...

"Double World" Hoffmann

In the 20th century, and today, the reader associated and still associates the name of Hoffmann, first of all, with the famous principle of "two worlds" - a romantically pointed expression of the eternal problem of art, the contradiction between the ideal and reality, "essentiality", as Russian romantics used to say. “Essentiality” is prosaic, that is, petty and miserable, this life is inauthentic, improper; the ideal is beautiful and poetic, it is true life, but it lives only in the chest of the artist, the "enthusiast", but he is persecuted by reality and unattainable in it. The artist is doomed to live in the world of his own fantasies, fenced off from the outside world with a protective shaft of contempt or bristling against him with a prickly armor of irony, mockery, satire. And in fact, Hoffmann is like that in Cavalier Gluck, and in The Golden Pot, and in Berganets the Dog, and in Little Tsakhes, and in Lord of the Fleas, and in Murre the Cat.

There is another image of Hoffmann: under the mask of a mad joker hides a tragic singer of duality and alienation human soul(not excluding the artistic soul). And it is also easy to find grounds for this image: in “ Sandman”, “Majorate”, “Devil's Elixirs”, “Magnetizere”, “Mademoiselle de Scuderi”, “Player's Happiness”.

These two images, iridescent, flickering, are the main ones in Hoffmann's work, but there are also others: a cheerful and kind storyteller - the author of the famous Nutcracker; singer of ancient crafts and patriarchal foundations - author of "Master Martin the Cooper" and "Master Johannes Watch"; the selfless priest of Music - the author of "Kreisleriana"; secret admirer of Life - the author of "The Corner Window".

Perhaps the most virtuosic elaboration of the psychological - and, by the way, social too - problematics is given in the striking study "Counsellor Crespel" from "The Serapion Brothers". It says about the title character: “There are people whom nature or merciless fate have deprived of a cover, under the cover of which we, the rest of mortals, imperceptibly to the eyes of others, proceed in our follies ... Everything that remains a thought in Crespel is immediately transformed into action. Bitter mockery, which, it must be assumed, is constantly concealed on its lips by the spirit languishing in us, squeezed in the vice of an insignificant earthly vanity, Crespel shows us with his own eyes in his extravagant antics and antics. But this is his lightning rod. Everything that rises up in us from the earth, he returns to the earth - but he keeps the divine spark sacredly; so that his inner consciousness, I believe, is quite healthy, despite all the seeming - even eye-catching - folly.

This is a significantly different twist. As it is easy to see, we are not talking about a romantic individual only, but about human nature in general. Crespel is characterized by one of the "other mortals" and all the time he says "we", "in us". In the depths of our souls, we all "come out in our follies", and the dividing line, the notorious "two worlds" begins not at the level of the inner, spiritual structure, but at the level of only its external expression. What "other mortals" reliably hide under a protective cover (everything "earthly") is not forced out in Crespel's depths. On the contrary, it is released outside, “returns to the earth” (psychologists of the Freudian circle will call it “catharsis” - by analogy with the Aristotelian “purification of the soul”).

But Crespel - and here he again returns to the romantic chosen circle - sacredly keeps the "divine spark". And it is possible - and quite often - also when neither morality nor consciousness are able to overcome "everything that rises up in us from the earth." Hoffmann fearlessly enters this sphere as well. His novel "Devil's Elixirs" at a superficial glance may now appear to be just a mixture of a horror novel and a detective story; in fact, the story of the unrestrained moral sacrilege and criminal offenses of the monk Medardus is a parable and a warning. What, in relation to Crespel, is softened and philosophically abstractly designated as "everything rising up in us from the earth", here it is called much sharper and harsher - we are talking about "a blind beast raging in a person." And here not only the uncontrolled power of the subconscious, "repressed" is rampant - here also the dark force of blood, bad heredity, presses.

According to Hoffmann, man is thus oppressed not only from the outside, but also from the inside. His "crazy antics and antics", it turns out, is not only a sign of dissimilarity, individuality; they are also Cain's seal of the race. The "cleansing" of the soul from the "earthly", splashing it outward can give rise to the innocent eccentricities of Crespel and Kreisler, and maybe even the criminal unbridledness of Medardus. Pressed from two sides, torn apart by two impulses, a person balances on the verge of a break, a split - and then already genuine madness.

The phantom of bifurcation, which had haunted his soul and occupied his mind all his life, Hoffmann embodied this time in an unheard of bold art form, not only placing two different biographies under one cover, but also demonstratively mixing them. We are talking about the novel "Everyday worldviews of the cat Murr". Interestingly, both biographies reflect the same epochal issues, the history of Hoffmann's time and generation, that is, one subject is given in two different illuminations, interpretations. Hoffmann sums up here; the outcome is ambiguous.

The confession of the novel is emphasized primarily by the fact that the same Kreisler appears in it. With the image of his literary double, Hoffmann began - "Kreislerian" in the cycle of the first "Fantasy" - and ends with it.

At the same time, Kreisler is by no means a hero in this novel. As the publisher immediately warns (fictitious, of course), the proposed book is precisely the confession of the learned cat Murr; and the author and the hero - he. But when preparing the book for publication, it is ruefully explained further, there was an embarrassment: when the proof sheets began to arrive at the publisher, he was horrified to find that the notes of the cat Murr were constantly interrupted by fragments of some completely different text! As it turned out, the author (that is, the cat), expounding his worldly views, along the way, tore apart the first book that fell into his paws from the owner’s library in order to use the torn pages “part for laying, part for drying.” The book, cut up in such a barbaric way, turned out to be a biography of Kreisler; due to the negligence of typesetters, these pages were also printed.

Biography brilliant composer like scrap paper in a cat's biography! It was necessary to have a truly Hoffmannian fantasy in order to give such a form to bitter self-irony. Who needs Kreisler's life, his joys and sorrows, what are they good for? Is that to dry the graphomaniac exercises of a learned cat!

However, with graphomaniac exercises, everything is not so simple. As we read Murr's autobiography itself, we are convinced that the cat is also not so simple, and by no means without reason claims to play the main role in the novel - the role of the romantic "son of the century." Here he is, now wiser with both worldly experience and literary and philosophical studies, reasoning at the beginning of his biography: “How rare, however, is the true affinity of souls in our miserable, inert, selfish age! .. My writings will undoubtedly ignite in the chest not one young, gifted with reason and heart cat, the high flame of poetry ... but another noble young cat will be completely imbued with the lofty ideals of the book that I now hold in my paws, and will exclaim in an enthusiastic impulse: Oh Murr, divine Murr, the greatest genius of our glorious feline race! Only to you I owe everything, only your example made me great! » Remove specific cat realities in this passage - and you will have a completely romantic style, lexicon, pathos.

To depict a romantic genius in the image of an imposingly sloppy cat is already a very funny idea in itself, and Hoffmann makes full use of its comic possibilities. Of course, the reader is quickly convinced that, by nature, Murr simply learned the fashionable romantic jargon. However, it is not so indifferent that he "works" under romance with success, with an outstanding sense of style! Hoffmann could not but know that such a masquerade risks compromising romanticism itself; it's a calculated risk.

Here are the "waste sheets" - with all the "Hoffmannian" reigning here, the sad story of the life of Kapellmeister Kreisler, a lonely, little-understood genius; inspired sometimes romantic, sometimes ironic tirades explode, fiery exclamations sound, fiery eyes blaze - and suddenly the narration breaks off, sometimes literally in the middle of a sentence (the torn page ends), and the learned cat rapturously mumbles the same romantic tirades: “... I know for sure : my homeland is an attic! The climate of the motherland, its customs, how inextinguishable are these impressions... Where does such an exalted way of thinking come from in me, such an irresistible desire for higher spheres? Whence such a rare gift to instantly ascend upwards, such courageous, most ingenious jumps worthy of envy? Oh, sweet longing fills my chest! Longing for my native attic rises in me in a powerful wave! I dedicate these tears to you, oh beautiful homeland ... "

The demonstrative, almost literal fragmentation of the novel, its outward narrative confusion (again: either the extravaganza of fireworks, or the whirlwind of the carnival) is compositionally soldered tightly, with ingenious calculation, and it must be realized.

At first glance, it may seem that the parallel biographies of Kreisler and Murr are a new version of the traditional Hoffmannian dual world: the sphere of "enthusiasts" (Kreisler) and the sphere of "philistines" (Murr). But even a second glance complicates this arithmetic: after all, in each of these biographies, in turn, the world is also divided in half, and each has its own sphere of enthusiasts (Kreisler and Murr) and philistines (environment of Kreisler and Murr). The world is no longer doubling, but quadrupling - the score here is "twice two"!

And this changes the whole picture very significantly. We isolate the experiment for the sake of Kreisler's line - before us will be another "classical" Hoffmann's story with all its characteristic attributes; if we isolate Murr's line, there will be a "hoffmanized" version of the genre of satirical allegory, the "animal epic" or fable with a self-revealing meaning, which is very common in world literature. But Hoffmann mixes them up, pushes them together, and they must certainly be perceived only in mutual relation.

These are not just parallel lines - they are parallel mirrors. One of them - Murrovsky - is placed in front of the former Hoffmannian romantic structure, reflects and repeats it again and again. Thus, this mirror inevitably removes absoluteness from the history and figure of Kreisler, gives it a shimmering ambiguity. The mirror turns out to be a parody, "worldly views of the cat Murr" - an ironic paraphrase of "the musical suffering of Kapellmeister Kreisler."

One of the essential components of Hoffmann's poetics, as well as the early romantics, is irony. Moreover, in Hoffmann's irony as a creative technique, 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 Yenese. 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 performs in the Jena romantics. Romantic irony in these works of Hoffmann receives a satirical sound, but this satire does not have a social, public 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 demonstrating the two-dimensionality of its creative method. Following the Jenians, the author of the short story "Princess Brambilla" believes that irony should express a "philosophical outlook on life", that is, be the basis of a person's attitude to life. In accordance with this, as with the Jenese, irony is a means of resolving all conflicts and contradictions, a means of overcoming that “chronic dualism” from which the main character of this short story the actor Giglio Fava.

In line with this main trend, another and more essential function of his irony is revealed. If among the Yenese irony as an expression of a universal attitude to 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 reality (“The Golden Pot”, “Little Tsakhes”, “Worldly Views of Cat Murr” are works that most characteristically reflect this function of Hoffmann’s irony).

For Hoffmann, the superiority of the poetic world over the world of real everyday life is undeniable. And he sings of this world of a fabulous 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 worldview, if such a fairy tale short story had determined the general direction of his work, and did not demonstrate only one of its sides. At its core, however, the writer's artistic worldview does not at all proclaim 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 duality is reflected in a number of Hoffmann's works, perhaps the most striking in their artistic quality and most fully embodied the contradictions of his worldview. Such, first of all, is the fairy-tale short story The Golden Pot (1814), the title of which is accompanied by the eloquent subtitle A Tale from Modern Times. The meaning of this subtitle is that the characters in this tale are contemporaries of Hoffmann, and the action takes place in the real Dresden early XIX in. This is how Hoffmann rethinks the Jena tradition of the fairy tale genre - the writer includes a plan of real everyday life in its ideological and artistic structure. 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 accessible to him. Faced with him, Anselm begins to lead a dual existence, falling from his prosaic existence into the realm of a fairy tale, adjacent to ordinary real life. In accordance with this, the short story is compositionally built on the interweaving and interpenetration of the fabulous-fantastic plan with the real. Romantic fairy-tale fantasy in its subtle poetry and elegance finds here in Hoffmann one of its best exponents. At the same time, the real plan is clearly outlined in the novel. 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. A significant role in the characterization of the characters is played by a realistic detail.

A widely and vividly developed fairy-tale plan with many bizarre episodes, so unexpectedly and seemingly randomly invading the story of real everyday life, is subject to a clear, logical ideological and artistic structure of the short story, in contrast to the deliberate fragmentation and inconsistency in the narrative manner of most early romantics. The two-dimensional nature of Hoffmann's creative method, the two-world nature in his worldview, were reflected in the opposition of the real and the fantastic world and in the corresponding division of the characters into two groups. Konrektor Paulman, his daughter Veronika, registrar Geerbrand - prosaically thinking Dresden townsfolk, which can be attributed, in the author's own terminology, to good people, devoid of any poetic flair. They are opposed by the archivist Lindhorst with his daughter Serpentina, who came to this philistine world from a fantastic fairy tale, and the dear eccentric Anselm, whose poetic soul opened fairy world archivist.

In the happy ending of the novel, which ends with two weddings, its ideological intent is fully interpreted. The court adviser becomes the registrar Geerbrand, to whom Veronika gives her hand without hesitation, having abandoned her passion for Anselm. Her dream comes true - “she lives in a beautiful house in the New Market”, she has “a hat of the latest style, a new Turkish shawl”, and, having breakfast in an elegant negligee by the window, she gives orders to the servants. Anselm marries Serpentina and, having become a poet, settles with her in fabulous Atlantis. At the same time, he receives as a dowry a “pretty estate” and a golden pot, which he saw in the archivist’s house. The golden pot - this peculiar ironic transformation of Novalis' "blue flower" - retains the original function of this romantic symbol. It can hardly be considered that the completion of the Anselm-Serpentina 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 give up his poetic dream, he only finds its realization.

philosophical idea short stories about incarnation, the realm of poetic fantasy in the world of art, in the world of poetry, is affirmed in the last paragraph of the short story. Its author, who suffers from the thought that he has to leave the fabulous Atlantis and return to the miserable squalor of his attic, hears the encouraging words of Lindhorst: “Weren’t you yourself just in Atlantis and don’t you own at least a decent manor there as poetic property your mind? Is Anselm's bliss nothing else than life in poetry, which reveals the sacred harmony of all that exists as the deepest of the mysteries of nature!

V. G. Belinsky highly appreciated Hoffmann's satirical talent, noting that he was able to "depict reality in all its truth and execute philistinism ... his compatriots with poisonous sarcasm."

These observations of the remarkable Russian critic can be fully attributed to the fairy tale short story "Little Tsakhes". The new fairy tale completely preserves Hoffmann's two worlds in the perception of reality, which is again reflected in the two-dimensional composition of the short story, in the characters' characters and their arrangement. Many of the main characters of the novel are fairy tales.

"Little Tsakhes" have their literary prototypes in the short story "The Golden Pot": student Balthazar - Anselma, Prosper Alpanus - Lindhorst, Candida - Veronica.

The duality of the novel is revealed in the opposition of the world of poetic dreams, the fabulous country of Dzhinnistan, the world of real everyday life, the principality of Prince Barsanuf, in which the action of the novel takes place. Some characters and things lead a dual existence here, as they combine their fairy-tale magical existence with existence in the real world. Fairy Rosabelverde, she is also the Canoness of the Rosenshen Orphanage for Noble Maidens, patronizes the disgusting little Tsakhes, rewarding him with three magical golden hairs.

In the same dual capacity, like the Rosabelverde fairy, she is also Canoness Rosenshen, and good wizard Alpanus, surrounding himself with various fabulous miracles, which the poet and dreamer student Balthazar sees well. In his ordinary incarnation, only accessible to philistines and sober-minded rationalists, Alpanus is just a doctor, prone, however, to very intricate quirks.

The artistic plans of the compared short stories are compatible, if not completely, then very closely. In terms of ideological sound, for all their similarity, the novellas are quite different. If in the fairy tale "The Golden Pot", which ridicules the attitude of the bourgeoisie, satire has a moral and ethical character, then in "Little Tsakhes" it becomes more acute and receives 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 contains "a lot of ridicule of stars and officials."

It is in connection with the expansion of the address of satire, with its strengthening in the short story, that one significant moment in its artistic structure also changes - the main character becomes not positive hero, a characteristic Hoffmannian eccentric, a poet-dreamer (Anselm in the short story "The Golden Pot"), and the negative hero is the vile freak Tsakhes, 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 Tsakhes” is even more of a “tale from new times” than “The Golden Pot”. Tsakhes - a complete nonentity, devoid of even the gift of intelligible articulate speech, but with an exorbitantly swollen swaggering pride, disgustingly ugly in appearance - due to the magical gift of the Rosabelverde fairy, in the eyes of those around him, he looks 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 only possible due to the fact that Tsakhes appropriates other people's labors and talents - the mysterious power of the 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 artistic means romantic method depicts one of the great evils of modern public system. 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, by 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-tale-magical forces (the sorcerer Prosper Alpanus, in his confrontation with the fairy Rosabelverde, patronizing Balthazar), which, according to Hoffmann, gave rise to this ugly social phenomenon. The scene of 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 taken as an attempt by the author to seek a radical means of eliminating the social evil that is symbolized in the fantastically fabulous image of the freak Tsakhes. This is just one of the minor details of the plot, which by no means has a programmatic character. The people are not rebelling against the evil temporary minister, but only mocking the disgusting freak, whose appearance finally appeared before them in its true form. Grotesque within the framework of the fairy-tale plan of the novel, and not socially symbolic, is the death of Tsakhes, who, fleeing the raging crowd, drowns in a silver chamber pot.

hoffman creativity writer dual world

Conclusion

It was Hoffmann who most poignantly embodied words in the art of "dvoe-world"; it is his identification mark. But Hoffmann is neither a fanatic nor a dogmatist of dual worlds; he is his analyst and dialectician...

... Since then, many wonderful masters have come into the world, somewhat similar and completely different from Hoffmann. And the world itself has changed beyond recognition. But Hoffmann continues to live in world art. Much was revealed for the first time to the intent and kind gaze of this artist, and therefore his name often sounds like a symbol of humanity and spirituality. For the great romantics, among whom Hoffmann occupies one of the most honorable places, the contradictions of life that painfully wounded them remained a mystery. But they were the first to talk about these contradictions, about the fact that the struggle with them - the struggle for the ideal - is the happiest lot of man ...

List of used literature

1. Belinsky V.G. Full composition of writings. T. 4. - L., 1954. - S. 98
2. Berkovsky N.Ya. Romanticism in Germany. SPb., 2002. S.463-537.
3. Braudo E.M. THIS. Hoffmann. - Pgd., 1922. - S. 20
4. Herzen A.I. Collected works in 30 volumes. T. 1. Hoffmann. - M., 1954. - S. 54-56.
5. Zhirmunsky V.M. German romanticism and modern mysticism. M., 1997.
6. Foreign literature of the 19th century. Romanticism. Reader historical and literary materials. Comp. A.S. Dmitriev et al. M., 1990.
7. Selected Prose of the German Romantics. M., 1979. T. 1-2.
8. History of foreign literature of the 19th century. Ed. A.S. Dmitrieva. M., 1971. 4.1.
9. History of foreign literature of the 19th century. Ed. Ya.N. Zasursky, S.V. Turaev. M., 1982.
10. History of foreign literature of the 19th century. Ed. N.P.Mikhalskaya. M., 1991. 4.1.
11. Karelsky A. Drama of German Romanticism. - M., 1992.
12. The Literary Theory of German Romanticism. - M., 1934.
13. Mirimsky I. Romanticism E.T.A. Hoffmann. Issue. 3. - M., 1937. - S. 14
14. Novikov M. "And I saw the world like this" // Literary Review. - 1996. - No. 9-10.
15. Turaev S.V. German literature// History of world literature in 9 vols. - T.6. - M.: Nauka, 1989. - S.51-55.
16. Ferman V.E. German Romantic Opera // Opera Theatre. Articles and research. - M., 1961. - S. 34
17. The artistic world of E.T.A. Hoffmann. - M.: Nauka, 1982. - 292 p.

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Hoffmann's first literary work appeared in 1809. It was the short story "Cavalier Glitch" - a poetic story about music and a musician.

So he creates for himself a special atmosphere that helps him forget about the huge bustling city, where there are many "music connoisseurs", but no one really feels it and does not understand the musician's soul. For Berlin townsfolk concerts and musical evenings- only a pleasant pastime, for Hoffmann's "Glitch" - a rich and intense spiritual life. He is tragically alone among the inhabitants of the capital, because behind his immunity to music he feels a deaf indifference to all human joys and sufferings.

Only a creative musician could so visibly describe the process of the birth of music, as Hoffmann did. In the hero's excited story about "how flowers sing to each other," the writer revived all those feelings that more than once enveloped him when the outlines and colors of the world around him began to turn into sounds for him.

That an obscure Berlin musician calls himself Gluck is no mere eccentricity. He recognizes himself as the successor and keeper of the treasures created by the great composer, carefully cherishes them as his own offspring. And therefore he himself seems to become the living embodiment of the immortality of the brilliant Glitch.

In the spring of 1814, the first book of Fantasies in the manner of Callot was published in Bamberg. Along with the short stories "Cavalier Glitch" and "Don Juan" it also contained six short essays-novellas under the general title "Kreisleriana". A year later, in the fourth book of Fantasies, the second series of Kreislerians was published, containing seven more essays.

It is no coincidence that Kreisleriana, one of Hoffmann's earliest literary works, was devoted to music. All German romantic writers gave music a special place among other arts, considering it "the spokesman for the infinite." But only for one Hoffmann, music was the second true vocation, to which he devoted many years of his life even before the beginning of literary creativity.

Great conductor, brilliant interpreter of operas by Mozart and Gluck, outstanding pianist and talented composer, author of two symphonies, three operas and a number of chamber compositions, creator of the first romantic opera Ondine, which in 1816 was successfully performed on the stage of the Royal Theater in Berlin, Hoffmann in 1804 - 1805 worked as the head of the Philharmonic Society in Warsaw, and later - the musical director of the city theater in Bamberg (1808 - 1812). It was here, forced at one time for the sake of earning money, to give more music lessons and to accompany at home evenings in the families of wealthy citizens, and Hoffmann went through all those musical sufferings that are mentioned in the first essay of the Kreisleriana, the suffering of a genuine, great artist in the society of "enlightened "burghers, who see in music lessons only a superficial tribute to fashion.

The Bamberg impressions provided rich material for literary creativity - it was to this time (1818 - 1812) that the first works of Hoffmann belong. The essay that opens "Kreislerian" - "The Musical Sufferings of Kapellmeister Kreisler" - can be considered Hoffmann's debut in the field of fiction. It was written at the suggestion of Rochlitz, editor of the Leipzig General Musical Gazette, where Hoffmann's musical reviews had been published even earlier, and published in this newspaper on September 26, 1810, together with the short story "Cavalier Gluck". Four of the six essays of the first series of "Kreislerians" and six essays from the second were first published on the pages of newspapers and magazines, and just preparing for publication the collection "Fantasy in the style of Callot", Hoffmann, having somewhat revised, combined them into a cycle.

With Kreisleriana, the image of Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler entered literature - the central figure among the enthusiastic artists created by Hoffmann, who have no place in the musty atmosphere of German philistine reality, the image that Hoffmann carried to the end of his work to make him the main character of his last novel " Worldly views of the cat Murr".

"Kreisleriana" is a unique work in terms of genre and history of creation. It includes romantic short stories ("The Musical Sufferings of Kapellmeister Kreisler", "Ombra adorata", "Kreisler's Music and Poetry Club"), satirical essays ("Thoughts on the High Importance of Music", "Information about an Educated Young Man", "The Perfect Machinist" ), musical-critical and musical-aesthetic notes ("Beethoven's instrumental music", "On the saying of Sacchini", "Extremely incoherent thoughts"), - this is a large number of free variations, united by one theme - the artist and society, - the central theme of all Hoffmann's work.

Hoffmann's thoughts on music and the position of a musician in modern society in most of the essays he put them into the mouth of Kreisler, and in some they are presented directly on behalf of the author. Sometimes (for example, in the notes "Extremely incoherent thoughts") it is even difficult to establish in question on behalf of the author or his character.

Hoffmann not only communicates the features of his biography to Kreisler's biography, but also attributes his own musical compositions to him. In the name of Kapellmeister Johann Kreisler, Hoffmann signs his musical reviews and even letters to friends. That is, Johannes Kreisler is not only Hoffmann's favorite hero, he is the literary double of the writer.

According to Kreisler (read Hoffmann), the meaning of the life of a spiritual person and the source of his inner harmony can only be in art. In the real world of profit, malice, base, mundane desires, an artist living a rich life of the spirit is an outcast, persecuted, impenetrable and lonely. “I am doomed, on my own grief, to wander here in the void, like a soul torn from the body ... Everything around me is empty, because I am not destined to meet my own soul. I am completely alone,” we read in the short story “Cavalier Glitch” . Both Hoffmann and his literary counterpart, Johannes Kreisler, could well have said the same words about themselves.

The tragic contradiction between the two worlds - the real and the illusory - was fully manifested precisely in the image of Kreisler.

Kreisler is a musician not only by the inclination of the heart, but also by necessity, he is one of those who (as Hoffmann writes with bitter irony) "are born to poor and ignorant parents or artists of the same kind, and need, chance, the impossibility of hoping for luck among the truly useful classes of society makes them what they become." He is either a bandmaster in a court theater, or a music teacher in rich houses, or an opera conductor, or a choir director in a Catholic monastery, or an unemployed musician. Being a wanderer involuntarily, moving from place to place in search of a better life, a worthy life, and often just a piece of bread, selling the precious fruits of his inspiration for gold they hate, he is everywhere looking for corners of harmony, light, beauty, but - alas! - these searches are endless, for there is no place on earth where a romantic dream would come true.

In "Kreisleriana" Hoffmann does not confine himself to expressing views on music and art only of his like-minded people - Cavalier Gluck and Kapellmeister Kreisler. The writer, possessing a penetrating vision and a subtle sense of the material world, depicts with great certainty the opposite pole of his "two-world"; he, in the words of V. G. Belinsky, knew how to "execute philistinism ... his compatriots with poisonous sarcasm."

The attitude of the philistine society towards art is expressed in the satirical essay “Thoughts on the High Importance of Music”: “The purpose of art in general is to give a person pleasant entertainment and turn him away from more serious or, rather, the only occupations appropriate to him, that is, from those that provide him bread and honor in the state, so that later, with redoubled attention and diligence, he could return to the real goal of his existence - to be a good cogwheel in the state mill ... and again begin to dangle and spin.

Johannes Kreisler, who does not want to be a "cogwheel", is constantly and unsuccessfully trying to escape from the world of philistines, and with bitter irony, the author, who himself has striven for an unattainable ideal all his life, in his last novel "The Worldly Views of Cat Murr" once again testifies to the futility of striving for absolute harmony by both tragic and comic intertwining of two biographies in "Cat Murr": the life story of the musician Kreisler, the embodiment of the "enthusiast", and Cat Murr, the embodiment of the "philistine".

In the development of 19th century art two main stages can be distinguished: the era of romanticism (the first half of the 19th century) and the era of decadence (from the end of the 50s to the first world war). The constant ferment in Europe associated with the incompleteness of the cycle of bourgeois revolutions, the development of social and national movements could hardly find a more adequate form of expression in art than romantic rebellion. Romanticism - a trend in European and American literature late XVIII - first half of XIX century. The epithet "romantic" in the 17th century served to characterize adventurous and heroic plots and works written in Romance languages ​​(as opposed to those created in classical languages). In the 18th century, this word denoted the literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. At the end of the 18th century in Germany, then in other European countries, including Russia, the word romanticism became the name artistic direction who opposed himself to classicism

Ideological premises of romanticism- disappointment in the Great French Revolution in bourgeois civilization in general (in its vulgarity, prosaic, lack of spirituality). The mood of hopelessness, despair, "world sorrow" is the disease of the century, inherent in the heroes of Chateaubriand, Byron, Musset. At the same time, they are characterized by a sense of hidden wealth and boundless possibilities of being. Hence Byron, Shelley, the Decembrist poets and Pushkin have an enthusiasm based on the belief in the omnipotence of the free human spirit, a passionate thirst for the renewal of the world. Romantics dreamed not of private improvements in life, but of a holistic resolution of all its contradictions. Many of them are dominated by the mood of struggle and protest against the evil reigning in the world (Byron, Pushkin, Petofi, Lermontov, Mickiewicz). Representatives of contemplative romanticism often tended to think about the dominance of incomprehensible and mysterious forces in life (rock, fate), about the need to submit to fate (Chateaubriand, Coleridge, Southey, Zhukovsky).

For romantics characteristic is the desire for everything unusual - for fantasy, folk legends, for "past centuries" and exotic nature. They create special world imaginary circumstances and exceptional passions. Especially, in contrast to classicism, much attention is paid to the spiritual wealth of the individual. Romanticism discovered the complexity and depth of the spiritual world of man, his unique originality ("man is a small universe"). The attention of the romantics to the peculiarities of the national spirit and culture of different peoples, to the originality of various historical eras. Hence - the requirement of historicism and nationality of art (F. Cooper, W. Scott, Hugo).

Romanticism was marked by the renewal of art forms: the creation of a genre historical novel, fantasy story, lyrical-epic poem. Lyricism has reached an unusual flowering. The possibilities of the poetic word have been significantly expanded due to its ambiguity.

The highest achievement of Russian romanticism- poetry of Zhukovsky, Pushkin, Baratynsky, Lermontov, Tyutchev Romanticism originally arose in Germany, a little later in England; it has become widespread in all European countries. The names were known to the whole world: Byron, Walter Scott, Heine, Hugo, Cooper, Anderson. Romanticism arose at the end of the 18th century and lasted until the 19th century. The emergence of romanticism is associated with an acute dissatisfaction with social reality; disappointment in the environment and impulses for a different life. To a vague but powerfully attractive ideal. This means that a characteristic feature of romanticism is dissatisfaction with reality, complete disappointment in it, disbelief that life can be built on the principles of goodness, reason, and justice. Hence the sharp contradiction between the ideal and reality (the striving for a lofty ideal). The romantic hero is a complex, passionate personality, inner world which is unusually deep, infinite; it is a whole universe full of contradictions. Romantics were interested in all passions, both high and low, which were opposed to each other. High passion - love in all its manifestations, low - greed, ambition, envy. The lowly material practice of romance was opposed to the life of the spirit, especially religion, art, and philosophy.

The world of Hoffmann's fairy tale has pronounced signs of a romantic dual world, which is embodied in the work in various ways. Romantic duality is realized in the story through a direct explanation by the characters of the origin and structure of the world in which they live. There is a local, earthly, everyday world and another world, some kind of magical Atlantis, from which man once originated. This is exactly what Serpentina tells Anselm about her archivist father Lindgorst, who, as it turned out, is the prehistoric fire elemental Salamander, who lived in magical land Atlantis and exiled to earth by the prince of spirits Phosphorus for his love for the daughter of a lily snake.

This fantastic story is perceived as an arbitrary fiction that is not of serious importance for understanding the characters of the story, but it is said that the prince of spirits Phosphorus predicts the future: people will degenerate (namely, they will no longer understand the language of nature) and only longing will vaguely remind of the existence of another world (the ancient homeland man), at this time the Salamander will be reborn and in its development it will reach a person who, having been reborn in this way, will begin to perceive nature again - this is already a new anthropodicy, the doctrine of man.

Anselm refers to the people of the new generation, as he is able to see and hear natural miracles and believe in them - after all, he fell in love with a beautiful snake that appeared to him in a flowering and singing elderberry bush. Serpentina calls this the "naive poetic soul" possessed by "those young men who, because of the excessive simplicity of their manners and their complete lack of so-called secular education, are despised and ridiculed by the crowd." Man is on the verge of two worlds: partly earthly being, partly spiritual. In fact, in all the works of Hoffmann, the world is arranged in this way. Compare, for example, the interpretation of the music and the creative act of the musician in the short story "Cavalier Glitch", music is born as a result of being in the realm of dreams, in another world:

“I found myself in a luxurious valley and listened to what flowers sang to each other. Only the sunflower was silent and mournfully bowed down to the valley with a closed corolla. Invisible ties drew me to him. He raised his head - the rim opened, and from there an eye shone towards me. And the sounds, like rays of light, stretched from my head to the flowers, and they greedily absorbed them. The sunflower petals opened wider and wider - streams of flame poured out of them, engulfed me - the eye disappeared, and I found myself in the cup of the flower.

Dvoemirie is realized in the system of characters, namely, that the characters are clearly distinguished by their affiliation or inclination to the forces of good and evil. In The Golden Pot, these two forces are represented, for example, by the archivist Lindgorst, his daughter Serpentina and the old witch, who, it turns out, is the daughter of a black dragon's feather and a beetroot.

An exception is the protagonist, who is under the equal influence of both forces, is subject to this changeable and eternal struggle between good and evil.

Anselm’s soul is a “battlefield” between these forces, see, for example, how easily Anselm’s worldview changes when he looks into Veronica’s magic mirror: only yesterday he was madly in love with Serpentina and wrote down the history of the archivist in his house with mysterious signs, and today it seems to him that he only thought about Veronica, “that the image that appeared to him yesterday in the blue room was again Veronica and that the fantastic tale of the marriage of Salamander with a green snake was only written by him, and not told to him in any way . He himself marveled at his dreams and attributed them to his exalted, due to love for Veronica, state of mind ... "

The human consciousness lives in dreams, and each of these dreams always seems to find objective evidence, but in fact all these states of mind are the result of the influence of the fighting spirits of good and evil. The extreme antinomy of the world and man is a characteristic feature of the romantic worldview.

Used by Hoffmann the color scheme in the depiction of objects from the artistic world of the "Golden Pot" betrays that the story belongs to the era of romanticism.

These are not just subtle shades of color, but necessarily dynamic, moving colors and whole color schemes, often completely fantastic: “pike-gray tailcoat”, snakes shining with green gold, “sparkling emeralds fell on him and wrapped around him with sparkling golden threads, fluttering and playing around him with thousands of lights”, “blood spattered from the veins, penetrating the transparent body of the snake and coloring it red”, “from the precious stone, as from a burning focus, rays came out in all directions, which, when combined, made up a brilliant crystal mirror.

The same feature- dynamism, elusive fluidity - sounds in the art world Hoffmann’s works (the rustle of elderberry leaves gradually turns into the ringing of crystal bells, which, in turn, turns out to be a quiet intoxicating whisper, then bells again, and suddenly everything breaks off in rude dissonance; the sound of water under the oars of a boat reminds Anselm of a whisper.

Wealth, gold, money, jewels are presented in the artistic world of Hoffmann's tale as mystical item, a fantastic magic tool, an object partly from another world. Spice taler every day - it was this payment that seduced Anselm and helped him overcome his fear to go to the mysterious archivist, it is this spice taler that turns living people into chained, as if poured into glass (see the episode of Anselm's conversation with other scribes of manuscripts, who also ended up in bottles). A precious ring from Lindhorst is able to charm a person. In dreams of the future, Veronika imagines her husband, the court councilor Anselm, and he has a “golden watch with a rehearsal”, and he gives her the latest style “nice, wonderful earrings”.

Poe's stories are generally classified into four main groups:

"terrible", or "arabesques" (“The Fall of the House of Usher”, “Ligeia”, “The Cask of Amontillado”, “William Wilson”, “Mask of the Red Death”, etc.),

satirical or "grotesque" (“Without breathing”, “Businessman”, “Devil in the bell tower”, etc.), fantastic (“Manuscript found in a bottle”, “The extraordinary adventure of a certain Hans Pfaal”, etc.)

and detective (“Murder on the Rue Morgue”, “The Secret of Marie Roger”, etc.

The core of Poe's prose legacy is "scary" stories. Their atmosphere and tonality are to some extent inherent in the stories of other groups. It was in the "terrible" stories that the main features of the writer's artistic manner were most clearly manifested. First of all, this is a combination of the unimaginable, fantastic with amazing accuracy of the image, bordering on the description of a naturalist. The delirium, the ghost, the nightmare under Poe's pen takes on material forms, becomes terribly real. The writer further enhances this effect of authenticity with the help of a first-person narration, which he constantly resorts to, and literary hoax, when the story is “disguised” as a document (“Manuscript found in a bottle”, “The Tale of the Adventures of Arthur Gordon Pym”, etc.) .

Another bright hallmark Poe's prose is the grotesque - a combination of the gruesome and the comic. The tale of the darkest subjects (for example, being buried alive in "A Premature Burial" may end funny situation, removing a depressing impression, and a heap of the most monstrous nightmares can imperceptibly turn into a parody of literary patterns ("Metzergenstein", "Duke de L" Ohm-let, etc.). The combination of mystical and parodic plans is noticeable even in one of the most "terrible" stories - "Ligeie".

An example of how Po achieves these effects is the following passage from the story "The Plague King", which depicts a company feast led by King Plague One. Here is a description of one of the participants in the feast: this is “a strangely stiff gentleman; he was crippled with paralysis and must have felt badly in his uncomfortable, albeit highly original, toilet. He was dressed in a brand new coffin. The transverse wall pressed down on the head of this man dressed in a coffin, hanging like a hood, which gave his face an indescribably funny look. Hand holes were made on the sides of the coffin, more for convenience than beauty. For all that, this outfit did not allow its owner to sit straight like the others, and lying at an angle of forty-five degrees, leaning back against the wall, he rolled up the whites of his huge protruding eyes to the ceiling, as if he himself was endlessly surprised at their monstrous size. Several of Poe's "logical" stories laid the foundation for the development of the detective genre, which has become widespread throughout the world.

In three of them (“Murder on the Rue Morgue”, “The Secret of Marie Roger”, “The Stolen Letter”), C. Auguste Dupin, the first in a series of famous literary detectives, acts. With his brilliant analytical skills, Dupin solves mysteries and solves crimes. His method is completely based on the "mathematical" approach - comparing details and building a chain of inferences.

But crime for Dupin is only an excuse for logic game. Justice or retribution does not interest him, as well as in general the world. He lives “in himself and for himself”, turning away from the petty fuss and mercantile interests of those around him. Combining romantic melancholy with a rationalistic, exploratory mindset makes Dupin typical hero Poe's prose. At the same time, Dupin's personality traits and method of logical analysis served as a model for all subsequent classics; Detective genre from A. Conan Doyle to A. Christie.

Most of satirical stories By written in the 30s. American reality is presented in these stories in a grotesque, caricatured form.

Poe anticipates the widely used in the literature of the 20th century. an artistic technique of “estrangement”, when the image is given in an unexpected, unusual perspective, and this allows you to reveal the absurdity and unnaturalness of what seems ordinary and almost normal in the hustle and bustle of everyday life. Poe's short stories can be considered the forerunner of modern science fiction. Although there are no robots or aliens in Poe's science fiction stories, they do main principle future popular type of literature: combining the fantastic nature of the topic with a scientific approach, rational analysis with the fundamentally unknowable.

Talking about a flight across the Atlantic in a hot air balloon ("The Story with a Balloon"), a flight to the Moon ("The Extraordinary Adventure of a Hans Pfaal"), crossing the Rocky Mountains ("The Diary of Julius Rodman"), Poe saturates the narrative with an abundance of physical, geographical, astronomical, mathematical information and calculations, widely uses special scientific terminology, even references to the works of scientists. This often misled the writer's contemporaries, who mistook the story for "reliable information." In the stories of this group, Poe's attraction to what lies beyond the limits of everyday existence and ordinary human experience is clearly visible.

Travelers and researchers - Pfaal, Arthur Gordon Pym, Rodman and others - are not satisfied with the philistine prose of gray everyday life and are driven beyond the horizon by an indefatigable thirst for knowledge. This side of Poe's creativity is especially close to the consciousness of people of the 20th century. All this determines the special place of Edgar Allan Poe - a poet and mathematician, a dreamer and logician, a dreamer and a rationalist, a seeker of the highest beauty and a witty mocker of the deformities of life - in the history of world classics.

Edgar Poe's achievements in the field of the theory of the genre of the novel can be summarized in the following three points:

1. Continuing the experiments begun by Irving, Hawthorne and other contemporaries, Poe completed the formation of a new genre, giving it those features that we today consider essential in defining the American romantic novel.

2. Not satisfied with practical achievements and recognizing the need for a theoretical understanding of his (and others') experience, Poe created a theory of the genre, which in in general terms outlined in three articles on Hawthorne, published in the forties of the XIX century. These articles are now regularly reprinted in all American anthologies on aesthetics and literary theory.

3. Poe's important contribution to the development of American and world short stories is the practical development of some of its genre subspecies. It is not without reason that he is considered the founder of the logical (detective) story, the science fiction novel and the psychological story.

The theory of the short story by Edgar Allan Poe does not have absolute independence, but is part of his general concept. artistic creativity. Poetry and prose, from his point of view, exist within the framework of a single aesthetic system, and the difference between them stems from the difference in goals and objectives facing them.

The theory of the Poe novel can best be represented as the sum of the requirements that every writer working in this genre must reckon with. The first of these concerns the volume or length of the work. A novella, Poe argues, should be short. A long story is no longer a story. However, in striving for brevity, the writer must observe a certain measure. A work that is too short is incapable of making a deep and strong impression, for, in his words, "without some stretch, without repetition of the main idea, the soul is rarely touched." The measure of the length of a work is determined by the ability to read it all at once, in its entirety, so to speak, "in one sitting."

It is important to note that Poe's considerations in this case completely repeat his thoughts about the size of the poem, expressed in the "Poetic Principle", "Philosophy of Creativity" and other articles devoted to poetry. And the reasons why the writer demands brevity so harshly and unconditionally are the same - the unity of impression or effect.

Stendhal. Originality of personality and creativity Analytical psychological method of Stendhal.

The pioneer of classical realism at a time when romanticism had not yet been abandoned :

a true and accurate portrayal of the person is needed. He grew up in a wealthy bourgeois family, was born 6 years before the French Revolution. Since childhood, he had a craving for writing, was fond of mathematics. After school in Grenobol, he leaves for Paris and intends to enter a mathematical school, but changes his mind and enters the school of fine arts. But, instead of apprenticeship, he joins the ranks of the French army and in 1800 goes with Napoleon on the Italian campaigns. The poet's soul could not stand it, and a year later he resigned. Dreaming of becoming a great poet, he rushes to Paris. 1802 - Stendhal in Paris. He is fond of philosophy, disappointed in Napoleon, becomes an enemy of tyranny and an ardent republican. Forever convinced of the connection between science and art. “Art uses methods discovered by science.” Since 1805, he was again in Napoleon's army - he had to eat something. 1812 - Napoleon in Russia. Stendhal too. He is delighted with the heroism and resilience of the Russian people. The abdication of Napoleon from power in 1814 and the restoration of the Bourbons put an end to Stendhal's service. Leaves for Italy, works as a journalist, writes biographies, art criticism, travel essays. Moves closer to the Italian romantics, fights with the classicists.

He formed his worldview on the basis of materialistic views. Completely denied faith. Rejected contrived morality. For him, the correct state of a person is important, when a person trusts his feelings. At the same time, a person is unthinkable outside the environment, and it is possible to study him only in a national environment. He distinguishes two passions: love and ambition. The hero of Stendhal is always a passionate person. Man is a mechanism of vanity.

In literature, Stendhal sees it as his task to consider the stages of the formation of a human character. Exploring the life of a person, Stendhal seeks to give a multifaceted analysis of his actions and deeds, to show various - virtuous and vicious - features in their life mixture. The character of a person, according to Stendhal, is his usual way that he uses in the hunt for happiness. Character is not given initially, it is formed throughout the work.

in the type of socio-psychological novel he created.

The first experience of the writer in this genre was the novel "Armans" (1827), which preceded the creation of the universally recognized masterpieces "Red and Black", "Lucien Leven" and "Parma Convent". The plot of the novel is based on the love story of two young people - Armans Zoilova and Octave de Malivera. Its public background is the life of the aristocratic salon of the Marquise de Bonnivet in the Saint-Germain suburb of Paris during the Restoration, with which the characters are related by family ties: Octave belongs to the aristocratic environment from birth, Armance is a poor relative of the Marquise de Bonnivet, Russian by birth. However, no matter how significant the history of the relationship between young heroes and the environment that killed them, the main interest and innovation of the Stendhal novel lies in the depiction of the characters’ love itself, presented in a complex process of “crystallization” - from the first vague jolts of an awakening feeling to a tragic finale. Here, Stendhal the realist, in contrast to the vaguely unsteady descriptions of the "secrets of the soul" by the romantics, who asserted the unknowability of these secrets, for the first time artistically carries out the scientifically substantiated by him previously "mathematical" accurate analysis of the "human heart", taking into account all the objective factors that determined the nature of the personality and the fate of the characters. Stendhal's first novel still bears the stamp of a kind of artistic experiment. Nevertheless, he testifies that the writer found his own way in literature, his own genre and style of a psychologist-analyst,

In 1830, Stendhal finished the novel "Red and Black", which marked the onset of the writer's maturity.

The plot of the novel is based on real events related to the court case of a certain Antoine Berthe. Stendhal found out about them by looking through the chronicle of the Grenoble newspaper. As it turned out, a young man sentenced to death, the son of a peasant, who decided to make a career, became a tutor in the family of the local rich man Mishu, but, caught in a love affair with the mother of his pupils, lost his place. Failures awaited him later. He was expelled from the theological seminary, and then from the service in the Parisian aristocratic mansion de Cardone, where he was compromised by his relationship with the owner's daughter and especially by a letter from Madame Misha, who was shot in the church by a desperate Berthe and then tried to commit suicide.

It was no coincidence that this court chronicle attracted the attention of Stendhal, who conceived a novel about the tragic fate of a talented plebeian in France during the Restoration. However, the real source only awakened the creative imagination of the artist, who was always looking for opportunities to confirm the truth of fiction with reality. Instead of a petty ambitious man, the heroic and tragic personality of Julien Sorel appears. The facts undergo no less metamorphosis in the plot of the novel, which recreates the typical features of an entire era in the main patterns of its historical development.

In an effort to cover all areas of modern public life Stendhal is akin to his younger contemporary Balzac, but he realizes this task in his own way. The type of novel he created is notable for its uncharacteristic for Balzac chronicle-linear composition, organized by the biography of the hero. In this, Stendhal gravitates towards the tradition of eighteenth-century novelists, in particular Fielding, who is highly revered by him. However, unlike him, the author of "Red and Black" builds the plot not on an adventurous basis, but on the history of the hero's spiritual life, the formation of his character, presented in a complex and dramatic interaction with the social environment. The plot is driven here not by intrigue, but by internal action, transferred to the soul and mind of Julien Sorel, each time strictly analyzing the situation and himself in it before deciding on an act that determines the further development of events. Hence the special significance of internal monologues, as if including the reader in the course of thoughts and feelings of the hero. "An accurate and penetrating image of the human heart" and defines the poetics of "Red and Black" as the brightest example socio-psychological novel in the world realistic literature XIX in.

"Chronicle of the 19th century" - such is the subtitle of "Red and Black". Emphasizing the authenticity of the depicted, he also testifies to the expansion of the object of the writer's research. If in Armance there were only “scenes” from the life of a high-society salon, then the theater of action in the new novel is France, represented in its main social forces: the court aristocracy (the de La Mole mansion), the provincial nobility (the house de Renal), the highest and the middle strata of the clergy (the Bishop of Agde, the venerable fathers of the Besancon Theological Seminary, the abbe Chelan), the bourgeoisie (Valno), small entrepreneurs (friend of the hero Fouquet) and peasants (the Sorel family).

Studying the interaction of these forces, Stendhal creates a picture of social life in France during the Restoration, striking in historical accuracy. With the collapse of the Napoleonic empire, power was again in the hands of the aristocracy and the clergy. However, the most insightful of them understand the precariousness of their positions and the possibility of new revolutionary events. To prevent them, the Marquis de La Mole and other aristocrats prepare in advance for defense, hoping to call for help, as in 1815, the troops of foreign powers. De Renal, the mayor of Verrieres, is also in constant fear of the beginning of revolutionary events, ready for any cost in order to ensure that his servants “do not slaughter him if the terror of 1793 is repeated.”

Only the bourgeoisie in "Red and Black" does not know fear and fear. Understanding the ever-increasing power of money, she enriches herself in every possible way. So does Valno, de Renal's main rival in Verrieres. Greedy and dexterous, not embarrassed in the means of achieving the goal, up to the robbery of the “subordinate” to him orphans of the poor from the charity home, devoid of pride and honor, the ignorant and rude Valno does not stop at bribery for the sake of advancing to power. In the end, he becomes the first person of Verrieres, receives the title of baron and the rights of the supreme judge, sentencing Julien to death.

In the history of the rivalry between Valno and the hereditary nobleman de Renal, Stendhal projects the general line of the social development of France, where the old aristocracy was replaced by the increasingly powerful bourgeoisie. However, the skill of Stendhal's analysis is not only that he foresaw the finale of this process. The novel shows that the "bourgeoisization" of society began long before the July Revolution. In the world surrounding Julien, not only Valno is concerned about enrichment, but also the Marquis de La Mole (he, "having the opportunity to learn all the news, played successfully on the stock exchange"), and de Renal, who owns a nail factory and buys up land, and the old peasant Sorel , for a fee yielding his "unlucky" son to the mayor of Verrieres, and later openly rejoicing at Julien's will.

The world of self-interest and profit is opposed by the hero of Stendhal, who is absolutely indifferent to money. A talented plebeian, he seemed to have absorbed the most important features of his people, awakened to life by the Great French Revolution: unbridled courage and energy, honesty and fortitude, steadfastness in moving towards the goal. He always and everywhere (whether it be de Renal's mansion or Valno's house, the Parisian palace de La Mole or the courtroom of the Verrieres court) remains a man of his class, a representative of the lower class, infringed on the legal rights of the estate. Hence the potential revolutionary nature of the Stendhal hero, created, according to the author, from the same material as the titans of 1993. It is no coincidence that the son of the Marquis de La Mole remarks: “Beware of this energetic young man! If there is another revolution, he will send us all to the guillotine.” That is how those whom he considers his class enemies, the aristocrats, think of the hero. His closeness with the brave Italian Carbonari Altamira and his friend, the Spanish revolutionary Diego Bustos, is not accidental either. It is characteristic that Julien himself feels himself to be the spiritual son of the Revolution and, in a conversation with Altamira, admits that it is the revolution that is his real element. “Is this the new Danton?” - Mathilde de La Mole thinks of Julien, trying to determine what role her lover can play in the coming revolution.

There is an episode in the novel: Julien, standing on top of a cliff, watches the flight of a hawk. Envying the soaring of a bird, he would like to become like it, rising above the surrounding world. “This was the fate of Napoleon,” the hero thinks. “Perhaps the same awaits me ...” Napoleon, whose example “gave rise to insane and, of course, unfortunate ambition in France” (Stendhal), is for Julien a kind of higher model, which the hero is guided by, choosing his path. Crazy ambition - the most important trait of Julien, the son of his age - and carries him into the camp opposite to the camp of the revolutionaries. True, while passionately desiring glory for himself, he also dreams of freedom for everyone. However, the former prevails. Julien builds daring plans to achieve glory, relying on his own will, energy and talents, in the omnipotence of which the hero, inspired by the example of Napoleon, does not doubt. But Julien lives in a different era. During the years of the Restoration, people like him seem dangerous, their energy is destructive, because it conceals the possibility of new social upheavals and storms. Therefore, Julien has nothing to think about making a worthy career in a direct and honest way.

The contradictory combination in Julien's nature of the beginning of the plebeian, revolutionary, independent and noble with ambitious aspirations, leading to the path of hypocrisy, revenge and crime, forms the basis of the complex character of the hero. The confrontation between these antagonistic principles determines the internal drama of Julien, "forced to violate his noble nature in order to play the vile role that he imposed on himself" (Roger Vaillant).

The path upward, which takes place in the novel by Julien Sorel, is the path of the loss of his best human qualities. But this is also the way to comprehend the true essence of the world of those in power. Starting in Verrieres with the discovery of moral uncleanliness, insignificance, greed and cruelty of the provincial pillars of society, it ends in the court spheres of Paris, where Julien discovers essentially the same vices, only skillfully covered and ennobled by luxury, titles, high society gloss. By the time the hero has already achieved his goal, becoming the Viscount de Verneuil and the son-in-law of the powerful Marquis, it becomes quite obvious that the game was not worth the candle. The prospect of such happiness cannot satisfy the Stendhal hero. The reason for this is the living soul that has been preserved in Julien in spite of all the violence done to it.

However, in order for this obvious to be fully realized by the hero, it took a very strong shock that could knock him out of the rut that had already become familiar. Julien was destined to survive this shock at the moment of the fatal shot at Louise de Renal. In complete confusion of feelings caused by her letter to the Marquis de La Mole, compromising Julien, he, almost without remembering himself, shot at the woman whom he selflessly loved - the only one of all who generously and recklessly gave him once true happiness, and now deceived the holy faith in her, betrayed, dared to interfere with his career.

Experienced like a catharsis ancient Greek tragedy, morally enlightens and raises the hero, cleansing him from the vices instilled by society. Finally, Julien also discovers the illusory nature of his ambitious aspirations for a career, with which he quite recently connected the idea of ​​\u200b\u200bhappiness. Therefore, while awaiting execution, he so resolutely refuses help. the mighty of the world this, still capable of rescuing him from prison, returning him to his former life. The duel with society ends with the moral victory of the hero, his return to his natural nature.

In the novel, this return is connected with the rebirth of Julien's first love. Louise de Renal - a subtle, whole nature - embodies the moral ideal of Stendhal. Her feeling for Julien is natural and pure. Behind the mask of an embittered ambitious man and a daring seducer who once entered her house, as one enters an enemy fortress that needs to be conquered, she revealed the bright appearance of a young man - sensitive, kind, grateful, for the first time knowing selflessness and the power of true love. Only with Louise de Renal did the hero allow himself to be himself, removing the mask in which he usually appeared in society.

Julien's moral revival is also reflected in the change in his attitude towards Mathilde de La Mole, a brilliant aristocrat, whose marriage was to establish his position in high society. Unlike the image of Madame de Renal, the image of Matilda in the novel, as it were, embodies the ambitious ideal of Julien, in the name of which the hero was ready to make a deal with his conscience. A sharp mind, rare beauty and remarkable energy, independence of judgments and actions, striving for a bright life full of meaning and passions - all this undoubtedly raises Matilda above the world around her of dull, sluggish and faceless high-society youth, which she openly despises. Julien appeared before her as an outstanding personality, proud, energetic, capable of great, daring, and perhaps even cruel deeds.

Just before his death at the trial, Julien gives the last, decisive battle to his class enemy, for the first time appearing before him with an open visor. Tearing off the masks of hypocritical philanthropy and decency from his judges, the hero throws a formidable truth into their faces. It is not for shooting Madame de Renal that he is sent to the guillotine. Julien's main crime lies elsewhere. The fact that he, a plebeian, dared to rebel against social injustice and rebel against his miserable fate, taking his rightful place under the sun.

Question 7. Romantic hero and romantic ideal in Hoffmann's stories

Consider the romantic features in two of Hoffmann's works: "The Golden Pot" and "Little Tsakhes ..."

1) Golden pot

romantic hero

Anselm is the main character, a romantically inclined student, very constrained in his means. He wears an old-fashioned pike-gray tailcoat and rejoices at the opportunity to earn a thaler by copying papers from the archivist Lindhorst. The young man is unlucky in everyday life, his indecisive nature causes many comic situations: his sandwiches always fall to the ground with the smeared side, if he happens to leave the house half an hour earlier than usual, so as not to be late, then he will definitely be doused from the window with soapy water. At the same time, Anselm has a "naive poetic soul" capable of throwing off "the burden of everyday life." It is to him that a poetic fairy-tale world opens up, connected with the second, fantastic life of Lindgorst (he is also the prince of the Salamander spirits from the magical land of Atlantis) and his daughters, who appear to Anselm in the guise of golden-green snakes. The fantastic invades the thick of the real everyday life.

Anselm belongs to the people of the new generation, as he is able to see and hear natural miracles and believe in them - after all, he fell in love with a beautiful snake that appeared to him in a flowering and singing elderberry bush. Serpentina calls it "a naive poetic soul", which is possessed by "those young men who, due to the excessive simplicity of their morals and their complete lack of so-called secular education, the crowd despises and ridicules."

. In The Golden Pot, these two forces are represented, for example, by the archivist Lindgorst, his daughter Serpentina and the old witch, who, it turns out, is the daughter of a black dragon's feather and a beetroot. An exception is the protagonist, who is under the equal influence of both forces, is subject to this changeable and eternal struggle between good and evil. Anselm’s soul is a “battlefield” between these forces, see, for example, how easily Anselm’s worldview changes when he looks into Veronica’s magic mirror: only yesterday he was madly in love with Serpentina and wrote down the history of the archivist in his house with mysterious signs, and today it seems to him that he only thought about Veronica, “that the image that appeared to him yesterday in the blue room was again Veronica.

The heroes of the story as a whole are distinguished by a clear romantic specificity.

Profession. Archivist Lindgorst is the keeper of ancient mysterious manuscripts, containing, apparently, mystical meanings, in addition, he is also engaged in mysterious chemical experiments and does not let anyone into this laboratory.

Anselm is a copyist of manuscripts, who is fluent in calligraphic writing. Anselm, Veronica, Kapellmeister Geerbrand have an ear for music, are able to sing and even compose music. In general, all belong to the scientific community, are associated with the extraction, storage and dissemination of knowledge.

Disease. Often, romantic heroes suffer from an incurable disease, which makes the hero seem to be partially dead (or partially unborn!) And already belonging to another world. In The Golden Pot, none of the characters are distinguished by ugliness, dwarfism, etc. romantic diseases, but there is a motif of insanity, for example, Anselm is often mistaken for a madman for his strange behavior.

Nationality. The nationality of the heroes is definitely not mentioned, but it is known that many heroes are not people at all, but magical creatures born from marriage, for example, a black dragon's feather and beetroot. Nevertheless, the rare nationality of the heroes as an obligatory and habitual element of romantic literature is still present, although in the form of a weak motive: the archivist Lindgorst keeps manuscripts in Arabic and Coptic, as well as many books “such that are written in some strange signs that do not belong to any of the known languages.

Household habits of heroes: many of them love tobacco, beer, coffee, that is, ways to bring themselves out of their normal state into an ecstatic one. Anselm was just smoking a pipe stuffed with "useful tobacco" when his miraculous encounter with an elder bush took place; the registrar Geerband “offered the student Anselm to drink a glass of beer every evening in that coffee house on his account, the registrar, and smoke a pipe until he somehow got to know the archivist ... which student Anselm accepted with gratitude”; Geerband told about how he once fell into a drowsy state in reality, which was the result of coffee exposure: “Something similar happened to me once after dinner over coffee ...”; Lindhorst has a habit of taking snuff; in the house of the rector Paulman, a punch was made from a bottle of arak, and “as soon as the alcoholic vapors rose in the head of the student Anselm, all the strangeness and wonders that he had experienced lately rose before him again.”

Portrait of heroes. For example, a few fragments of a portrait of Lindhorst scattered throughout the text will suffice: he had a piercing look of eyes that sparkled from the deep depressions of a thin, wrinkled face as if from a case, he wears gloves, under which a magic ring is hidden, he walks in a wide cloak, the skirts of which , blown by the wind, resemble the wings of a large bird, at home Lindgorst walks "in a damask dressing gown, sparkling like phosphorus."

romantic ideal

The world of Hoffmann's fairy tale has pronounced signs of a romantic dual world, which is embodied in the work in various ways. Romantic duality is realized in the story through a direct explanation by the characters origin and structure of the world in which they live. There is a local, earthly, everyday world and another world, some kind of magical Atlantis, from which man once originated.

Man is on the verge of two worlds: partly earthly being, partly spiritual. In fact, in all the works of Hoffmann, the world is arranged in this way.

Used by Hoffmann color spectrum in the depiction of objects from the artistic world of the "Golden Pot" betrays the belonging of the story to the era of romanticism. These are not just subtle shades of color, but necessarily dynamic, moving colors and whole color schemes, often completely fantastic: “pike-gray tailcoat”, snakes shining with green gold, “sparkling emeralds fell on him and wrapped around him with sparkling golden threads, fluttering and playing around him with thousands of lights", "blood spattered from the veins, penetrating the transparent body of the snake and coloring it red", "from the precious stone, as from a burning focus, rays came out in all directions, which, when combined, made up a brilliant crystal mirror" .

The dual world is realized in the system of characters, namely, in the fact that characters are clearly distinguished by affiliation or inclination to the forces of good and evil.

Duality is realized in images mirrors, which are found in large numbers in the story: a smooth metal mirror of an old fortune-teller, a crystal mirror made of rays of light from a ring on the hand of the archivist Lindgorst, Veronica's magic mirror that enchanted Anselm.

Wealth, gold, money, jewelry presented in the artistic world of Hoffmann's tale as a mystical object, a fantastic magic tool, an object partly from another world. Spice taler every day - it was this payment that seduced Anselm and helped him overcome his fear to go to the mysterious archivist, it is this spice taler that turns living people into chained, as if poured into glass (see the episode of Anselm's conversation with other scribes of manuscripts, who also ended up in bottles). A precious ring from Lindhorst is able to charm a person. In dreams of the future, Veronika imagines her husband, the court councilor Anselm, and he has a “golden watch with a rehearsal”, and he gives her the latest style “nice, wonderful earrings”.

The style of the story is distinguished by the use grotesque, which is not only the individual originality of Hoffmann, but also of romantic literature in general. “He stopped and examined a large knocker attached to a bronze figure. But as soon as he wanted to take up this hammer at the last resounding strike of the tower clock on the Cross Church, when suddenly the bronze face twisted and grinned into a disgusting smile and terribly flashed with rays of metal eyes. Oh! It was an apple vendor from the Black Gate…”, “the cord of the bell went down and turned out to be a gigantic white transparent snake…”, “with these words he turned and left, and then everyone realized that the important little man was, in fact, a gray parrot”.

Fiction allows you to create the effect of a romantic dual world: there is a local, real world, where ordinary people think about a portion of coffee with rum, double beer, smart girls, etc. a thousand multi-colored rays, and fought with the dragon, which with its black wings hit the shell ... ".

Fantasy in Hoffmann's story comes from grotesque imagery: one of the signs of an object with the help of the grotesque is increased to such an extent that the object, as it were, turns into another, already fantastic. See, for example, the episode with Anselm moving into a flask. The image of a man bound by glass, apparently, is based on Hoffmann's idea that people sometimes do not realize their lack of freedom - Anselm, having got into a bottle, notices the same unfortunate people around him, but they are quite satisfied with their position and think that they are free, that they they even go to taverns, etc., and Anselm has gone mad (“thinks he is sitting in a glass jar, but stands on the Elbe bridge and looks into the water”).

Irony. Sometimes two realities, two parts of the romantic dual world intersect and give rise to funny situations. So, for example, drunken Anselm begins to talk about the other side of reality known only to him, namely, about the true face of the archivist and Serpentina, which looks like nonsense, since those around are not ready to immediately understand that “Mr. the garden of the prince of spirits Phosphorus in hearts because a green snake flew away from him. However, one of the participants in this conversation - the registrar Geerbrand - suddenly showed awareness of what was happening in the parallel real world: “This archivist is indeed a damned Salamander; he flicks out fire with his fingers and burns holes in frock coats in the manner of a fiery pipe. Carried away by the conversation, the interlocutors completely stopped responding to the amazement of those around them and continued to talk about heroes and events understandable only to them, for example, about the old woman - “her dad is nothing but a tattered wing, her mother is a bad beetroot.” The author's irony makes it especially noticeable that the characters live between two worlds.

Irony, as it were, dispels a holistic perception of a thing (a person, an event), settles a vague feeling of understatement and "misunderstanding" of the world around.

2) Baby Tsakhes

Hero

The main character - Balthazar - is a creator, not a consumer, therefore it is to him that the magician Prosper Alpanus reveals a big secret. Only Balthazar can free the world from spiritual emptiness, since he is endowed with inner harmony. It is he who tells the world the love of the nightingale and the rose, as he is able to see beauty.

He is melancholy, immersed in nature and reflection. Like Anselm, he is the only one given the opportunity to see the other side of the world.

Zinnober (Tsakhes) is ugly, like Quasimodo, only here the opposite is true: he seemed beautiful on the outside, but turned out to be ugly inside.

romantic ideal

The ideal in the work, antagonism to reality - this is the kingdom under Demetrius, when people lived in harmony and did not engage in any nonsense.

“Surrounded by mountain ranges, this small country, with its green, fragrant groves, flowering meadows, noisy streams and merrily murmuring springs, was likened - and especially because there were no cities at all, but only friendly villages and in some places lonely castles , -

wonderful, beautiful garden, the inhabitants of which seemed to walk in it for

own joy, unaware of the burdensome burden of life. Everyone knew that

this country is ruled by Prince Demetrius, but no one noticed that she

manageable, and everyone was very pleased with it. Persons who love total freedom

in all his endeavors, the beautiful countryside and mild climate, could

to choose for himself a better residence than in this principality, and therefore it happened

that, among others, beautiful fairies of a good tribe settled there,

who, as you know, place warmth and freedom above all else.

Now everything is sad and terrible.

Irony

Balthasar's love interest: "Balthasar's subject of poetic delight - Candida, with her legible handwriting and a couple of books read - does not indicate the sophistication of the taste of a romantic enthusiast." Irony haunts Hoffmann's heroes to the very end, even to a happy ending. Alpanus, having arranged for a safe reunion of Balthazar with his beloved, gives them a wedding gift - a “country house”, on the plot of which excellent cabbage grows, pots never boil in the magic kitchen, porcelain does not beat in the dining room, carpets do not get dirty in the living room. “The ideal, which, having come to life, by the cunning will of Hoffmann, turns into quite philistinical comfort, thus which the hero shunned and fled; this is after a nightingale after a scarlet rose - an ideal cuisine and excellent cabbage !!! ”. And here, please, in the story kitchen paraphernalia.

Philosophy and aesthetics of German romanticism. German romantics living in a burgher philistine environment, which was hardly touched by such grandiose historical events as the Great French revolution, involving the French in the process of a complete restructuring of society, as no one sharply contrasted the ideal and reality, paying special attention to the development of the concept of the ideal.

Ideal and reality. The ideal is “this is the mystical manifestation of our deepest spirit in the image, this is the expression of the world spirit, this is the humanization of the divine, in a word: this presentiment of the infinite in the visible and imaginary is the romantic, wrote in 1807 the German poet L. Uhland. And although F. Schlegel in his “Athenaean Fragments” stated: “The ideals that are considered unattainable are not ideals, but mathematical phantoms of purely mechanical thinking”, in the treatise “Ideas” he expressed the idea that the basis of poetry is the infinite, and “ the universe can neither be explained nor comprehended, but only discovered and contemplated.

On the contrary, reality appears to the German romantics as low and transient, it is only a "sign of eternity"; the ideal, the spiritual is given to perceive only by man, but, having been embodied, it is distorted. Hence the conclusion: “Earthly existence in its external expression will never be able to fully reflect the work of the spirit ...” (LA von Arnim). German romantics accept Herder's position on the equal rights of the aesthetic ideals of different countries and different peoples, but only as "ever-changing forms" of the incarnation of the one God, to whom "the Gothic temple is just as dear as the Greek one, and the rough military music of the savages just as delights his ear, how exquisite the choirs and church hymns ”(W. G. Wackenroder).

The ideal of nature is comprehended not by reason and science, but intuitively, through art. “The poet comprehends nature better than the mind of a scientist,” Novalis argued. Thus, the poet is a very special person: “What people are in relation to other creatures of the earth, so artists are in relation to people” (F. Schlegel).

A poet, an artist, a musician are not subject to any rules, their visionary talent is above any canons of art. The subjective moment in art is intensifying: “Only the individual is interesting, hence everything classical is not individual” (Novalis). But from the absoluteness of the ideal, it follows that, along with typification through the exceptional, the German romantics assert typification as an absolutization (primarily of moral categories, but also of concretely sensory images, therefore their heroes are titanic, etc.). "Absolutization, giving universal meaning, classification individual moment, individual situation, etc. constitute the essence of any transformation into romanticism...” (Novalis). But the romantics carried out their own typology of characters, dividing people into those to whom the ideal is accessible, and those to whom it is inaccessible (into "musicians" and "just good people" according to E.T.A. Hoffmann). In the short story Don Juan (1812, published 1813), Hoffmann wrote: “Only a poet is able to comprehend a poet; only the soul of romance can access the romantic; only a spirit inspired by poetry, who has taken initiation in the midst of a temple, is able to comprehend what is said by the initiated in a burst of inspiration.

The doctrine of romantic irony is the pinnacle of romantic aesthetics. It is designed to overcome the gap felt by romantics between the ideal and reality.

Hoffman

The beginning of the creative path. Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann (1776 - 1822) - the largest representative of German romanticism. Hoffmann's biography embodies the contradictions of a romantic personality forced to live in a philistine world alien to her. By nature, he was brilliantly gifted. Music was his greatest passion, and it was no coincidence that he changed his third name, Wilhelm, given to him by his parents, for the middle name of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Hoffmann wrote the first German romantic opera, Ondine (1814, post. 1816). He was a wonderful artist and a great writer. But Hoffmann was born in the prim and boring Koenigsberg in a bureaucratic family, where he studied at the law faculty of the university, then was in the civil service in various cities. The French invasion, which caught Hoffmann in Warsaw (1806), deprived him of work and earnings. Hoffmann decides to devote himself to art, serves as a conductor, gives music lessons, writes music reviews. After the defeat of Napoleon, Hoffmann from 1814 was again in the public service in Berlin.

Kreisler image. This romantic character, passing from work to work, closest to the author, his alter ego, first appears in the essay-story “The Musical Sufferings of Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler” (1810), one of the first literary works of Hoffmann. The author plays with the reader, coming up with unexpected compositional moves.

The text is allegedly the notes of the musician Kreisler on the edition of the notes of J. S. Bach's variations. He makes notes about the past evening at the house of the Privy Councilor Rederlein, where he is forced to accompany the Councilor's mediocre daughters Nanette and Marie. Hoffmann resorts to irony: “... Fraulein Nanette has achieved something: a melody heard only ten times in the theater and then repeated no more than ten times on the piano, she is able to sing in such a way that you can immediately guess what it is.” Then - an even greater test for Kreisler: adviser Ebershtein sings. Then the guests begin to sing in chorus - and next to it there is a game of cards. The writer conveys this episode in this way: "I loved - forty-eight - carefree - pass - I did not know - whist - pangs of love - a trump card." Kreisler is asked to play fantasies, and he plays 30 variations of Bach, becoming more and more carried away by brilliant music and not noticing how all the guests scatter, only the sixteen-year-old footman Gottlieb listens to him.

Hoffmann's characteristic division of people into musicians and "just good people" appears in the essay. Already in this short story, Hoffmann uses a technique characteristic of his subsequent work - showing events from two opposite points of view: Kreisler sees the guests engaged in music! townsfolk, while they see the Kreisler E as a boring eccentric.

"Fantasy in the manner of Callot". "Creisleria" a)> in 1814, the first volume of the collection “Fantasy in the manner of Callot” was published, in which, in addition to the short stories “Cavalier Gluck” and “Don Giovanni >> Hoffmann, he included the Kreislerian cycle, consisting of six c) rk: ov-novels. in the fourth volume (1815) seven more works of this cycle appear. In 1819, Hoffmann republished the collection, grouping his material into two volumes, the second half of the Kreisleriana VO was in the second volume. Romantic essays-novellas are here next to satirical essays (“Perfect machine ^ x”) > musical-critical notes (“Extremely incoherent thoughts”), etc. Kreisler acts as a lyrical hero, in many respects autobiographical, it is often impossible to distinguish him from the author. Those around him believe that he has lost his mind (this is reported in the preface, which refers to his disappearance).

Hoffman owns the entire spectrum of comic _ from the humorous ora, irony to sarcasm. You combine the comic with the grotesque, consummate master which he beat j aK in the short story “Information about an educated young man >> we read: “The heart is touched when you see how widely culture is spreading among us.” This is quite enlightening f^ase. The comic effect is due to the fact that she meets Milo, an educated monkey, with a friend - a monkey Pishch ^ living "in North America. Milo learned to speak, psch at ^ play the piano, and now he is no different from PEOPLE.

Even more indicative of the romanticism is Hoffmann's short story The Enemy of Music. The hero of the novel, a young man who is truly talented, understands music - and he< енно поэтому слывет «врагом музыки». О нем ходят анекдоты, Во время исполнения бездарной оперы сосед ему сказал: «Какое прекрасное место!» - «Да, место хорошее, хотя немного сквозит г>> _ he replied. The young man appreciates I live music Kreisle is next to him: a ra who "has been reviled enough for his eccentricities." Again, the technique of opposing the two is used, TO check the same facts.

"Golden Pot". In the third volume of "Fantasy%" (1814), Hoffmann included the story-tale "The Golden Pot", which he yells with his the best work. The romantic D1 VO world appears in the work as a combination of two plans, a narrative - real and fantastic.

For the soul of the hero, a student of Anselm, supernatural forces enter the battle, the good ones - the spirit of the Salamanders, in everyday life. archivist Lindhorst, and the evil ones - a witch, she is an old woman (p GOVka with apples and fortune-telling Frau Rauerin. The student leaves the cheerful Veronica and connects with the green snake - the beautiful daughter of Salamander Serpentina, receiving from the sorcerer the Golden Pot.

This is a symbol similar to the blue flower of Novalis: at the moment of betrothal, Anselm must see how a fiery lily sprouts from a pot, must understand its language and know everything that is open to disembodied spirits. Anselm disappears from Dresden; apparently, he found his happiness in Atlantis, connecting with Serpentina. Veronica, on the other hand, consoled herself in her marriage to court counselor Geerbrand.

The grotesque and irony of Hoffmann in the story-tale extend to the description of both worlds, real and fantastic, and to all the characters. One of the consequences of the development of the principle of folklore fairy-tale permeability of space by a romantic writer is the ability of heroes to simultaneously reside in both worlds, making different actions. So, Anselm is simultaneously imprisoned by the Salamander in a glass jar for the temporary preference of Veronica Serpentina and stands on the bridge, looking at his reflection in the river. This is a kind of reception, the opposite of duality and complementing it. And again, the opposition of two points of view is used. Typical example: Anselm hugs an elderberry (in his dreams it is Serpentina), and those passing by think that he has lost his mind. But Anselm himself thinks that he just scattered the apples of the old woman merchant, and she sees in them her children, whom he ruthlessly tramples. This is how whole system doubling techniques, conveying the idea of ​​a romantic dual world.

Other works. Among the works of Hoffmann are the novel "Devil's Elixirs" (1815-1816), fairy tales "Little Tsa-khes, nicknamed Zinnober" (1819), "Lord of the Fleas" (1822), collections "Night stories" (vols. 1 - 2 , 1817), "The Serapion Brothers" (vol. 1 _4 5 1819-1821), " Latest stories» (publ. 1825). The story-tale "The Nutcracker, or the Mouse King" (1816) became especially famous thanks to P.I. Tchaikovsky's ballet "The Nutcracker" (1892).

"Worldly views of the cat Murr". Hoffmann's last, unfinished novel, The Worldly Views of Murr the Cat, Together with Fragments of the Biography of Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler, Accidentally Surviving in Waste Sheets (1820-1822), is the result of his writing activity, one of his most profound creations.

The composition of the novel is so original that it is difficult to find even a remote analogue of it in all previous literature. In the Publisher's Preface, the author plays a game with the reader, presenting the book as a manuscript written by a cat. Since the manuscript was prepared for printing extremely carelessly, it contains fragments of another manuscript, sheets from which the cat used "partly for lining, partly for drying the pages." This second manuscript (fragments of the biography of the brilliant musician Johannes Kreisler) is wedged into the text of the “non-musician” Cat Murr, creating counterpoint, reflecting the separation of the ideal and reality.

Thus, Hoffmann used montage in literature, and in that version, which was discovered for cinema in 1917 by director L.V. Kuleshov: fragments of two films with completely different, unrelated plots, being glued alternately, create a new story in which they are connected through viewer associations.

The publisher also cites the misprints noticed (instead of “glory” one should read “tear”, instead of “rat” - “roof”, instead of “I feel” - “I honor”, ​​instead of “destroyed” - “beloved”, instead of “flies” - “spirits ”, instead of “meaningless” - “profound”, instead of “value” - “laziness”, etc.). This humorous remark actually has deep meaning: Hoffmann, almost a century earlier than 3. Freud, with his Psychopathology of Everyday Life, emphasizes that typos are not accidental, they unconsciously reveal the true content of a person’s thoughts.