"INTELLECTUAL NOVEL"
The term " intellectual novel" was first proposed by Thomas Mann. In 1924, the year the novel “The Magic Mountain” was published, the writer noted in the article “On the Teachings of Spengler” that the “historical and world turning point” of 1914-1923. with extraordinary force intensified in the minds of his contemporaries the need to comprehend the era, and this was refracted in a certain way in artistic creativity. “This process,” wrote T. Mann, “blurs the boundaries between science and art, infuses living, pulsating blood into abstract thought, spiritualizes the plastic image and creates that type of book that... can be called an “intellectual novel.” T. Mann also classified the works of Fr. as “intellectual novels”. Nietzsche. It was the “intellectual novel” that became the genre that for the first time realized one of the characteristic new features of realism of the 20th century - the acute need for interpretation of life, its comprehension, interpretation, which exceeded the need for “telling”, the embodiment of life in artistic images. In world literature he is represented not only by the Germans - T. Mann, G. Hesse, A. Döblin, but also by the Austrians R. Musil and G. Broch, the Russian M. Bulgakov, the Czech K. Capek, the Americans W. Faulkner and T. Wolfe , and many others. But T. Mann stood at its origins. Never before and never since (after the Second World War, the characteristic tendency of prose was to turn - with new possibilities and means - to reflect the concrete) has literature sought with such persistence to find scales that lie outside it for judging modernity. A characteristic phenomenon of the time was the modification of the historical novel: the past became a convenient springboard for clarifying the social and political springs of modernity (Feuchtwanger). The present was permeated with the light of another reality, different and yet somehow similar to the first. Multi-layeredness, multi-composition, the presence of layers of reality far removed from each other in a single artistic whole became one of the most common principles in the construction of novels of the 20th century. Novelists articulate reality. They divide it into life in the valley and on the Magic Mountain (T. Mann), on the worldly sea and the strict solitude of the Republic of Castalia (G. Hesse). They isolate biological life, instinctive life and the life of the spirit (German “intellectual novel”). The province of Yoknapatawfu (Faulkner) is created, which becomes the second universe, representing modernity. First half of the 20th century put forward a special understanding and functional use of myth. Myth has ceased to be, as usual for the literature of the past, a conventional garment of modernity. Like many other things, under the pen of writers of the 20th century. the myth acquired historical features, was perceived in its independence and isolation - as a product of distant antiquity, illuminating repeating patterns in common life humanity. The appeal to myth widely expanded the time boundaries of the work. But besides this, the myth, which filled the entire space of the work (“Joseph and his brothers” by T. Mann) or appeared in separate reminders, and sometimes only in the title (“Job” by the Austrian I. Roth), provided the opportunity for endless artistic play, countless analogies and parallels, unexpected “meetings”, correspondences that throw light on modernity and explain it. The German “intellectual novel” could be called philosophical, meaning its obvious connection with the traditional philosophizing in artistic creativity for German literature, starting with its classics. German literature has always sought to understand the universe. A strong support for this was Goethe's Faust. Having risen to a height not reached by German prose throughout the second half of the 19th century, the “intellectual novel” became a unique phenomenon of world culture precisely because of its originality. The very type of intellectualism or philosophizing was of a special kind here. In the German “intellectual novel”, its three largest representatives - Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, Alfred Döblin - have a noticeable desire to proceed from a complete, closed concept of the universe, a thoughtful concept of the cosmic structure, to the laws of which human existence is “subjected”. This does not mean that the German “intellectual novel” soared in the sky and was not connected with the burning problems of the political situation in Germany and the world. On the contrary, the authors named above gave the most profound interpretation of modernity. And yet the German “intellectual novel” strived for an all-encompassing system. (Outside the novel, a similar intention is obvious in Brecht, who always sought to connect the most acute social analysis with human nature, and in early poems with the laws of nature.) The very national type of philosophy on the basis of which this novel grew was strikingly different than, for example, from Austrian philosophy, taken as a kind of wholeness. Relativity, relativism - an important principle of Austrian philosophy (in the 20th century, it was most clearly expressed in the works of E. Mach or L. Wittgenstein) - indirectly affected the deliberate openness, incompleteness and unsystematic nature of such an outstanding example of Austrian literary intellectualism as the novel “The Man Without properties" by R. Musil. Through any number of mediations, literature was powerfully influenced by the type of national thinking that had developed over the centuries. Of course, the cosmic concepts of the German novelists did not pretend to be a scientific interpretation of the world order. The very need for these concepts had, first of all, an artistic, aesthetic meaning (otherwise the German “intellectual novel” could easily be accused of scientific infantilism). Thomas Mann accurately wrote about this need: “The pleasure that can be found in a metaphysical system, the pleasure that is delivered by the spiritual organization of the world in a logically closed, harmonious, self-sufficient logical structure, is always predominantly of an aesthetic nature; it is of the same origin as the joyful satisfaction that art gives us, which organizes, shapes, makes visible and transparent the confusion of life” (article “Schopenhauer”, 1938). But, perceiving this novel, according to the wishes of its creators, not as philosophy, but as art, it is important to understand some of the most important laws of its construction. These include, first of all, the obligatory presence of several non-merging layers of reality, and above all the momentary existence of man and the cosmos. If in the American “intellectual novel”, in Wolfe and Faulkner, the heroes felt themselves to be an organic part of the vast space of the country and the universe, if in Russian literature the common life of people traditionally carried the possibility of a higher spirituality in itself, then the German “intellectual novel” is multi-component and complex artistic whole. The novels of T. Mann or G. Hesse are intellectual not only because there is a lot of reasoning and philosophizing. They are “philosophical” by their very construction - by the obligatory presence in them of different “floors” of being, constantly correlated with each other, assessed and measured by each other. The work of combining these layers into a single whole constitutes the artistic tension of these novels. Researchers have repeatedly written about the special interpretation of time in the twentieth-century novel. What was special was seen in free breaks in action, in movements into the past and future, in arbitrary slowing down or speeding up the narrative in accordance with the subjective feeling of the hero (this last also applied to “The Magic Mountain” by T. Mann). However, in fact, time was interpreted in the twentieth century novel. much more varied. In the German “intellectual novel” it is discrete not only in the sense of the absence of continuous development: time is also torn into qualitatively different “pieces”. In no other literature is there such a tense relationship between historical time, eternity and personal time, the time of human existence. A single time exists for Faulkner, it is indivisible, although it is experienced differently by different characters. “Time,” Faulkner wrote, “is a fluid state that does not exist outside the momentary incarnations of individual people.” In the German “intellectual novel” it is precisely “existing”... Different hypostases of time are often even spaced, as if for greater clarity, in different spaces. Historical time laid its course below, in the valley (as in “The Magic Mountain” by T. Mann, and in “The Glass Bead Game” by Hesse). Above, in the Berghof sanatorium, in the rarefied mountain air of Castalia, some other “hollow” time flows, time distilled from the storms of history. The internal tension in the German philosophical novel is largely generated by precisely that clearly perceptible effort that is needed to keep in integrity and unite time that has actually disintegrated. The form itself is saturated with actual political content: artistic creativity fulfills the task of drawing connections where gaps seem to have formed, where the individual seems to be free from obligations to humanity, where he apparently exists in his own separate time, although in reality he is included in the cosmic and “ great historical time” (M. Bakhtin). The image of a person’s inner world has a special character. The psychologism of T. Mann and Hesse differs significantly from the psychologism of, for example, Döblin. However, the German “intellectual novel” as a whole is characterized by an enlarged, generalized image of a person. The interest lies not in clarifying the secrets of the hidden inner life of people, as was the case with the great psychologists Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, or in describing the unique twists of personality psychology, which was the undoubted strength of the Austrians (A. Schnitzler, R. Shaukal, St. Zweig, R. Musil , H. von Doderer), - the hero acted not only as an individual, not only as a social type, (but with more or less certainty) as a representative of the human race. If the image of a person became less developed in the new type of novel, then it became more voluminous, containing - directly and immediately - broader content. Is Leverkühn a character in Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus? This image, indicative of the 20th century, represents to a greater extent not a character (there is a deliberate romantic uncertainty in it), but a “world”, its symptomatic features. The author later recalled the impossibility of describing the hero in more detail: the obstacle to this was “some kind of impossibility, some kind of mysterious impermissibility.” The image of a person has become a capacitor and container of “circumstances” - some of their indicative properties and symptoms. The mental life of the characters received a powerful external regulator. This is not so much the environment as the events of world history and the general state of the world. Most German “intellectual novels” continued the tradition that developed on German soil in the 18th century. genre of education novel. But education was understood according to tradition (“Faust” by Goethe, “Heinrich von Ofterdingen” by Novalis) not only as moral improvement. The heroes are not busy curbing their passions and violent impulses, they do not set themselves lessons, they do not accept programs, as, for example, the hero of Tolstoy’s “Childhood”, “Adolescence” and “Youth” did. Their appearance does not change significantly at all, their character is stable. Gradually they are freed only from the accidental and superfluous (this was the case with Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, and with T. Mann’s Joseph). What happens is, as Goethe said about his Faust, “relentless to the end life activities , which is becoming higher and cleaner." The main conflict in the novel, dedicated to the upbringing of a person, is not internal (not Tolstoy’s: how to reconcile the desire for self-improvement with the desire for personal well-being) - the main difficulty in knowledge. If a hero. “Fiestas” Hemingway said: “I don’t care how the world works. All I want to know is how to live in it,” then such a position is impossible in a German educational novel. You can only know how to live here by knowing the laws by which the enormous integrity of the universe lives. You can live in harmony or, in case of disagreement and rebellion, in opposition to eternal laws. But without knowledge of these laws, the guideline is lost. It is impossible to know how to live then. In this novel, causes often operate that lie beyond human control. Laws come into force, in the face of which actions according to conscience are powerless. It makes an even greater impression, however, when in these novels, where the life of the individual is made dependent on the laws of history, on the eternal laws of human nature and the cosmos, a person nevertheless declares himself responsible, takes upon himself “the whole burden of the world,” when Leverkühn, the hero of “Doctor Faustus” by T. Mann admits to the audience, like Raskolnikov, his guilt, and Deblin’s Hamlet thinks about his guilt. In the end, knowledge of the laws of the universe, time and history (which, undoubtedly, was also a heroic act) is not enough for the German novel. The task becomes to overcome them. Following the laws is then perceived as “convenience” (Novalis) and as a betrayal of the spirit and the person himself. However, in actual artistic practice, distant spheres were subordinated in these novels to a single center - the problems of the existence of the modern world and modern man. Thomas Mann (1875-1955) can be considered the creator of a new type of novel not because he was ahead of other writers: the novel “The Magic Mountain”, published in 1924, was not only one of the first, but also the most definitive example of new intellectual prose. Before The Magic Mountain, the writer was only looking for new ways to reflect life. After “Buddenbrooks” (1901), an early masterpiece that absorbed the experience of nineteenth-century realism, and partly the technique of impressionistic writing, after a number of no less significant short stories (“Tristan”, “Tonio Kroeger”) - he sets himself new tasks, perhaps in the short story "Death in Venice" (1912) and in the novel "Royal Highness" (1909). The changes in his poetics that occurred after this, in the most general terms, consisted in the fact that the essence and being of reality, as they appeared to the writer, were no longer completely dissolved in the individual and individual. If the history of the Buddenbrooks family still naturally reflected the end of an entire era and the life organized in a special way by it, then later - after the World War and the period of revolutionary upheavals - a creature that became many times more complex modern life expressed by the writer in other ways. The main subject of his research was not what he described in his new novels. The life he depicted quite concretely and tangibly, although it captivated the reader in itself, still played a service role, the role of an intermediary between it and the more complex essence of reality that was not expressed by it. This is the essence that was discussed in the novel. After the publication of The Magic Mountain, the writer published a special article, polemicizing with those who, not having had time to master new forms of literature, saw in the novel only a satire on morals in a privileged high-mountain sanatorium for pulmonary patients. The content of The Magic Mountain was not limited to those frank debates about the important social and political trends of the era that occupy dozens of pages of this novel. An unremarkable engineer from Hamburg, Hans Kastorp, ends up in the Berghof sanatorium and gets stuck here for seven long years for quite complex and vague reasons, which by no means boil down to his love for the Russian Claudia Shosha. The educators and mentors of his immature mind are Lodovico Settembrini and Leo Nafta, whose disputes intersect many of the most important problems of Europe, which stands at a historical crossroads. The time depicted by T. Mann in the novel is the era preceding the First World War. But this novel is filled with questions that have become extremely urgent after the war and revolution of 1918 in Germany. Settembrini represents in the novel the noble pathos of old humanism and liberalism and is therefore much more attractive than his repulsive opponent Naphtha, who defends strength, cruelty, and the predominance in man and humanity of the dark instinctive principle over the light of reason. Hans Castorp, however, does not immediately give preference to his first mentor. The resolution of their disputes cannot at all lead to a resolution of the ideological knots of the novel, although in the figure of Naphtha T. Mann reflected many social trends that led to the victory of fascism in Germany. The reason for Castorp’s hesitation is not only the practical weakness of Settembrini’s abstract ideals, which lost their importance in the 20th century. support in reality. The reason is that the arguments between Settembrini and Naphtha do not reflect the complexity of life, just as they do not reflect the complexity of the novel. Political liberalism and an ideological complex close to fascism (Nafta in the novel is not a fascist, but a Jesuit, dreaming of totalitarianism and the dictatorship of the church with the fires of the Inquisition, the execution of heretics, the banning of free-thinking books, etc. ), the writer expressed it in a relatively traditional “representative” way. The only thing that is extraordinary is the emphasis placed on the clashes between Settembrini and Naphtha and the number of pages devoted to their disputes in the novel. But this very pressure and this extremeness are needed by the author in order to identify as clearly as possible for the reader some of the most important motives of the work. The clash of distilled spirituality and rampant instincts occurs in “The Magic Mountain” not only in disputes between two mentors, nor only in political public programs it is also realized in life. The intellectual content of the novel is deep and expressed much more subtly. As a second layer, on top of what is written, giving living artistic concreteness the highest symbolic meaning (as it was given, for example, to the Magic Mountain itself, isolated from the outside world - a test flask where the experience of learning life is carried out), T. Mann conducts the most important themes for him, and the theme about the elementary, unbridled and instinctive, strong not only in the feverish visions of Naphtha, but also in life itself. When Hans Castorp first walks along the corridor of the sanatorium, an unusual cough is heard behind one of the doors, “as if you were seeing the insides of a person.” Death does not fit into the Berghof sanatorium in the solemn evening dress in which the hero is accustomed to greeting him on the plain. But many aspects of the idle existence of the inhabitants of the sanatorium are marked in the novel by emphasized biologism. The large meals greedily devoured by sick and often half-dead people are terrifying. The inflated eroticism reigning here is terrifying. The disease itself begins to be perceived as a consequence of promiscuity, lack of discipline, and inadmissible revelry of the bodily principle. Through looking at illness and death (Hans Castorp’s visit to the rooms of the dying), and at the same time at birth, the change of generations (chapters dedicated to memories of his grandfather’s house and the font), through the hero’s persistent reading of books about the circulatory system, the structure of the skin, etc. . and so on. (“I made him experience the phenomenon of medicine as an event,” the author later wrote) Thomas Mann talks about the same topic that is most important to him. Gradually and gradually, the reader grasps the similarity of various phenomena, gradually realizes that the mutual struggle between chaos and order, bodily and spiritual, instincts and reason occurs not only in the Berghof sanatorium, but also in universal existence and in human history. In the same way, Doctor Faustus (1947), a tragic novel that grew out of humanity’s experiences during the years of fascism and world war, is only externally structured as a consistent chronological biography of the composer Adrian Leverkühn. The chronicler, Leverkühn's friend Zeitblom, talks first about his family and the passion of Leverkühn's father Jonathan for alchemy, various strange and mysterious tricks of nature, and generally “reflections on the elements.” Then the conversation turns to Leverkühn's hometown of Kaisersaschern, which has preserved its medieval appearance. Then, in strictly chronological order, about Leverkühn’s years of studying composition with Kretschmar and their general views on music. But no matter what these and the following chapters of Doctor Faustus are devoted to, we are, in essence, not about the objects brought to the fore, but about the reflection on different planes of the same several themes that are important for the author. The author talks about the same thing when the novel talks about the nature of music. Music in the understanding of Kretschmar and in the work of Leverkühn is both arch-systemic and at the same time irrational. Using the example of the history of music, ideas about the crisis of European humanism, which has nourished culture since the Renaissance, are woven into the fabric of the work. Using the example of Beethoven, the very sound of his works, conveyed in words (Chapter VIII), the novel indirectly presents the concept, widely adopted after the works of Nietzsche, according to which, after the proud ascension and separation of the arrogant “I” from nature, after the ensuing torment In his unbearable isolation, the personality returns to the mystical, elementary and instinctive, to the irrational foundations of life. This last stage is already taking place in modern music, in the work of Leverkühn, which is both precisely calibrated and “bursting with the heat of the underworld.” Far beyond the boundaries of this creativity, in historical life there was a rampant of instincts - in 1933, when barbarism triumphed in Germany for twelve years. A novel telling about the tragic life of Levorkün, who agreed, like Faust from medieval German folk books, to conspire with the devil (not for the sake of knowledge, but for the sake of unlimited possibilities in musical creativity), a novel telling about the reckoning not only with death, but also with impossibility for the hero to love, is “voiced” by the counterpoint of many motives and themes. The combination of their sounds creates one of the most profound artistic reflections of the destinies of Germany in the first half of the 20th century. Of great importance in the works of Thomas Mann is the idea of the “middle” - the idea of the creative mediation of man as the center of the universe between the sphere of the “spirit” and the sphere of the organic, instinctive, irrational, which need mutual limitation, but also fertilization by each other. This idea, like the contrasting vision of life, which always disintegrated under the writer’s pen into opposite principles: spirit - life, illness - health, chaos - order, etc. - is not an arbitrary construction. A similar bipolar perception of reality is characteristic of other representatives of the “intellectual novel” in Germany (in G. Hesse it is the same spirit - life, but also momentariness - eternity, youth - old age), and for the German classics (Faust and Mephistopheles in Goethe’s tragedy ). Through many mediations, they reflect the tragic feature of German history - the highest rises of culture and “spirit” for centuries did not find realization here in practical social life. As K. Marx wrote, “... the Germans reflected in politics on what other peoples were doing.” The German “intellectual novel” of the 20th century, no matter what stratospheric heights it soared to, responded to one of the deepest contradictions in national reality. Moreover, he called to recreate the whole, to unite together the divergent ranks of life. For the modest hero of The Magic Mountain, Hans Castorp, the idea of “mastering contradictions” remained a momentary insight (chapter “Snow”). The hero now reveals what was persistently, but unobtrusively, revealed to the reader over hundreds of pages of the novel. “Man is the master of contradictions,” concludes Hans Castorp. But this means an elusive opportunity and a difficult task, and not an externally gifted solution. The question that worried all the great novelists of the 20th century, the question of how to live correctly, is perceived by Thomas Mann as a constantly facing task for everyone. In the tetralogy “Joseph and His Brothers” (1933-1942), completed in emigration, the idea of “mastering contradictions” was assessed as the most important for the education of the human race. “In this book,” argued Thomas Mann, “the myth was knocked out of the hands of fascism.” This meant that instead of the irrational and instinctive as primordial and determining for man and human history (it was in this understanding of mythology that attracted fascism), T. Mann showed, unfolding in four books a brief biblical legend about Joseph the Beautiful, how even in prehistoric times the formation of moral foundations of humanity, as an individual, standing out from the group, learned to curb his impulses, learned to coexist and cooperate with other people. In “Joseph and His Brothers” T. Mann portrayed a hero engaged in creative work government activities. This was an important aspect for all German anti-fascist literature. A few years later, G. Mann's dilogy about Henry IV was created. At the time of the destruction of human values undertaken by fascism, German literature in exile defended the need for life-building and creation that meets the interests of the people. Humanistic German culture also became a support for faith in the future. In written between parts of the tetralogy about Joseph " little novel "Lotte in Weimar" (1939) T. Mann created the image of Goethe, representing another Germany in all the richness of its possibilities. And yet the writer’s work was not distinguished by either simplicity of solutions or superficial optimism. If “The Magic Mountain,” and even more so “Joseph and His Brothers,” still has reason to be considered educational novels, since their heroes still see before them the possibility of knowledge or fruitful practical activity, then in “Doctor Faustus” there is no one to educate. This is truly a “novel of the end,” as the author himself called it, a novel in which various themes are brought to their limit: the death of Leverkühn, the death of Germany. The image of a cliff, an explosion, a limit unites into a single consonance the different motifs of the work: the dangerous limit to which art has come; the last line to which humanity has come. The creative image of Hermann Hesse (1877-1962) is in many ways close to Thomas Mann. The writers themselves were aware of this closeness, which manifested itself both in the organic reliance on German classics and in the often identical attitude to the reality of the 20th century. Similarities, of course, did not exclude differences. Hesse's "Intellectual Novels" are a unique artistic world, built according to its own special laws. If for both writers the work of Goethe remained a high example, then Hesse is characterized by a living perception of romanticism - Hölderlin, Novalis, Eichendorff. The continuation of these traditions were not so much the early neo-romantic experiences of the writer, which were largely dependent and epigonic (collection of poems “Romantic Songs”, 1899; lyrical prose “An Hour After Midnight”, 1899; “Posthumously published notes and poems of Hermann Lauscher”, 1901; “Peter Kamensind”, 1904), he became the successor of romanticism, which enriched the realism of the twentieth century, when his work indirectly reflected the tragic events of our time. Like Thomas Mann, the milestone in Hesse's development was the First World War, which radically changed his perception of reality. The first experience of its reflection was the novel “Demian” (1919). Enthusiastic readers (T. Mann was one of them) did not guess the author of this work, published under a pseudonym. With all the spontaneity of youth, it conveyed the confusion of mind and feelings caused by the young hero’s collision with the chaos of reality. Life did not want to develop into a single coherent picture. The bright childhood in the parental home was not connected not only with the dark abysses of life that opened up to the teenager Sinclair back in the gymnasium. Nor did it connect with the dark impulses in his own soul. It was as if the world had fallen apart. It was this chaos that was a reflection of the world war, which broke into the life of the heroes only in the last pages. The collision of different faces of life, of “non-gluing” reality, became after “Demian” one of the main features of Hesse’s novels, a sign reflected in their modernity. This perception was prepared by his own fate. Hesse is one of those writers whose life plays a special role in their work. He was born in provincial Swabia, in the family of a Protestant missionary, who spent many years in India and then continued to live in the interests of the mission. This environment instilled in the writer high ideals, but not a knowledge of life. Revolutions and discoveries were to become the law of this biography. Like other creators of the “intellectual novel,” Hesse did not depict the reality of a global catastrophe even after Demian. His books omit what was the main subject of the anti-war novels of E.M. Remarque (“On western front Without Changes,” 1928) or A. Zweig (“The Dispute about Non-Commissioned Officer Grisha,” 1927), and in other literature - A. Barbusse or E. Hemingway. Nevertheless, Hesse's work reflected modernity with great accuracy. The writer had, for example, the right to claim in 1946 that he predicted the danger of fascism in his novel Steppenwolf, published in 1927. Following the main direction of his work, Hesse, more keenly than many German writers, perceived the increasing share of the unconscious in the private and public lives of people (popular approval of the First World War in Germany, the success of fascist demagoguery). During the First World War, the writer was especially struck by the fact that culture, spirituality, “spirit” as a separate pure sphere no longer existed: the vast majority of cultural figures sided with their imperialist governments. The writer deeply experienced the special position of man in a world that has lost all moral guidelines. In the novel “Demian,” as later in the story “Klein and Wagner” (1919) and the novel “Steppenwolf,” Hesse showed a person as if cut from different materials. Such a person is labile. Two faces - the pursued and the pursuer - are visible in the appearance of the main character of "Steppenwolf" Harry Haller. Once in the magical Magic Theater, which serves the author as a kind of screen onto which the state of souls in pre-fascist Germany was projected, Harry Haller sees in the mirror thousands of faces into which his face disintegrates. Harry's schoolmate, who has become a theology professor, enjoys shooting at passing cars at the Magic Theater. But the confusion of all concepts and rules extends much wider. Suspicious saxophonist and drug addict Pablo, as well as his girlfriend Hermine, turn out to be life teachers for Harry. Moreover, Pablo reveals an unexpected similarity with Mozart. Of great importance for Hesse was the study of human unconscious life in the works of Z. Freud and, especially, G.K. Cabin boy. Hesse was a passionate defender of the individual. But in order to come to oneself, the personality had to, Hesse believed, throw off the masks imposed on it, become in the full sense itself or, as Jung puts it, a “self,” including both consciousness and the unconscious impulses of a person. At the same time, unlike many contemporary writers (for example, St. Zweig), Hesse was not interested in the whimsical twists of individual psychology, not in what separates people, but in what unites them. In the Magic Theater depicted in Steppenwolf, Harry's face disintegrates into many faces. The images lose their clear contours, converge, and move closer to each other. And this secret unity runs like a golden thread through many of Hesse’s works. "Steppenwolf", as well as the novel "Demian" and the story "Klein and Wagner", are among the series of Hesse's works that to the greatest extent reflected the chaos and fragmentation of their time. These books constitute a sharp contrast with his later work, with works, the most important of which were the story “Pilgrimage to the Land of the East” (1932) and the novel “The Glass Bead Game” (1930-1943). But this contradiction is superficial. And not only because in both the 10s and 20s Hesse created works full of harmony (“Siddhartha”, 1922), and the harmony of his later work includes the tragedy of time. Hesse was always faithful to the main direction of his work - he was focused on the inner life of people. In the relatively peaceful years of the Weimar Republic, not trusting this, as he put it, “shaky and gloomy state,” he wrote books full of a sense of approaching catastrophe. On the contrary, when the catastrophe happened, an even, unquenchable light shone in his works. In “Pilgrimage to the Land of the East,” as in “The Glass Bead Game,” Hesse painted a reality that practically did not exist, about which people only guessed from the expressions of each other’s faces. Both of these works are light and transparent, like a mirage. They are ready to take off and disappear into the air. But Hesse’s dreams had their own basis. They were more firmly rooted in reality than the terrible reality of fascism. Hesse's mirages were destined to survive fascism and triumph in reality. In “Pilgrimage to the Land of the East,” Hesse depicted a fantastic journey through centuries and spaces of people who met by chance, among whom were the author’s contemporaries, and the heroes of his works, and heroes of the literature of the past. The external plot is the story of the apostasy of the main character, who bears the initials of the author (G.G.). But in the story there is also an opposite, powerfully sounding theme, affirming the indestructible brotherhood of humanity. In the same way, in The Glass Bead Game there are several layers of content that mutually complement and correct each other. The plot does not reveal, as it might seem, the full meaning of the novel. The action in The Glass Bead Game is set in a future that has left the era of world wars far behind. On the ruins of culture, from the ineradicable ability of the spirit to be reborn, the Republic of Castalia arises, preserving the cultural riches accumulated by humanity inaccessible to the storms of history. Hesse’s novel posed a question that was most relevant for the 20th century: should the wealth of the spirit be kept in all its purity and inviolability in at least one place in the world, because with their “practical use,” as the same 20th century proved, they often lose their purity, turning into anti-culture and anti-spirituality? Or is spirit in “disuse” just a meaningless abstraction? It is on the collision of these ideas that the main plot core of the novel is built - disputes between two friends-opponents, Joseph Knecht, a modest student, and then a student, who over the years became the chief master of the Game in Castalia, and the scion of a noble patrician family, representing the sea of \u200b\u200blife - Plinio Designori. If you follow the logic of the plot, victory is on Plinio's side. Knecht leaves Castalia, having come to the conclusion that its existence outside world history is illusory; he goes to people and dies trying to save his only student. But in the novel, as in the story that preceded it, the opposite idea is clearly expressed. In the biographies of Knecht and other possible versions of his life attached to the main text, the main character of one of them is Dasa, i.e. the same Knecht leaves the world forever and sees the meaning of his existence in solitary service to the forest yogi. The most meaningful idea for Hesse, which he drew from the religions and philosophies of the East, was the relativity of opposites. The deep tragedy of this harmonious book, a tragedy that reflected the situation of modern reality, lay in the fact that none of the truths asserted in the novel were absolute, that none of them, according to Hesse, could be surrendered forever. The absolute truth was neither the idea of contemplative life, proclaimed by the forest yogi, nor the idea of creative activity, behind which stood the centuries-old tradition of European humanism. The antagonists in Hesse's novels not only oppose each other - they are also connected. Mysteriously connected opposite friend to a friend the characters are Harry Haller and Hermine, Mozart and Pablo in Steppenwolf. In the same way, Joseph Knecht and Plinio Designori not only argue furiously, but agree, see that each other is right, and then change places, obeying the complex patterns of the work. All this did not at all mean that Hesse was omnivorous and the relativism of his work. On the contrary, both before and now Hesse was filled with the greatest demands on people. The hero's name - Knecht - means "servant" in German. Hesse's idea of service is far from simple. It is no coincidence that Knecht ceases to be a servant of Castalia and goes to the people. It is no coincidence that his Indian incarnation Dasa went into forest solitude. The man was faced with the task of clearly seeing the changing outlines of the whole and its moving center. To realize the idea of service, Hesse's hero had to bring his desire, the law of his own personality, into conformity with the productive development of society. Hesse's novels provide neither lessons nor final answers or solutions to conflicts. The conflict in The Glass Bead Game is not Knecht’s break with Castalian reality; Knecht breaks and does not break with the republic of the spirit, remaining a Castalian and beyond its borders. The true conflict lies in the courageous assertion of the individual’s right to a dynamic correlation between himself and the world, the right and responsibility to independently comprehend the contours and tasks of the whole and subordinate his destiny to them. The work of Alfred Döblin (1878-1957) is in many ways the opposite of the work of Hesse and Thomas Mann. What is highly characteristic of Döblin is something that is not characteristic of these writers - an interest in the “material” itself, in the material surface of life. It was precisely this interest that connected his novel with many artistic phenomena of the 20s in various countries. The 1920s saw the first wave of documentary films. Accurately recorded material (in particular, a document) seemed to guarantee comprehension of reality. In literature, montage has become a common technique, displacing the plot (“fiction”). It was montage that was central to the writing technique of the American Dos Passos, whose novel Manhattan (1925) was translated in Germany in the same year and had a certain influence on Döblin. In Germany, Döblin's work was associated at the end of the 20s with the style of the “new efficiency”. As in the novels of Erich Kästner (1899-1974) and Hermann Kesten (b. 1900) - two of the greatest prose writers of the “new efficiency”, in Döblin’s main novel “Berlin - Alexanderplatz” (1929) a person is filled to the limit with life. If people's actions did not have any decisive significance, then, on the contrary, the pressure of reality on them was decisive. As if in full accordance with the characteristic ideas of the “new efficiency”, Döblin showed his hero - the former cement worker and bricklayer Franz Biberkopf, who served in prison for the murder of his fiancee, and then decided to become decent at all costs - in powerless battles with this reality. More than once Biberkopf gets up, takes on a new business, acquires new love and everything in his life begins anew. But each of these attempts is doomed. At the end of the novel, Franz Biberkopf, powerless and crippled, ends his life as a night watchman in a run-of-the-mill factory. Like many other outstanding works of the “new efficiency”, the novel captured the crisis situation in Germany on the eve of the rise to power of fascism in the elements of lawless crime. But Döblin’s work not only came into contact with the “new efficiency”, it was wider and deeper than this literature. The writer spread the widest carpet of reality before his readers, but his artistic world had more than just this dimension. Always wary of intellectualism in literature, convinced of the “epic weakness” of T. Mann’s works, Döblin himself, to no less an extent, although in his own special way, “philosophized” in his works. Few people in the literature of the 20th century. was fascinated, like Döblin, by the quantity, the mass. In his novels, very diverse in concept and dedicated to a variety of eras (“The Three Leaps of Wang Loon,” 1915, a novel about the religious opposition movement of the poor in China in the 18th century; “Mountains, Seas and Giants,” 1924, a utopian novel from the distant future of the earth; "November 1918", 1937-1942, - a trilogy about the revolution of 1918 in Germany), Döblin always, with the exception of his last novel "Hamlet, or the Long Night Ends", depicted collisions of enormous proportions that were set in motion. blocks of reality. Unlike T. Mann and Hesse, he was focused precisely on what was of little importance in their novels - direct conflict, mutual struggle. But this mutual struggle, even in “Berlin - Alexanderplatz,” was not reduced only to the hero’s attempt to resist the oppression of social circumstances. Döblin's novel about a man who had served his prison sentence and had been cut off from all paths to a "decent life" was not like the novel by Hans Fallada, who followed a different path, "Who Once Tried the Prison Chowder" (1934), where the hero's attempts to win a modest place in life and constituted the essence of the content. Even the organization of the material itself, using the “objective” method of editing familiar to the 1920s, was filled with lyrical, philosophical, and intellectual meaning in Döblin’s novel. Franz Biberkopf experienced not only the pressure of circumstances - he experienced the oppression of the indestructible mechanisms of life, space, and the universe. A heavy mass - life - is approaching the hero like an “iron roller”. The description of the Chicago slaughterhouses - a large montage that breaks the story about Biberkopf - not only expressed the inhumanity of the surrounding life (although it undoubtedly served this purpose), but was also a figurative expression of its mercilessness, subjecting all its creatures to continuous destruction and destruction. “There is a reaper, his name is death,” sounds the biblical saying in the novel. The alternation of different slices of life - biological, everyday, social, political and, finally, transcendental, eternal, cosmic - immeasurably expands the world of Döblin's novel. It is this world in all its manifestations that puts pressure on a person and causes attempts at resistance. Researchers have repeatedly written about Döblin's “stream of consciousness,” usually insisting on his dependence on Joyce. Döblin actually gave Joyce's Ulysses a glowing review. It is also important that the German translation of “Ulysses” appeared in the late 20s, during the time Döblin was working on “Berlin - Alexanderplatz”. The writer, however, did not borrow someone else's technique. Döblin’s “stream of consciousness” had different artistic goals than Joyce’s. He had to not only, as was the case with Joyce, show the inner world of a person as directly as possible, without mediation, without thoughts that had time to take shape to communicate to others. Döblin perceived the very collision of internal and external in a deeply dramatic way: even his body was external in relation to a person, which could hurt, causing “me” suffering. With such a worldview, human resistance to reality seemed tragically difficult and ultimately hopeless. For many years, at a time of fascination with the ideas of Buddhism. which affected many other German writers (Hesse, young Feuchtwanger), Döblin saw a solution in the idea of non-resistance. The only possible manifestation of the conscious role of a person opposing the iron laws of existence seemed to be heroic selflessness, realized in passivity and weakness. These ideas were most fully expressed in Döblin’s “Chinese” novel “The Three Leaps of Wang Lung.” The contrast between activity and weakness with the preference given to the latter can be found in Döblin’s grandiose “Latin American” trilogy “The Land Without Death” (1935-1948), and in the “November 1918” trilogy, and in the novel “Berlin - Alexanderplatz” . Parallels to these ideas of Döblin can be found in R. Musil’s novel “Man Without Qualities”, and in the works of G. Hesse, and in the novels of one of the greatest German novelists of this time, G.H. Jann (1894-1959), who remained almost unknown outside Germany. When applied to social and political life, this idea, however, gave Döblin serious doubts. If the writer was on the side of weakness, it was because he did not accept the cult of strength, violence, and thoughtless activity, which was propagated by fascism. Before him was the European reality of the first half of the twentieth century. He saw Nazism approaching and then triumphing for twelve years. The people resisting political reaction were already present in “Berlin - Alexanderplatz”, where the development of the plot was accompanied not only by sayings from the Bible, but also by lines from the “Internationale”. In the novel No Mercy (1935), written in exile, Döblin pins his hopes on the struggle of the proletariat, in which he now sees the most powerful opposition force. In this novel, the revolutionary struggle is shown as if “from the inside,” through the consciousness of the main character, the capitalist Karl, devastated by the meaninglessness of his life. However, Karl dies with a white handkerchief in his hands, not having time to reach the red barricades. In the “November 1918” trilogy, Döblin unfolds a wide epic canvas before the reader. Among the outstanding works of German literature dedicated to the revolution (novels by B. Kellermann, E. Gleser, L. Feuchtwanger, L. Renn, etc.), there is no equal in scope to the Döblin trilogy. But the author’s attitude towards the revolution is not clear. Deeply sympathizing with the rebellious proletariat, Spartacists, K. Liebknecht, depicting the top of Social Democracy with bitter sarcasm, the writer at the same time believes that the revolutionary movement lacked a high idea. Having drawn closer to Catholicism in the last years of his life, Döblin dreamed of combining popular indignation and faith, revolution and religion. In Döblin's latest novel, Hamlet or the End long night” (1956) responsibility for history is placed on the weak shoulders of the individual. In this work, the influence of existentialism is noticeable, with its characteristic idea of resistance without hope of success. In post-war development European literature Döblin's novel is remarkable, however, as one of the first experiments in reckoning with the past, in bringing a person to the court of history. “Hamlet” is distinguished by in-depth psychologism, which was not previously characteristic of the writer. The action is confined to the tight confines of family proceedings. The son of the English writer Allison, crippled in the war, tries to find out the complicity of everyone, and above all his parents, in the upheavals experienced by humanity, accusing them of passivity and conciliation. The boundaries of the plot, which constrains the action, are expanded in a way unusual for the author: breadth is achieved in Hamlet not by comparing different “floors of the world”, but by inserted short stories commenting on the main action. The best examples of the social and historical novel in many cases developed a technique close to the “intellectual novel.” Among the early victories of realism of the 20th century. include the novels of Heinrich Mann, written in the 1900-1910s. Heinrich Mann (1871-1950) continued the centuries-old traditions of German satire. At the same time, like Weerth and Heine, the writer experienced significant influence from French social thought and literature. It was French literature that helped him master the genre of the socially accusatory novel, which acquired unique features from G. Mann. Later, G. Mann discovered Russian literature. The name of G. Mann became widely known after the publication of the novel “The Land of Jelly Shores” (1900). In the original, the novel is called “Schlarafenland”, which promises the reader an acquaintance with a fabulous land of prosperity. But this folklore name is ironic. G. Mann introduces the reader to the world of the German bourgeoisie. In this world, everyone hates each other, although they cannot do without each other, being connected not only by material interests, but also by the nature of everyday relationships, views, and the belief that everything in the world is bought and sold. The author creates an image according to the laws of caricature, deliberately shifting proportions, sharpening and exaggerating the characteristics of the characters. G. Mann's characters, depicted with sharp strokes, are characterized by the rigidity and immobility of masks. “Geometric style” by G. Mann is one of the variants of the convention so characteristic of realism of the 20th century. The author constantly balances on the brink of authenticity and plausibility. But his social sense and skill as a satirist do not allow the reader to doubt the accurate reflection of the essence of the phenomenon. The creature is exposed, “brought out,” and itself becomes, as in a caricature or poster, the subject of direct artistic depiction. Already in this, G. Mann’s letter is close to the technique of the “intellectual novel” that emerged later. G. Mann gained worldwide fame with his novel “The Loyal Subject,” completed before the First World War. In 1916, it was printed in only 10 copies; The general German public became acquainted with The Loyal Subject through the 1918 edition, and in Russia the novel was published in 1915, having been translated from the manuscript. The novel “The Loyal Subject,” along with the novels “The Poor” (1917) and “The Head” (1925), formed the “Empire” trilogy. The hero of the novel is not one of many, he is the very essence of loyalty, its essence embodied in a living character. The novel was structured as a biography of a hero who, from childhood, worshiped power - a father, a teacher, a policeman. Studying at the university, serving in the army, returning to his hometown, the factory that he headed after the death of his father, a profitable marriage, the fight with the liberal Buk, the leader of the “party of the people” - the author needs all these pictures in order to once again emphasize the main properties of Gesling's nature. Like teacher Gnus from the early novel “Teacher Unrath” (1905), Gesling understands life, only in this he sees the possibility of self-realization. Lifelikeness is transformed by the mechanics of interaction between a person and circumstances, which invariably occupied G. Mann. The story about Diedrich Goesling records his ever-changing social position (the same applies to many heroes in other novels by G. Mann). The writer was not interested in a consistent description of the hero’s life, but Gesling’s social attitude is visible in every detail - the posture and gesture of a subordinate or ruler, the desire to express strength or, on the contrary, hide fear. G. Mann represents a cross-section of the entire German society, all its social strata from Kaiser Wilhelm II to the Social Democrats. Gesling quickly turns into an automatically acting robot, and society itself is just as mechanical. In conversations and reactions to what is happening, the stereotypical psychology of interdependent and interconnected people is revealed. Nonentities crave power, nonentities get it. In the article “To My Soviet Readers,” published in Pravda on July 2, 1938, G. Mann wrote: “Now it is clear to everyone that my novel “Loyal Subject” was neither an exaggeration nor a distortion.<...>The novel depicts the previous stage of development of the type who then achieved power." The type of social novel created by Heinrich Mann is related to many other works - novels by Erich Kästner and Hermann Kesten, designed in the style of “new efficiency”, the famous anti-fascist novel by Klaus Mann (1906-1949) “Mephisto” (1936). All of them achieve the utmost clarity of the “drawing”, demonstrating to the reader some important patterns of reality. Of course, in German literature there were many social novels created on other creative grounds. Suffice it to name E.M. Remarque (1898-1970) with his best anti-war novel “All Quiet on the Western Front”, the novels “Three Comrades”, “Black Obelisk”, etc. A special place belongs to the novels of Hans Fallada (1893-1947). His books were read in the late 20s by those who had never heard of Döblin, Thomas Mann or Hess. They were bought with meager earnings during the years of economic crisis. Not distinguished by either philosophical depth or special political insight, they posed one question: how can a small person survive? “Little man, what’s next?” - was the name of the novel published in 1932, which enjoyed enormous popularity. The constant feature of Fallada's novels, which opened his hearts, was not only his excellent knowledge of the daily life of the working people, but also the author's frank affection for his heroes. Fallada began with novels in which the situation of the main characters is almost hopeless. But the heroes, and with them the reader, do not leave hope. The author and readers passionately want their beloved hero to win for himself at least a modest place in life. The charm of Fallada's novels lies in the correspondence of their poetics to the very logic of life according to which everyone lives and hopes. In the 30s, Fallada, who remained in Nazi Germany, wrote, along with many minor works, his great novels “A Wolf Among Wolves” (1937) and “Iron Gustav” (1938). But the writer’s main achievement was his last novel, “Everyone Dies Alone” (1947). The work of G. Fallada is an example that proves the inexhaustibility of German literature in the first half of the 20th century. traditional “life-likeness”, traditional forms of realism. The German historical novel is largely dependent on the technique of the “intellectual novel.” Its defining feature in Heinrich Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, Bruno Frank, Stefan Zweig is the transfer of purely modern, urgent problems that concern the writer as a witness and participant in the social and ideological struggle of his time, into the setting of the distant past, modeling them in a historical plot, i.e. ., in other words, the modernization of history or the historicization of modernity. Within this general characteristic of the historical novel of the new type, the range of transitions and varieties is quite large: from the “modernization of history,” i.e. a novel in which the plot, basic facts, description of everyday life, national and temporal flavor are historically accurate, but modern motivations and problems are introduced into the conflicts and relationships of the characters (“The Ugly Duchess” or “The Jew Suess” by L. Feuchtwanger), before the “historicization of modernity”, i.e. a novel that is, in essence, a historically costumed modernity, a novel of allusions and allegories, in which completely modern events and persons are depicted in a conditionally historical shell (“The False Nero” by L. Feuchtwanger or “The Affairs of Mr. Julius Caesar” by B. Brecht) .
Literature
Mann T. Buddenbrooks. Magic mountain. Doctor Faustus. Mann G. Loyal Subject. The youth of King Henry IV. Hesse G. The Glass Bead Game. Döblin A. Berlin - Alexanderplatz. History of German literature. T. V. 1918-1945. M., 1976. Leites N.S. German novel 1918-1945 (evolution of the genre). Perm, 1975. Pavlova N.S. Typology of the German novel. 1900-1945. M., 1982. Apt S.K. Above the pages of Thomas Mann. M., 1980. Fedorov A.A. Thomas Mann. Time for masterpieces. M., 1981. Rusakova A.V. Thomas Mann. L., 1975. Berezina L.G. Hermann Hesse. L., 1976. Karalashvili R. The world of Hermann Hesse’s novel. Tbilisi, 1984.
The “intellectual novel” united various writers and different trends in world literature of the 20th century: T. Mann and G. Hesse, R. Musil and G. Broch, M. Bulgakov and K. Chapek, W. Faulkner and T. Wolfe, etc. d. But the main feature of the “intellectual novel” is the acute need of 20th century literature to interpret life, to blur the lines between philosophy and art.
T. Mann is rightfully considered the creator of the “intellectual novel”. In 1924, after the publication of “The Magic Mountain,” he wrote in the article “On the Teachings of Spengler”: “Historical and world turning point 1914 - 1923. with extraordinary force intensified in the minds of his contemporaries the need to comprehend the era, which was refracted in artistic creativity. This process erases the boundaries between science and art, infuses living, pulsating blood into abstract thought, spiritualizes the plastic image and creates the type of book that can be called an “intellectual novel.” T. Mann classified the works of F. Nietzsche as “intellectual novels.”
One of birth characteristics The “intellectual novel” is myth-making. Myth, acquiring the character of a symbol, is interpreted as a coincidence of a general idea and a sensory image. This use of myth served as a means of expressing the universals of existence, i.e. repeating patterns in the general life of a person. The appeal to myth in the novels of T. Mann and G. Hesse made it possible to replace one historical background with another, expanding the time frame of the work, giving rise to countless analogies and parallels that cast light on modernity and explain it.
But despite the general trend of an increased need to interpret life, to blur the lines between philosophy and art, the “intellectual novel” is a heterogeneous phenomenon. The variety of forms of the “intellectual novel” is revealed by comparing the works of T. Mann, G. Hesse and R. Musil.
The German “intellectual novel” is characterized by a well-thought-out concept of a cosmic device. T. Mann wrote: “The pleasure that can be found in a metaphysical system, the pleasure that is delivered by the spiritual organization of the world in a logically closed, harmonious, self-sufficient logical structure, is always predominantly of an aesthetic nature.” This worldview is due to the influence of Neoplatonic philosophy, in particular the philosophy of Schopenhauer, who argued that reality, i.e. the world of historical time is only a reflection of the essence of ideas. Schopenhauer called reality "maya", using a term from Buddhist philosophy, i.e. ghost, mirage. The essence of the world is distilled spirituality. Hence Schopenhauer's dual world: the world of the valley (the world of shadows) and the world of the mountain (the world of truth).
The basic laws of constructing the German “intellectual novel” are based on the use of Schopenhauer’s dual worlds: in “The Magic Mountain”, in “Steppenwolf”, in “The Glass Bead Game” reality is multi-layered: this is the world of the valley - the world of historical time and the world of the mountain - the world of true essence. Such a construction implied the delimitation of the narrative from everyday, socio-historical realities, which determined another feature of the German “intellectual novel” - its hermeticity.
The tightness of the “intellectual novel” of T. Mann and G. Hesse gives rise to a special relationship between historical time and personal time, distilled from socio-historical storms. This genuine time exists in the rarefied mountain air of the Berghof sanatorium (The Magic Mountain), in the Magic Theater (Steppenwolf), in the harsh isolation of Castalia (The Glass Bead Game).
About historical time, G. Hesse wrote: “Reality is something with which under no circumstances is worth satisfying.”
to fight and that should not be deified, for it is an accident, i.e. the garbage of life."
R. Musil's "intellectual novel" "Man without Properties" differs from the hermetic form of the novels of T. Mann and G. Hesse. The work of the Austrian writer contains the accuracy of historical characteristics and specific signs of real time. Viewing the modern novel as a “subjective formula for life,” Musil uses the historical panorama of events as the backdrop against which the battles of consciousness are played out. “A Man Without Qualities” is a fusion of objective and subjective narrative elements. In contrast to the complete closed concept of the universe in the novels of T. Mann and G. Hesse, R. Musil's novel is conditioned by the concept of infinite modification and relativity of concepts.
Thomas Mann (1875 – 1955)
T. Mann's creative path spans more than half a century - from the 90s XIX century to the 50s of the XX century. The writer’s work embodied one of the characteristic features of 20th century art. – artistic synthesis: a combination of the German classical tradition (Goethe) with the philosophy of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. For the early T. Mann - the period from the 90s to the 20s of the XX century - the Nietzschean concept of “Dionysian aestheticism”, glorifying the “vital impulse” (the irrational foundations of life) and asserting the aesthetic justification of life, is very important. The “Dionysian” orgiastic perception is contrasted with the position of contemplation and reflection, which is defined by Nietzsche as a rational Apollonian principle that kills the “vital impulse.”
The creative evolution of T. Mann is due to the constant attraction and repulsion of Nietzschean philosophy. This ambiguous attitude towards Nietzsche’s ideas is embodied in the writer’s mature works (“The Magic Mountain”, “Joseph and His Brothers”, “Doctor Faustus”) in the idea of the “middle”, i.e. synthesis of the “Dionysian” orgiastic perception of life and the “Apollo” principle of art, permeated with the light of spirituality and reason (synthesis of the sphere of spirit and the sphere of the irrational).
This idea of the “middle” breaks down into dialectical opposites: spirit - life, illness - health, chaos - order. The idea of the “middle” included the concept of “burgher culture,” which T. Mann defined as a highly developed element of life, a kind of summary definition of European humanistic culture. The element of burgherism, in the writer’s concept, is the eternal evolution of life forms, the crown of which is man, and the most important conquests are love, kindness, and friendship. Linking the origin of the burghers with successful times in history - with the Renaissance, T. Mann believed that even in such unfortunate times as the 20th century, these humanistic principles of human relationships cannot be destroyed. The concept of “burgher culture” was developed by the writer in a number of articles: “Lubeck as a form of spiritual life”, “Essays on my life”, all articles about Goethe, about Russian literature. The artistic synthesis of T. Mann’s ideas is formalized into the method of “humanistic universalism”, i.e. perception of life in all its diversity. T. Mann contrasts the “burgher” culture with decadence based on the “tragic pessimism” of Schopenhauer, who elevates the troubles and evils of life into a universal law.
Early short stories by T. Mann - "Tonio Kroeger"(1902) and "Death in Venice"(1912) – represent shining example embodiment of the Nietzschean concept of “Dionysian aestheticism”. The bipolarity of the writer’s worldview is expressed in the polarity of the types of heroes: Hans Hansen (“Tonio Kröger”) and Tadzio (“Death in Venice”) - the personification of the healthy organic forces of life, its direct perception, not clouded by a screen of reflection and introspection.
Tonio Kroeger and the writer Aschenbach embody the type of “contemplative artist”, for whom art serves as the highest form of knowledge of the world, and perceive life through the screen of bookish experiences. Hans Hansen's appearance: “golden-haired”, blue-eyed is not only an individual trait, but also a symbolic one.
the ox of a genuine “burgher” for the early T. Mann. The longing for blue-eyed and golden-haired people that Tonio Kröger is obsessed with is not only a longing for specific people - Hans Hansen and Inge Holm, but it is a longing for spiritual integrity and physical perfection.
The concept of “burgherism” at this stage bears clear features of the influence of Nietzschean philosophy and is equivalent to the concept of a vital impulse that embodies the irrational foundations of life. Hans Hansen and Tadzio perceive life in its synthesis: as pain and pleasure, as the apotheosis of sensations in their immediate manifestations. Tonio Kroeger and Aschenbach perceive life one-sidedly, elevating its negative features into a kind of universal law. Unlike their opponents, they are not participants in life, but its contemplators. Therefore, the art they create is contemplative and, from T. Mann’s point of view, flawed. Using Nietzsche’s term “decadence,” which the German philosopher used to designate romanticism and the philosophy of Schopenhauer, the writer defines with this term the art of a contemplative type, reproducing life only from the standpoint of negative personal experience.
Thus, in the worldview of the early T. Mann, two definitions of art appear: false, or decadent, and genuine, burgher. Over the course of the writer’s creative biography, these concepts are filled with ever new meaning, which will be due to a change in his attitude towards the philosophy of F. Nietzsche.
In his final novel, Doctor Faustus, T. Mann will call decadent art the reproduction of the irrational foundations of life, which are reflected in the music of Adrian Leverkühn, “bursting with the heat of the underworld.”
The basis of the philosophical structure of the novel "Magic Mountain" is the idea of "middle". The novel is characterized by a special interpretation of time. Time in The Magic Mountain is discrete not only in the sense of the absence of continuous development, but it is also torn into qualitatively different pieces. Historical time in the novel is time in the valley, in the world of everyday vanity. Upstairs, in the Berghof sanatorium, time passes, distilled from the storms of history. The novel tells the story of a young man, engineer G. Castorp, the son of “honorable burghers,” who ends up in the Berghof sanatorium and gets stuck there for seven years for quite complex and vague reasons. In a report dedicated to The Magic Mountain, T. Mann emphasized that this novel cannot be classified as an educational novel, since main conflict not in the pursuit of self-improvement and not in acquiring positive experience, but in search of new ideas about the essence of man and existence. The hero, according to the tradition of German classical literature from Novalis to Goethe, does not change his appearance, his character is stable. All that happens, as Goethe said about his Faust, is “tireless activity until the end of life, which becomes higher and purer.” T. Mann is not interested in clarifying the secret of the hidden life of G. Castorp, but in his generalized essence as a representative of the human race.
The Berghof Sanatorium, isolated from the world, is a kind of test flask where various forms of decadence are explored. Decadence at this stage is interpreted by T. Mann as the rampant chaos, instincts, as a violation of the ethical principles of life. Many aspects of the idle existence of the sanatorium's inhabitants are marked in the novel by emphasized biologism: abundant meals, inflated eroticism. The disease begins to be perceived as a consequence of promiscuity, lack of discipline, and inadmissible revelry of the bodily principle. Hans Castorp goes through the temptation of chaos and the rampant instinct in various manifestations: each of the forms of temptation is reproduced according to the principle of antithesis. The figures of the hero’s first mentors – Settembrini and Naphtha – are essentially opposite. Settembrini embodies the spirit of abstract ideals of humanism, which lost their real support in the 20th century; Nafta, as Settembrini’s ideological opponent, personifies the position of totalitarianism. Having experienced negative experiences in his youth, he spreads hatred to all of humanity: he dreams of the fires of the Inquisition, the execution of heretics, the banning of free-thinking books. Naphtha personifies the power of the dark instinctive principle. In the writer’s concept, this position is the opposite of the burgher element and is one of the forms of decadence.
The next stage of temptation is temptation by the elements of unbridled passions, expressed in the image of Claudia Shosha. In one of the central episodes of the novel, “Walpurgis Night,” which introduces Faustian associations, an explanation occurs between Claudia Chauch and Hans Castorp. For G. Castorp, love is the highest achievement of evolution, the fusion of Nature and spirit: “I love you. I have always loved you, because you are you, whom you have been looking for all your life, my dream, my destiny, my eternal desire.” For Claudia Shosha, love has the character of a romantic passion: passion for her is self-forgetfulness, the irrational element of life, merging with chaos, i.e. what T. Mann calls decadence.
Of great philosophical significance for the spiritual experience of G. Castorp is the dream described in the chapter “Snow,” which resolves ethical and philosophical problems about the relationship between chaos and order, reason and instinct, love and death. “Love resists death. Only she, and not the mind, is stronger than her. Only she inspires in us the good thoughts of a reasonable, friendly community with a silent glance at the bloody feast. In the name of love and goodness, a person should not allow death to dominate life.”
The mutual struggle between chaos and order, physical and spiritual, expands in “The Magic Mountain” to the dimensions of universal existence and human history.
Novel "Joseph and his brothers"(1933 – 1942) was created at the height of World War II. The entire artistic space of this work is filled with the biblical myth of Joseph the Beautiful. The young man Joseph, the beloved son of Jacob, the Hebrew king of the sheep flocks, aroused the envy of his brothers. They threw him into the well. A passing merchant saved the boy and sold him to the rich Egyptian nobleman Potiphar. In Egypt, Joseph, as if born again, acquires another name - Osarsiph. Thanks to his abilities, he managed to earn Potiphar's friendship and become his steward. Potiphar's wife, the beautiful Mut-em-Enet, fell in love with Joseph, but, being rejected, slandered him and achieved his imprisonment. Joseph is saved this time too. Chance brings him together with a young Egyptian fa-
district. Joseph becomes an all-powerful minister and in difficult years saves Egypt from famine and pestilence. T. Mann leaves this biblical story unchanged.
To the fore, as the writer noted, in this biblical story comes an interest in the typical, eternally human, i.e. to the “since anciently given form of characters” and some stereotypical situations, which in the art of the 20th century, with the light hand of Jung, is usually called an archetype. In Joseph, the main contours of the myth of Adonis (or, among the ancient Greeks, of Dionysus) are preserved. Young hero humiliated, torn to pieces, dawn gives way to darkness. Joseph - Adonis-Dionysus - Gilgamesh - Osiris - this mythological archetype arouses the envy of the mediocre, and they kill him in some particular, concrete manifestation. But the power of this archetype is limitless, life gives birth to it again and again. This, according to T. Mann, contains the “esoteric justice” of the world. But in the writer’s system of reasoning, the fundamental principle of existence has a dual character - evil is also its inevitable element. Therefore, Joseph goes to meet him halfway, without making the slightest attempt to stop the brothers, or, later, to justify himself to Potiphar. Realizing the predestination of his destiny, Joseph tries to improve his mythological formula, his archetype.
At the age of 17, Joseph, sold into slavery, represented zero from a social point of view. At forty, he becomes an all-powerful minister who saved Egypt from famine. Joseph’s “beauty” is the awareness of his Adonis fate, the desire to be worthy of it and the confidence that he is obliged to improve his mythological prototype. This, according to T. Mann, is the true basis of the deep “esoteric” process of being, the eternal improvement of spiritual life. For the writer, the story of Joseph is a symbolic path of humanity. The use of myth made it possible for T. Mann to identify analogies and correspondences that cast light on the terrible era of World War II, to explain how the combination of a high level of culture and wild barbarism, genocide, bonfires of books, and the extermination of all dissent became possible.
Novel "Doctor Faustus"(1947) T. Mann called it a “secret confession”, summing up his many years of thoughts about the spiritual culture of the 20th century. The novel is only externally structured as a sequential chronological biography of the German composer Adrian Leverkühn. Leverkühn's friend, the chronicler Zeitblom, talks first about his family, then about Leverkühn's hometown of Kaisersaschern, which has preserved its medieval appearance. Then, in strictly chronological order, about Leverkühn’s years of studying composition with Kretschmar and their general views on music. But in accordance with the genre of “intellectual novel,” we are not talking about the biography of the main character, but about a philosophical and aesthetic study of the genesis of the ideology of corruption that destroyed Germany during the years of fascism.
The fate of Germany (the novel was created during the Second World War) and the fate of the main character Adrian Leverkühn turn out to be closely interconnected. Music, in the understanding of Kretschmar and his student, is “archisystemic”; it is the embodiment of the irrational foundations of life. This concept, widely adopted after the works of F. Nietzsche, is reflected in modern music and, in particular, in the work of Schoenberg, who is in some way the prototype of A. Leverkühn. One of the important problems for which the “Faustian theme” is introduced is the problem of the relationship between art and life, a revaluation of Nietzsche’s philosophy and the role it played in the fate of Germany.
In his diaries, T. Mann called his novel a novel about Nietzsche: “And wasn’t it him (“Nietzsche’s Philosophy in the Light of Our Experience”) who demonstrated the ardor of his temperament, an irresistible craving for everything boundless, and, alas, groundless revelation of his own “I”.” Leverkühn, like his historical prototype, elevates the “ambiguity of life”, the “pathetics of filth” into a kind of universal law. So, a dirty adventure with Esmeralda, this “emerald harlot,” will become for him an eternal “sickening sensation of sick flesh,” which will forever kill the feeling of love in him. The unsuccessful matchmaking with Maria Godot through an intermediary, a friend of Leverkühn, is due to the atrophy of feelings that separate him from the world of humanity and doom him to the eternal “coldness of the soul.” No wonder Serenius Zeitblom will say: “Adrian’s chastity does not come from the ethics of purity, but from the pathos of filth.” T. Mann in his diaries calls the shock experienced by his hero “a mythical drama about marriage and friends with an eerie and special denouement, behind which lies the motive of the devil.”
In the article “Germany and the Germans” (1945), T. Mann wrote: “The devil Leverkühn, the devil Faust seem to me to be an extremely German character, and an agreement with him, pawning the soul to the devil, refusing to save the soul in the name of so that for a certain period to own all the treasures, all the power in the world - such an agreement is very tempting for a German by virtue of his very nature. Isn’t now the right moment to look at Germany in precisely this aspect - now, when the devil is literally carrying away her soul.” Adrian Leverkühn creates his music under the sign of “the pathos of filth,” because he believes that “in music, ambiguity is elevated to a system.” In his oratorios and cantatas there is a thunderous affirmation of the impotence of good. An adequate expression of this concept was parody, replacing melody and tonal connections as the basis fruitful for art. The devil in the novel, as in Goethe’s tragedy, is “the principle in disguise,” the embodiment of overcoming the impossible. In the case of A. Leverkühn, this is overcoming creative impotence. The devil offers to “sell time - the time of flights and insights, a feeling of freedom, liberty and triumph.” The only condition is the prohibition of love. At the same time, the devil emphasizes that “such a general frozenness of life and communication with people” is inherent in the very nature of Adrian. “The coldness of your soul is so great that it does not allow you to warm yourself even at the fire of inspiration.”
Leverkühn's last work, the cantata "Lamentation of Doctor Faustus", was conceived as the antipode of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, as if "reversing the path of song to the joy of being." His cantata sounds not only like a periphrase of “Song to Joy,” but also like a periphrase of “The Last Supper,” since “holiness” without skill is unthinkable and it is measured by a person’s sinful potential, says Adrian Leverkühn.
A. Leverkühn ends his journey with madness, which is a quote from the biography of Nietzsche. In terms of philosophical allegory, Leverkühn's madness is a metaphor for “Faust's descent into hell,” embodying the historical realities of Germany during the period of fascism.
Hermann Hesse (1877 – 1962)
The second largest representative of the German “intellectual novel” is G. Hesse. In Hesse’s “intellectual novel,” in contrast to the works of T. Mann, the high example was not only Goethe, but also German romanticism. The writer was interested in the hidden, invisible side of the world, the center of which was the realities of the inner life of the individual. Hesse was in tune with Novalis’s views on the subjective nature of the world, reflected in his theory of “magical idealism”: the whole world and the entire reality surrounding a person are identical to his “I”. The writer adopted and rethought the romantic tradition. The object of the image in his novels is “magical reality,” “a reflection of the core,” “the deep essence of the individual,” as the writer puts it. All of the writer’s works - “Demian” (1919), “Klein and Wagner” (1921), “Pilgrimage to the Land of the East” (1932), “Sidhartha” (1922), “Steppenwolf” (1927), “The Glass Bead Game” (1940 – 1943) – search for symbolic correspondences to the universals of being. This determines the delimitation of artistic space from the socio-historical context and the hermetic nature of his novels. “Steppenwolf” and “The Glass Bead Game” brought the writer world fame and recognition.
In the novel "Steppenwolf" G. Hesse conveyed not only an alarming atmosphere post-war years, but also the danger of fascism. The “steppe” in the European mind is a harsh expanse that contradicts the cozy and lived-in world, and the image of the “wolf” is inextricably linked with the idea of something wild, strong, aggressive and untamed.
In his diaries, Hesse emphasized that the novel “Steppenwolf” has a structure reminiscent of a sonata form: a three-stage development of action, a spiral plot drawing, “turning points”, the binary nature of the organization of leading themes, generating epic energy. The novel is divided into four parts: “Publisher's Preface”, “Notes of Harry Haller”, “Treatise on Steppenwolf”, “Magic Theater”. The movement of the novel is directed by a tendency to liberate action from socio-historical realities and a transition to the allegory of intramental processes. “The Notes of Harry Haller” represent a kind of internal self-portrait of the hero. “Publisher's Notes” supplements them with an external portrait. “Treatise on the Steppenwolf,” like “The Magic Theater,” is perceived as an insert, “a picture within a picture.” The need for inserts is due to the writer’s desire to distinguish unreal and fantastic events from the main plot development, perceived as a certain reality.
C. Jung's theory of the archetype and integrity of the human psyche, uniting both the conscious and the unconscious, determined the concept of personality in the novel. Jung calls this archetype the hermaphroditic unity of the “rounded personality,” and Hesse, expanding the concept of the “rounded personality,” introducing into it the synthesis of “yin” and “yang,” Spirit and Nature, calls such an archetype the perfect personality, or “immortals.” The embodiment of this archetype in the novel are Goethe and Mozart.
G. Hesse’s novel offers not so much “pictures of life” as images of consciousness. The publisher describes Harry Haller as a somewhat strange, unusual, and at the same time friendly and even attractive person. A sad, spiritual face, a piercing, desperate look, a disorganized mental and bookish life, thoughtful, often incomprehensible speeches - everything testifies to his originality and exclusivity. An atmosphere of mystery surrounds Harry Haller: no one knows where he came from or what his origins are. A closed lifestyle delimits his existence from those around him and gives him a touch of mystery.
In the Treatise on Steppenwolf, the image of Harry Haller is built on the romantic principle of antithesis. The Steppenwolf, Haller, had two natures: human and wolf. “The man and the wolf did not get along in him... but were always in mortal enmity, and one only tormented the other.” In Haller, the wildness and indomitability of the Steppenwolf were combined with kindness and tenderness, a love of music, especially Mozart, as well as “with the desire to have human ideals.” The division into wolf and man is a division into Spirit and Nature (instincts), conscious and unconscious. Hesse affirms the idea of multi-layered, ambiguity of personality, refuting the stereotypical idea of its integrity and unity.
Hesse generalizes the type of consciousness of his hero, expanding it to the archetype of artistic consciousness. “There are quite a lot of people like Harry in the world; in particular, many artists belong to this type. All these people contain two souls, two beings, a divine principle and a devilish one.”
G. Haller's type of consciousness is a modification of the romantic consciousness, which opposed itself to the world of everyday life or, according to Hesse, the world of philistinism. “According to his own idea, Steppenwolf was outside the bourgeois world, since he did not lead a family life and did not know social ambition, he felt like only a loner, sometimes a strange unsociable, a sick hermit, sometimes an out-of-the-ordinary person with the makings of a genius.” But, unlike the romantic hero, G. Haller always recognized and affirmed with one half of his consciousness what the other half denied. He felt connected to the philistinism. Philistinism is interpreted by Hesse as the “golden mean” between the countless extremes of human behavior. Unlike the romantics, the writer believed that the element of philistinism rests not on the properties of mediocrity, but on the properties of outsiders generated by philistinism due to the “vagueness of ideals.” Outsiders like G. Haller are generated by this element of balance, but step beyond its limits - behavioral stereotypes, common sense.
The whole story of G. Haller is the story of the liberation of the individual from his outer shell, the “social mask” (the external attitude of the psyche) and the search for the true world of the soul (the internal attitude of the psyche), aimed at achieving harmony.
nic unity of the splitting world of one’s own soul, i.e. synthesis of the conscious and unconscious, Spirit and Nature, feminine (“yin”) and masculine (“yang”) principles. This desire is oriented toward the ideal of the “immortals,” which embodies the synthesis of opposing spheres of the psyche in a higher unity. The “immortals” - Goethe and Mozart - belong to the same archetype as Christ: “the greatness of self-giving, the readiness for suffering, the ability for extreme loneliness... the loneliness of the Garden of Gethsemane.”
“Magic Theater” is the finale of the novel, in which an experiment in building a perfect personality is carried out. This world without time belongs to the realm of fantasy and dreams, recording internal mental processes in plastic and visible embodiment. Everything that happens is a symbolic personification of the author’s ideas. Access to the “Magic Theater” is open only to “crazy people.” “Crazy” in the novel are people who managed to free themselves from the generally accepted idea that a person is a kind of unity, the center of which is consciousness, and who, behind the apparent unity, were able to see the diversity of the soul. Haller, who discovered in himself the fragmentation, the polarity of the soul - Steppenwolf and man, is the type of “madman” who has the right to enter the “Magic Theater”. But before this happens, he must say goodbye to the fiction of his “I”, to his social mask.
The masquerade ball in the halls of the Globe is a kind of “purgatory” preparing for Harry Haller’s entry into the Magic Theater. It was not for nothing that Hesse chose the element of masquerade, where “bottom” and “top”, love and hate, birth and death are closely intertwined. Using the ambivalence of the carnival, G. Hesse seeks to show that the death of Harry Haller, or rather his social mask, is associated with the birth of the “inner man,” “the image of his soul.” Haller's dance with Hermine, the “call girl,” is called a “wedding dance” in the novel. This is not an ordinary wedding, but a “chemical” wedding, uniting opposites in a higher androgynous unity. This becomes possible thanks to the numerous symbolism scattered throughout the text of the novel. One such symbol is the lotus. The lotus in ancient Indian philosophy, which Hesse was fond of, archetypally expressed the hermaphroditic unity of opposites. The lotus has its roots in the dark water and black swamp and from the primordial darkness makes its way to the sunlight in the form of a beautiful flower, dazzling white in its primordial purity. The lotus symbolizes not only the unity of being, but also the unity of the soul, pointing both to the primary materiality of the world and to the bottomless depths of the unconscious. The androgynous nature of the “wedding dance” is also emphasized by external imagery: Termina appears at the carnival in a man’s suit, which emphasizes her two-status character. This bisexuality of Termina is outlined long before the masquerade ball: she vaguely reminds Harry Haller of his childhood friend Herman. The motif of similarity is emphasized by the identity of the names – Herman and Termina. Hesse expands this rapprochement, finding new perspectives in it; Termina turns out to be the hero’s double, the embodiment of his unconscious, or rather, “the image of his soul”, “... I am like you... You need me so that you learn to dance, learn to laugh, learn to live.” The task facing Haller, who identifies himself with his mask, is to develop the “inner attitude” embodied in the image of Termina. Therefore, in the “Magic Theater” the “call girl” acts as Harry Haller’s life teacher, and the saxophonist Pablo acts as a guide to the “world of his own soul.” “I can only give you what you already carry within yourself; I cannot open to you another picture hall except the picture hall of your soul... I will help you make your own world visible.”
The versatility of the human personality, concealing behind the visible unity of external manifestation a whole chaos of forms, symbolism
is literally embodied in the episode with the magic mirror, in which Harry sees many Gallers - old and young, sedate and funny, serious and cheerful. The car hunting scene is also symbolic, when the pacifist and humanist Harry discovers in himself the presence of aggressive and destructive principles that he did not even know about. “Magic Theater” reveals to the hero the secret of the identity of the musician Pablo and Mozart, based on the integrity of the entire psyche: Pablo is the embodiment of absolute sensuality and elemental nature; Mozart is the personification of sublime spirituality. In the dual unity of Pablo-Mozart, according to the writer’s plan, the ideal of the “immortals” is realized, i.e. the merging of opposite spheres of the psyche takes place, harmonious balance and “astral” dispassion are achieved.
Galler, mixing images of the soul with reality, cannot get rid of his “social mask”. The act of Termina, who enters into a relationship with Pablo, is perceived by him as betrayal, and he reacts to the situation in accordance with the stereotypes of the external attitude - he kills her. Haller is unaware that Termina, who embodies the unconscious natural principle, according to the rules of the game of the “Magic Theater”, is supposed to enter into an alliance with Pablo-Mozart. Harry, violating the laws of the “Magical Theatre,” leaves with the intention of returning again to better master the game.
The playful beginning in the “Magic Theater” expresses the writer’s ironic attitude towards the realization of the possibility of a perfect personality. The openness and openness of the ending are due to the author's concept of the path to improvement as a path to infinity. On a metaphysical level, this takes on the role of a symbol; on an eventual level, it means that the hero’s life, his inner growth must always remain unfinished.
Above the novel "The Glass Bead Game" Hesse worked for 13 years. The action of the novel is set in the distant future, away from the century of world wars, the “era of spiritual laxity and dishonesty.” On the ruins of this era, from the inexhaustible need of the spirit to exist and be reborn, a game of beads arises - at first simple and primitive, then increasingly complex and turned into the comprehension of a common denominator and common language culture. “With all the experience, all the high thoughts and works of art... With all this huge mass of spiritual values, the master of the game plays like an organist on the organ, and the perfection of this organ is difficult to imagine - its keys and pedals cover the entire spiritual cosmos, its registers are almost countless, theoretically playing on With this instrument one can reproduce all the spiritual content of the world... the idea of the Game has always existed.”
A playful attitude towards the entire “spiritual cosmos”, establishing the finest patterns of correspondences between various types art and science, implies an ironic attitude towards a universally valid, once and for all established truth. The world of the game is a world of relativity of concepts and a statement of the eternal spirit of variability and freedom of choice. Castalian scientists vow not to develop, but only to preserve, deepen, and classify the arts and sciences, since they believe that any development, and especially practical application, threatens the spirit with a loss of purity. The center of the game becomes the Republic of Castalia, designed to preserve intact the spiritual wealth accumulated by humanity. The Republic requires its citizens to possess not only the skills of the Game, but also contemplative concentration and meditation. Mandatory living conditions for Castalians are renunciation of property, asceticism and neglect of comfort, i.e. a semblance of a monastic charter.
The novel tells about a certain Joseph Knecht, who was once taken to Castalia as a modest student, who over the years becomes a master of the Game, but then, contrary to all traditions and customs, leaves the republic of the spirit for the sake of a world full of anxiety and vanity, for the sake of raising one single student. The content of the novel, if you follow the plot, comes down to the denial of Castalian isolation, but the philosophical structure of the novel is much more complex.
The central place in the novel is occupied by discussions and clashes between the two main characters - Joseph Knecht and Plinio Desi-
nyori. These disputes began even when Knecht was a modest student in Castalia, and Plinio, the scion of a patrician family long associated with Castalia, was a volunteer who came to Castalia from the world of noisy cities. In the clash of two opposing positions, one of the most pressing problems of the 20th century is revealed: do culture, knowledge, and spirit have the right to be preserved in all purity and inviolability in at least one single place. Knecht is a supporter of Castalian isolation, Plinio is his opponent, who believes that “the glass bead game is fooling around with letters,” consisting of continuous associations and playing with analogies. But over the years, the conflict is removed, the opponents meet each other halfway, expanding their own understanding of life at the expense of the rightness of the opponent. Moreover, by the end of the novel they seem to change places - Knecht leaves Castalia for the world, Plinio flees from the world of everyday vanity into the isolation of Castalia. In different ways, the novel juxtaposes an active and contemplative attitude towards life, but none of the truths is affirmed as an absolute. The author does not give lessons on the structure of life and the fullness of existence.
Through the mouth of Knecht, Hesse reveals the inferiority and harm of absolute, irrefutable truths: “Because of their attempts to teach “meaning,” philosophers of history ruined half of world history, laid the foundation for the feuilleton era and are guilty of streams of shed blood.” Hesse, giving his hero the name Knecht (in German - servant), introduces the theme of service into the novel, which he calls “service to the highest lord" This idea is associated with one of the most profound concepts - “illumination” or “awakening”. The state of “awakening” does not contain something final, but eternal spiritual growth and personality change.
Communication with Father Jacob served as a powerful impetus for the “coercion of Joseph Knecht.” The matter concerned the relationship of Castalian spirituality to world history, to life, to man: “You, Castalians, are great scientists and aesthetes, you measure the weight of vowels in an old poem and correlate its formula with the formula of the orbit of some planet. It’s amazing, but it’s a game... The Glass Bead Game.” Father Jacob emphasizes the infertility
the creativity of Castalian isolation, “a complete lack of a sense of history”: “You don’t know him, man, you don’t know either his animal nature or his godlikeness. You only know a Castalian, a caste, an original attempt to cultivate some special species.”
Knecht, for the first time in Mariafels, discovered history for himself, experiencing it not as a field of knowledge, but as reality, and “this means to correspond, to transform one’s own individual life into history.” The “illumination” of Knecht, who remained faithful to Castalia, forced him to “awaken, advance, grasp and understand reality,” i.e. realize the impossibility of continuing life within the same boundaries.
G. Hesse never depicted the final achievement of the goal by his heroes. Knecht's life, symbolizing the universals of human existence, is a path to infinity. IN last chapters Knecht dies trying to save his student, who is drowning in the waves. mountain lake. But Knecht’s death is interpreted by the writer not as an end and destruction, but as “disembodiment” and the creation of a new one. Knecht's spiritual example will become the starting point in Tito's formation and self-creation. The teacher, as if giving himself to the student, “flows into him.” The conflict in the novel is not only in Knecht’s break with Castalia, but also in the affirmation of eternal spiritual growth and personality change.
Robert Musil (1880 – 1942)
Fame came to R. Musil, one of the greatest thinkers and artists of the 20th century, only after his death. He died in obscurity and poverty, in emigration. All works of R. Musil, starting with the early novel “The Confusion of the Pupil Törless” (1906), the cycle of short stories “Three Women” (1924) and ending with the grandiose novel “The Man without Qualities” (1930 – 1934), is an attempt to show the typology of modern consciousness , installation on the “view from the inside”. Close interest in the “anatomy” of consciousness determines the structure artistic images, which are the author's self-projections.
Assessing modern consciousness as a combination of bare practicality, sterile reflection and unbridled instincts, Musil sought to destroy the clichédness of stereotypical perceptions and ideas, to change a person who had lost his natural properties. Utopia becomes the main structure in his worldview system, and “other existence” as the harmonious implementation of all rational and emotional capabilities of a person becomes the central concept in his main work, the novel “Man Without Qualities.”
The writer’s ideological position is formed in the essay “The Mathematical Man” (1913). A successor to the romantic and Rousseauist traditions, Musil considers the world of social norms and laws to be hostile to the individual, killing him “ living soul" The writer sees the source of the clarity of sensory sensations in mystical “illumination”, i.e. in a state of sublime vibration of all senses. Showing interest in the “mysticism” of reality, Musil tried to present a real, clear state of mystical illumination of the soul, “to calculate the mechanism of ecstasy.” He finds the truly rational (“rational,” in Musil’s terminology) in the Enlightenment traditions of consistent rationalism, not clouded by the exhausting and fruitless reflection of later layers. The synthesis of rational and emotional possibilities is proclaimed by Musil as the only means of achieving the integrity of the worldview and the fullness of being.
The worldview position of the writer determined the tendency towards the synthesis of various stylistics in the novel "A man without qualities." The first layer lying on the surface is the layer of objective narration, reproducing the epic canvas of the Habsburg Empire. With absolute precision, Musil determined the time and place of action: Austria, or more precisely, Vienna, 1913, the eve of the assassination of the Habsburg heir to the throne and the beginning of the First World War. The external movement of events is organized by the famous “parallel action”. In circles close to the throne, it becomes known about preparations in Germany for the celebration in June 1918 of the thirtieth anniversary of the accession of William II to the throne. The same year marks the anniversary of the seventy-year reign of Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria-Hungary; The Austrians decide to keep up with the “arrogant Germans” and are preparing a “parallel action.” But the historical panorama of events is for Musil just the background against which the main battles are played out - the battles of modern consciousness. As the writer emphasized, for him the main thing is “not a real explanation of real events, but a spiritual-typical one.”
In Musil’s understanding, the modern novel is a “subjective formula of life” that embraces the whole person and the entire complexity of his relationship with time, history, and the state. This attitude determined that “The Man Without Qualities” belonged to the genre of the intellectual novel. True reality in the novel is contrasted with the world of ordinary consciousness - the world of properties, i.e. reproducing erased clichés and stereotypes, once and for all established “great ideals” and laws. This is a world of falsehood, hypocrisy, a world of “inauthentic”, “improper” existence. This whole world of banal, everyday consciousness is presented in the planned “parallel action”. The participants of the “action” are people of different “professions”. The concept of “profession” acts as a pillar in Musil’s ideological structure and bears similarities not only with Hölderlin’s definition of the inertia of everyday consciousness, but is a kind of once and for all fossilized social mask, the antithesis of the ever-changing and elusive nature of the spirit. “A resident of a country has at least 9 characters - professional, national, state, class, geographical, gender, conscious and unconscious, and perhaps also private; he unites them in himself, but they dissolve him, and he is, in fact, nothing more than a hollow washed out by these many streams.” In Musil's characters, their indigenous properties are distorted, social masks are stamped and clichéd by stereotypes.
In the vast space of Musile's novel, officials, military men, industrialists, aristocrats, journalists are depicted - “types of professionals” in whom, as Hölderlin puts it, the living, immediate essence of the soul has been killed. This is important
the horny official Tuzzi, who is guided not by his own opinion, but by the logic of the authorities, becoming part of the bureaucratic machine; the organizer of the action, Count Leinsdorf, hopelessly preserved in his archaic aristocracy; the millionaire intellectual Arnheim and the dim-witted General Stumm, trying to benefit from the “parallel action”. This is Tuzzi’s wife, whose antique appearance evokes in Ulrich associations with Plato’s Diotima. Inspired by the dream of making history, Diotima hopes to accomplish a “spiritual feat” with her participation in the “parallel action”: Ulrich, as Leinsdorf’s secretary, witnesses how the movement, called the “parallel action”, attracts some and repels others. Proposals are made, one more absurd than the other, endless meetings are convened, receptions are held; All sorts of inventors, fanatics, dreamers send projects to the committee, each more fantastic than the other. But neither the organizing committee, nor the government and the imperial chancellery standing behind it have an idea under the flag of which the monarch’s anniversary should be celebrated. Everything goes by itself, and that’s the main thing. And the idea will probably come to fruition. At some point it begins to seem that this promises to be the creation of the “Emperor Franz Joseph’s Soup Distribution Canteen.”
The acutely satirical model of a doomed world has another dimension: despite the activity of all participants in the “parallel action,” no changes occur. As Ulrich puts it, “the same thing happens” or “the same thing happens again.”
“Repetition of similar things”, which is included in the title of the second part of the novel, has a functional and semantic meaning. This aphorism was borrowed by Musil from F. Nietzsche (Nietzsche used it in “The Gay Science” (1882), “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” (1884)). Despite all efforts to change anything, the motionless world, frozen in clichés and dogmas, produces “its own kind,” i.e. a certain ordering system that brings spiritual comfort and satisfaction to the participants of the action: “... the most important mental tricks of humanity serve to preserve an even state of mind, and all the feelings, all the passions of the world are nothing compared to the monstrous, but completely unconscious efforts that humanity makes to preserve its sublime peace of mind!” Musil highlights one of the main features of the archetype of everyday consciousness: repetition and stability. It is not for nothing that Ulrich defines traditional morality as “the problem of a long-term state to which all other states are subordinated.”
The world of stability and repetition is exposed by Musil with the help of irony. Unlike romantic irony, which overcomes the inconsistency of life through play, Musil’s irony analytically splits the world of “repetition of similar things.” Ulrich, the author's self-projection, constantly maintains a distance from any position, from any stable form of behavior, which for him is a destruction of the true capabilities of the ever-changing Spirit. The spirit, elusive for static definitions of morality, in Musil’s concept, acquires the status of eternal openness and incompleteness of life, determining the implementation of the unrealized natural capabilities of the individual. Musil's irony, acting as a “tragic negation,” embodied the rejection of stable systems that transform the ever-changing substance of life into something motionless and frozen.
Irony splits the world of Musile's novel into the world of “reality” (“repetition of similar things”) and the world of “other existence,” in which the categories of “possibilities” rule. Such a “double world” determines the two-layer nature of the narrative: the “realistic plan” of the novel is the language of life, following the stability of the system. The properties of reality are “an involuntarily acquired disposition of repetitions (“the world of properties”).” The second layer of the narrative is organized by some invisible, intangible reality, or the sphere of the Spirit, symbolically embodying a “different state,” a world of possibilities. This narrative plan, defining the internal, deep structure of the novel, represents the constant splitting and polysemy of semantic complexes, personifying the symbolic correspondences of unrealized, suppressed possibilities. The novel was built as an endless game of analogies and similarities (Musil admitted his passion for analogies in his diaries). Analogies that do not obey any laws are based
based on arbitrary associations, most corresponded to the writer’s intention: not to assert a certain order of things, but to create a state of instability and “floating”, the interpenetration of positions and ideas.
One of the main ones is the motive for violence or readiness for it. Ulrich is beaten in the street. However, Ulrich himself also harbors a latent passion for violence: he is looking for a pocketknife to kill the Prussian industrialist Arnheim. Clarissa demands Ulrich to kill her effeminate husband Walter and at the same time feels ready to kill Ulrich if he does not become her lover. And Ulrich’s sister, Agatha, is ready to kill her own husband, turning to her brother for help.
The readiness to commit a crime, repeated in different situations, reveals in the novel the manifestation of the mysterious spheres of the unconscious. “...Completely decent people with great pleasure, although, of course, only in the imagination, commit crimes,” states Ulrich.
An important role in the novel is played by the murderer and sexual maniac Moosbrugger, who embodies the theme of the crime, which in numerous connections and correspondences gives rise to analogies and a game of variations. The image of Moosbrugger, personifying the unconscious, “overflowing its banks,” was associated with a complex of ideas of the conscious and unconscious, the Nietzschean “life impulse” and the superman who crosses the line, which was important for Musil’s era. In the reasoning of Musile's heroes, who follow the fate of Moosbrugger, both Nietzschean immoralism and Freudian ideas are played out ironically. Clarissa, a “fan” of Nietzsche’s ideas, sees in Moosbrugger’s crime the fulfillment of a vital impulse, an internal call from the depths of the unconscious. The motif of the unconscious takes on various forms of similarities and correspondences in the novel.
The dance of the mentally ill Moosbrugger, which sometimes lasted for several days, embodies the “incredible and fatally uninhibited state” that resulted in an act of rape or murder. The essence of the dance is compared with the incredible pleasure experienced from the removal of all prohibitions.
Comrade This motive receives an unexpected expansion due to the introduction of the definition of musicality as a trait inherent in killers. Music is interpreted within the framework of Nietzschean philosophy as a reproduction of the irrational foundations of life. The ecstatic state of extreme pleasure into which the music plunges Clarissa and Walter generates in Clarissa a powerful impulse of associative correspondence with the state of murder. No wonder she calls Moosbrugger a “musical man.”
The motif of the unconscious embodies in the novel the powerful fundamental principles of life, which determine the endless variability of human actions and the impossibility of their unambiguous interpretation. Musil divided life into “rational” and “non-rational”. “Non-rational”, in the writer’s interpretation, in contrast to Freudian determinism, is something that cannot be understood, placed in a Procrustean bed of formulas and concepts. Therefore, Musil sought to capture the “sliding logic of the soul” in endless analogies and symbolic correspondences. This determines the constant playing out of repeating images, objects and phenomena. Thus, Moosbrugger imagines that every thing and phenomenon has an elastic band that prevents them from getting close to others and “passing through each other,” i.e. do what you want, “and suddenly these rubber bands are gone.” This state in Moosbrugger coincides with his feelings at the time of the murder. The image of the rubber band is repeated on a completely different level of the narrative - Agatha and Ulrich at the coffin of their father: Agatha suddenly removes the rubber garter from her leg and places it in the coffin. In a realistic narrative sense, this act is motivated by childhood memories of both; Once upon a time they liked to bury “part of themselves” in the garden - “cut nails.” In the symbolic plane of the narrative of endless similarities and variations, the removal of the rubber garter embodies the lifting of all prohibitions and the characters entering into an incestuous relationship.
The ideas and positions of the characters are played out in the same way. The meaning of each episode fits into the overall polyphony of the novel, which represents a system of endless reflections. Based on specific life material, Musil builds a chain of analogies and similarities around the topical problem of activity and inaction for the era, which runs like a leitmotif throughout the entire novel. Thus, the industrialist Arnheim believes that a thinking person must necessarily be a man of action. This position is associated in the novel with the opposition of “Prussian activity” and the passivity of the Austrian national character; General Stumm informs Ulrich that the main password of the “parallel action” is action. There is always something going on in the salon of Diotima, an activist of the “parallel action”. Diotima, obsessed with the desire to go down in history, asserts the need for active work in the name of unity of a multinational state. The novel repeatedly characterizes the Austro-Hungarian Empire as the embodiment of frozen immobility. The “thoughts on the subject” scattered throughout the work, ironically commented by the author, merge into one of the main themes of the novel: about the vacuum of ideas in modern world, about the impossibility of choosing positive activity and the disadvantages of inaction. The endless variability of these qualities and properties, changing and acquiring new meaning in various situations and positions of the heroes, personifies the universal features of the era.
This technique of likening and analogy made it possible for Musil to reveal one of the basic structures (laws) of existence: through the properties of the era, stamped in their viscous repeatability, the eternal laws of existence are visible. Musil emphasized that he was not interested in events, but in “structures.”
The position of the main character, Ulrich, is distanced from any actions, from any interference in what is happening. He constantly feels the impossibility of reducing unrealized possibilities to formulas and diagrams. The position of secretary of the “parallel action” provides him with access to all participants in this action. But Ulrich only observes, not wanting to realize himself, i.e. give any real shape to your life. He emphasizes that he would like to “live hypothetically.” Ulrich as a “hypothetical hero” is not imprisoned by “profession”, “character”, “clichéd”, stereotypical consciousness. He is a “man without qualities.” Author's self-projection, Ulrich osoz-
recognizes the eternal variability of life, “the meaning of which has not yet been discovered.” The hero, who does not accept any of the available positions, is a symbolic embodiment of the fragmentation of life, devoid of purpose and meaning, into the irreducible contradictions of the “rational” and “non-rational”, the world of reality and the world of “otherness.” The utopia of the “millennium” embodies in symbolic form the possibility of synthesizing these contradictions. In it, according to Musil’s plan, the achievement of “another being” is achieved, i.e. the harmony of the unity of all rational (“rational”) and emotional (“non-rational”) properties of a person. The mythologeme of the “millennial kingdom”, or the “golden age”, which existed in various myths as a symbol of a certain timeless space, most often the “Garden of Eden”, correlates with the earthly paradise, being the embodiment of the removal of any contradictions and differences.
At the center of Musile’s utopia, aimed at the abolition of reality, “its properties,” is incest, Ulrich’s love for his own sister. In incest, the idea of dissolving all moral laws, all taboos and restrictions is extremely emphasized. The solitude of the brother and sister, who have cut off all external ties and acquaintances, carries a double meaning. On the one hand, this existence together, in the solitude of the “Garden of Eden,” evokes associations with the biblical Adam and Eve before the Fall. It is not for nothing that the love of Ulrich and Agatha is interpreted in the romantic sense as languor, expectation, giving rise to a sublime vibration of all feelings: “Dreams of love are closer for both than physical attraction.” In this state of “illumination”, a utopian fusion of opposites into one whole takes place, Ulrich feels himself to be a part of Agatha: “I know that you are: my selfishness.”
On the other hand, the myth of the “millennial kingdom”, fueled by Plato’s myth of love, of the longed-for fusion of two halves - “They hugged, intertwined and, passionately wanting to grow together, died of hunger and from inaction, since they did not want to do anything separately” ( Plato) - introduces the motive of ambiguity, ironic play on the possibility of achieving “otherness.” Ulrich explains to Agatha that “just at the great
“In spite of its strength, the feeling is not the most confident,” that “in the greatest happiness there is often some kind of special pain.”
Reflecting on the story of Agatha and Ulrich, Musil calls his novel an “ironic novel of education,” in which there is a self-refutation of the writer’s efforts to synthesize, to harmoniously merge opposites. Musil's analogies, permeated with infinity of interpretation, never lead to a specific meaning. “Even in any analogy,” says Ulrich, “there is some residue of the magic of identity.” The meaning of life for the writer remained a mystery and a mystery that can only be embodied in symbolic form. “Truth is not a crystal that you can put in your pocket, but an endless liquid into which you are completely immersed.” The absence of logical, causal connections determines openness and understatement in the endless game of analogies and likenings. Musile's “two worlds”, based on the synthesis of logical and sensory ideas, gives rise to a feeling of an indefinite infinity of possibilities.
The novel, on which the writer worked all his life, remained unfinished. This incompleteness is, as it were, a symbolic feature of a work directed into infinity. Musil created a form of novel in which the aesthetics of analogies and similarities determines the fusion of various stylistics. The multi-layered artistic world of the work adequately embodied the main idea: “Everything we do is only a likeness.” The novel “The Man Without Qualities” earned the writer immortal fame.
Literature
1. Mann T. The Magic Mountain. Doctor Faustus.
2. Hesse G. Steppenwolf. Bead game.
3. Musil R. A man without properties.
4. History of German literature. T. V, 1918 – 1945. – M., 1976.
5. Karelsky A.V. From hero to man // Utopias and reality (prose of Robert Musil). – M., 1990.
6. Karalashvili R. The world of novels by Hermann Hesse. – Tbilisi, 1984.
In the Garden of Gethsemane, Christ spent the last night before his execution, learning about the betrayal of Judas and the coming suffering. In mental anguish, he decides to accept the “crown of thorns of suffering” in the name of atonement for the errors and vices of humanity.
The term "intellectual novel" was first coined by Thomas Mann. In 1924, the year the novel “The Magic Mountain” was published, the writer noted in the article “On the Teachings of Spengler” that “Historical and world pearl 1914-1923. with extraordinary force intensified in the minds of his contemporaries the need to comprehend the era, and this was refracted in a certain way in artistic creativity. “This process,” wrote T. Mann, “blurs the boundaries between science and art, infuses living, pulsating blood into abstract thought, spiritualizes the plastic image and creates the type of book that ... can be called an “intellectual novel.” Nietzsche's works fall into this type. It was the intellectual novel that became the genre that first realized one of the characteristic features of 20th century realism. – an acute need to interpret life, to make sense of it. For the Germans it is: T. Mann, G. Hesse. We have: Bulgakov. For the Americans: Faulkner, Wolfe.
Multi-layeredness, multi-composition, the presence of layers of reality far removed from each other in a single artistic whole became one of the most common principles in the creation of novels of the 20th century. Mann divides reality into life in the valley and on the Magic Mountain. The first half of the 20th century put forward a myth - a creation of a distant past, illuminating recurring patterns in the general life of mankind.
Poetics: The internal tension in the German philosophical novel is largely born of precisely that clearly tangible effort that is needed to keep in integrity, to unite the actually disintegrated time. The form itself is saturated with actual political content: artistic creativity fulfills the task of drawing connections where gaps seem to have formed, where it seems to be free from obligations to humanity, where it apparently exists in its own separate time, although in reality it is included in the cosmic and “great historical time" (M. Bakhtin)
The image of a person became a condenser and container of “circumstances” - some of their indicative properties and symptoms. The mental life of the characters received a powerful external regulator. It was not the environment that confronted us, but rather the events of world history and the general state of the world.
The time depicted in the novel is the era preceding the First World War. But this novel is filled with questions that have become extremely urgent after the war and revolution of 1918 in Germany.
21. Life and creative path of G. Hesse. Genre, plot, principles of composition of the novel "Steppenwolf". Poetics of the finale.
Hesse's work is characterized by a departure from reality, a search for one's inner self, contemplation and descriptiveness. He does not call for active action, he only shows reality as he sees it and thereby makes us think about the problems of existence, “awakens anxiety, a dormant conscience and activates the mind,” gives “freedom to think for ourselves and find our own way.”
Steppenwolf
In the center stands not a traditional hero, but a sick, frightened man, torn in different directions. Harry Haller belongs to a generation whose life fell in the period “between two eras.” He perceives his time as an era of deep crisis.” For Harry, his era is a time of collapse of ideals, and he is disgusted by this era. Harry hates the burghers and is proud that he is not a burgher, but he still lives among the burghers, has savings in the bank, pays taxes, etc.
The publisher's "Foreword", written on behalf of the nephew of the mistress of the house in which Steppenwolf lived, gives information about the external life of Harry Haller. Life, habits, habits. The first-person narrative is told in the notes of Harry Haller. Here Harry speaks about himself - and here, next to the real world, a symbolic image of a magical theater appears - the kingdom of eternal values, where immortals live (specifically in his case - Mozart, Goethe). The narrative in this part of the novel combines lyrical confession, reflection and allegorical visions of the hero. In search of himself, Harry crosses the threshold of the “magic theater.” In this theater, Haller is looking for a means of overcoming a spiritual crisis. It is worth noting several autobiographical facts that are directly reflected in the novel. Firstly, these are the psychoanalytic conversations of the writer with Jung’s student Dr. I. B. Lang, which took place at the beginning of 1926. They influenced the description in the novel of the search for ways and means to overcome the spiritual crisis in which both the writer himself and his hero were. Further. The world of “elementary” feelings. Hesse took special dance lessons and often appeared at carnivals and masquerades in Zurich. The atmosphere of eroticism and ecstasy experienced by Hesse at one of these night balls in the hotel is reproduced in the novel in the scenes of the masquerade in the halls of the Globe.
The ending shows us that man and wolf have a conciliatory solution - humor. Hesse views humor as an air bridge spanning the gap between ideal and reality, as one of the means of reconciling opposites.
Intellectual novel in German literature
Topic 3. Literature of Germany at the turn of the century in the first half of the 20th century.
1. The sociocultural situation and historical landmarks that determined the nature of the development of German culture. The formation of the world system of monopoly capitalism in Germany was belated, by the beginning of the 20th century. the transition is complete. Germany has surpassed England in economics. With the reign of Wilhelm II since 1888. established aggressive policy under the slogan – “to achieve a place in the sun for Germany”. It was also a slogan that united the empire. Ideological foundations - the teachings of German philosophers (Nietzsche, Spengler, Schopenhauer)
In the popular social democratic movement there is a tendency towards gradual peaceful resolution of conflicts, opposed to the revolutionary theory of Marxism. For a short period of time, apparent calm was established, but in literature there was a premonition of the apocalypse. The influence of the revolution of 1905.ᴦ. led to the strengthening of social democratic ideology and the growth of the labor movement of 1911ᴦ. - clash of interests of France and Germany in North America which almost led to war.
The Balkan crisis and the First World War of 1914. ᴦ., the revolution of 1917 in Russia led to mass strikes and the November people's revolution in Germany (1918). The revolutionary situation was finally suppressed in 1923ᴦ. The post-war revolutionary upsurge gave way... to the stabilization of capitalism.
1925.ᴦ. - Weimar bourgeois republic, Germany is actively involved in the process of Americanization of Europe. After the need and disasters of the war, the need for entertainment was natural (which caused the development of the corresponding industry, the cultural market, and the emergence of mass culture). The general characteristic of the period is the “golden twenties”.
The 1930s that followed were called the “black” years. 1929 - crisis of overproduction in America, paralyzing the world economy. In Germany there is an economic and political crisis - a change of governments that have no control over the situation. Unemployment is massive. The National Socialist Party is gaining strength. The confrontation between the forces of the developed KPD (Communist Party of Germany) and the NSP (National Socialist Party) ended in victory for the latter. 1933 - Hitler came to power.
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The militarization of the economy has become the main means of social stability. At the same time, cultural life became politicized. The era of literary “isms” is over. The era of reaction and the fight against the undesirable began. From this period, German literature developed in anti-fascist emigration. The Second World War.
2. Literature at the turn of the century and the 1st half of the 20th century was marked by a crisis of bourgeois culture, the spokesman of which was F. Nietzsche.
In the 1890s, there was a move away from naturalism. 1894 - Hauptmann’s naturalistic drama “The Weavers”. The peculiarity of German naturalism is “Consistent naturalism,” which required a more accurate reflection of objects that changed along with lighting and position. The “second style,” developed by Schlaf, involves dividing reality into many instantaneous perceptions. The “photographic image of the era” could not reveal the invisible signs of the approaching new AGE. In addition, a sign of the new times was a protest against the concept of a person’s complete dependence on the environment. Naturalism fell into decline, but its techniques were preserved in critical realism
Impressionism was not widespread in Germany. German writers were almost not attracted to the analysis of infinitely variable states. Neo-romantic research into specific psychological states has not often been undertaken. German neo-romanticism included features of symbolism, but there was almost no mystical symbolism. Usually the romantic two-dimensionality of the conflict between the eternal and the everyday, the explicable and the mysterious was emphasized.
The predominant direction in the first half of the 20th century. was expressionism. Leading genre: scream drama
Along with the ʼʼ-ismsʼʼ at the turn of the century to the end of the 20s. A layer of proletarian literature was actively taking shape. Later (in the 30s) socialist prose developed in emigration (A. Segers and Becher's poetry).
A popular genre at this time was the novel. In addition to the intellectual novel, there were historical and social novels in German literature, which developed a technique close to the intellectual novel, and also continued the traditions of German satire.
Heinrich Mann(1871 - 1950) worked in the genre of socially revealing novel (influence of French literature). The main period of creativity is 1900-1910. The novel “The Loyal Subject” (1914) brought fame to the writer. According to the author himself, “The novel depicts the previous stage of the leader who then achieved power.” The hero is the embodiment of loyalty, the essence of the phenomenon, embodied in a living character.
The novel is the biography of a hero who has worshiped power since childhood: father, teacher, policeman. The author uses biographical details to enhance the properties of the hero’s nature; He is a slave and a despot at the same time. At the root of his psychology lies sycophancy and a thirst for power to humiliate the weak. The story about the hero records his constantly changing social position (second style!). The mechanical nature of the hero’s actions, gestures, and words conveys the automatism and mechanical nature of society.
The author creates an image according to the laws of caricature, deliberately shifting the proportions, sharpening and exaggerating the characteristics of the characters. The heroes of G. Mann are characterized by the mobility of masks = caricature. All of the above together is G. Mann’s “geometric style” as one of the variants of convention: the author balances on the brink of authenticity and implausibility.
Lion Feuchtwanger(1884 - 1954) - philosopher interested in the East. He became famous for his historical and social novels. In his work, the historical novel, more than the social novel, depended on the technique of the intellectual novel. Common features
* Transferring modern problems that concern the writer to the setting of the distant past, modeling them in a historical plot - modernization of history (the plot, facts, description of everyday life are historically accurate, the national color is introduced into the relationships of the characters).
* Historically costumed modernity, a novel of indirections and allegories, where modern events and persons are depicted in a conventional historical shell “False Nero” - L. Feuchtwanger, “The Cases of Mr. Julius Caesar” B Brecht).
The term was proposed in 1924 by T. Mann. “Intellectual novel” became a realistic genre, embodying one of the features of realism of the 20th century. - an acute need for interpretation of life, its comprehension and interpretation. Exceeding the need for “storytelling”. In world literature they worked in the genre of intellectual novel; EL Bulgakov (Russia), K. Chapek (Czech Republic), W. Faulkner and T. Wolf (America), but T. Mann stood at the origins.
A characteristic phenomenon of the time has become the modification of the historical novel: the past becomes a springboard for clarifying social and political mechanisms modernity.
A common principle of construction is multi-layering, the presence in a single artistic whole of layers of reality far removed from each other.
In the first half of the 20th century, a new understanding of myth emerged. It acquired historical features, ᴛ.ᴇ. was perceived as a product of a distant past, illuminating repeating patterns in the life of mankind. The appeal to myth expanded the time boundaries of the work. At the same time, it provided the opportunity for artistic play, countless analogies and parallels, unexpected correspondences that explain modernity.
The German “intellectual novel” was philosophical, firstly, because there was a tradition of philosophizing in artistic creativity, and secondly, because it strived for consistency. The cosmic concepts of German novelists did not pretend to be a scientific interpretation of the world order. According to the wishes of its creators, the “intellectual novel” was to be perceived not as philosophy, but as art.
Laws of construction of an “Intellectual Novel”.
* The presence of several non-merging layers of reality (in German I.R) is philosophical in construction - mandatory presence of different levels of life, correlated with each other, assessed and measured by each other. Artistic tension lies in combining these layers into a single whole.
* A special interpretation of time in the 20th century (free breaks in action, movements into the past and future, arbitrary acceleration and slowdown of time) also influenced the intellectual novel. Here time is not only discrete, but also torn into qualitatively different pieces. Only in German literature is such a tense relationship between the time of history and the time of personality observed. Different hypostases of time are often spread across different spaces. Internal tension in the German philosophical novel is born largely from the effort that is needed to keep in integrity, to unite the actually disintegrated time.
* Special psychologism: “an intellectual novel” is characterized by an enlarged image of a person. The author's interest is focused not on clarifying the hidden inner life of the hero (following L.N. Tolstoy and F.M. Dostoevsky), but on showing him as a representative of the human race. The image becomes less developed psychologically, but more voluminous. The mental life of the characters received a powerful external regulator; it is not so much the environment as the events of world history, the general state of the world (T Mann (ʼʼDoctor Faustusʼʼ): ʼʼ...not character, but the worldʼʼ).
The German “intellectual novel” continues the traditions of the educational novel of the 18th century, only education is no longer understood only as moral improvement, since the character of the heroes is stable, the appearance does not change significantly. Education is about liberation from the random and superfluous; in this regard, the main thing becomes not internal conflict(reconciliation of the aspirations of self-improvement and personal well-being), but a conflict of knowledge of the laws of the universe, with which one can be in harmony or in opposition. Without these laws, the guideline is lost, and therefore the main task of the genre becomes not the knowledge of the laws of the universe, but their overcoming. Blind adherence to laws begins to be perceived as convenience and as a betrayal in relation to the spirit and to man.
Thomas Mann(1873 -1955) The Mann brothers were born into the family of a wealthy grain merchant. Even after the death of their father, the family was quite wealthy. For this reason, the transformation from burgher to bourgeois took place before the eyes of the writer.
Wilhelm II spoke about the great changes to which he was leading Germany, but T. Mann saw its decline.
The Decline of One Family is the subtitle of the first novel. ʼʼBudennybrokiʼʼ(1901). The peculiarity of the genre is a family chronicle (traditions of the river novel!) with elements of epic (historical-analytical approach). The novel absorbed the experience of 19th century realism. and partly the technique of impressionistic writing. Myself T. Mann considered himself a continuator of the naturalistic movement. At the center of the novel is the fate of three generations of Buddenbrooks. The older generation is still at peace with itself and the outside world. Inherited moral and commercial principles bring the second generation into conflict with life. Tony Buddenbrook does not marry Morten for commercial reasons but remains unhappy; her brother Christian prefers independence and turns into a decadent. Thomas energetically maintains the appearance of bourgeois well-being, but fails because the external form that one cares about no longer corresponds to either the state or the content.
T. Mann is already opening up new possibilities for prose, intellectualizing it. Social typification appears (the detail becomes symbolic meaning, their diversity opens up the possibility of broad generalizations), features of an educational “intellectual novel” (the characters hardly change), but there is still an internal conflict of reconciliation and time is not discrete.
The writer was acutely aware of the problematic nature of his place in society as an artist, hence one of the main themes of his work: the position of the artist in bourgeois society, his alienation from “normal” (like everyone else) social life. (ʼʼTonio Krögerʼʼ, ʼʼDeath in Veniceʼʼ).
After the First World War, T. Mann took the position of an outside observer for some time. In 1918 (the year of the revolution!) he composed idylls in prose and poetry. But, having rethought the historical significance of the revolution, he ends in 1924. educational novel ʼʼMagic Mountainʼʼ(4 books). In the 1920s. T. Mann becomes one of those writers who, under the influence of the war they experienced, the post-war era, and under the influence of the emerging German fascism, felt it was their duty to “not to bury your head in the sand in the face of reality, but to fight on the side of those who want to give human meaning to the earth”. In 1939.v. - Nobel Prize, 1936.. - emigrated to Switzerland, then to the USA, where he was actively involved in anti-fascist propaganda. The period was marked by work on the tetralogy ʼʼJoseph and his brothersʼʼ(1933-1942) - a myth-novel, where the hero is engaged in conscious government activities.
Intellectual novel ʼʼDoctor Faustusʼʼ(1947) - the pinnacle of the intellectual novel genre. The author himself said the following about this book: “Secretly, I treated Faustus as my spiritual testament, the publication of which no longer plays a role and with which the publisher and executor can do as they pleaseʼʼ.
ʼʼDoctor Faustusʼʼ is a novel about the tragic fate of a composer who agreed to a conspiracy with the devil not for the sake of knowledge, but for the sake of unlimited possibilities in musical creativity. Reckoning is death and the inability to love (the influence of Freudianism!).. To facilitate understanding of the novel by T. Mann E 19.49T. creates “The History of Doctor Faustus”, excerpts from which may help to better understand the concept of the novel.
“If my previous works acquired a monumental character, then it turned out beyond expectation, without intention.”
“My book is, in general, a book about the German soul.”
“The main gain is that when introducing the figure of a narrator, it is possible to sustain the narrative in a double time plan, polyphonically interweaving events that shock the writer at the very moment of work into the events about which he writes.
Here it is difficult to discern the transition of the tangible-real into the illusory perspective of the drawing. This editing technique is part of the very concept of the book.
ʼʼIf you are writing a novel about an artist, there is nothing more vulgar than just praising art, genius, work. What was needed here was reality, concreteness. I had to study music.
ʼʼThe most difficult of the tasks is a convincingly reliable, illusory-realistic description of a satanic-religious, demonically pious, but at the same time something very strict and downright criminal mockery of art: refusal of beats, even of an organized sequence of sounds...ʼʼ
“I carried with me a volume of Schwanks from the 16th century - after all, my story always went back to this era, so in other places an appropriate flavor in the language was required.”
“The main motive of my novel is the proximity of infertility, the organic doom of the era, predisposing to a deal with the devil.”
“I was bewitched by the idea of the work, which, being from beginning to end a confession and self-sacrifice, knows no mercy for pity and, pretending to be art, at the same time goes beyond the scope of art and is true reality.”
ʼʼWas there a prototype of Adrian? That was the difficulty, to invent the figure of a musician capable of taking a plausible place among real figures. He. - a collective image of a person who carries within himself all the pain of the era.
I was captivated by his coldness, his distance from life, his lack of soul... It is curious that at the same time he was almost deprived of my local appearance, visibility, physicality... Here it was necessary to observe the greatest restraint in local concretization, which threatened to immediately belittle and vulgarize the spiritual plane with its symbolism and polysemy.
ʼʼThe epilogue took 8 days. The Doctor's last lines are Zeitblom's heartfelt prayer. for friend and Fatherland, which I have heard for a long time. I mentally transported myself through the 3 years and 8 months I lived under the stress of this book. On that May morning, when the war was in full swing, I took up my pen.
If the previous novels were educational, then in “Doctor Faustus” there is no one to educate. This is truly a novel of the end, in which various themes are taken to the extreme: the hero dies, Germany dies. It shows the dangerous limit to which art has come, and the last line to which humanity has approached.
Topic 4. English literature of the turn of the century and the first half of the 20th century.
1. Social situation and Philosophical foundations turn-of-the-century literature. The social situation of the period - under the influence of the Victorian crisis (during the reign of Queen Victorine 1837-1901) it was criticized as a system of spiritual and aesthetic values. The great compromise between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie did not bring harmony. In the period 1870-1890, Great Britain entered the fold of imperialism, which led to an intensification of political and social activity, as well as the polarization of social forces, and the rise of the labor movement. The activation of reformist ideas led to the emergence of a socialist attitude (Fabian society). England is involved in colonial wars, which were a consequence of the loss of world prestige.
Participation in the First World War. 1916 - uprising in Ireland, which turned into civil war. As a consequence of the event ‣‣‣ the appearance of literature ʼʼ lost generationʼʼ .Oldinggok ʼʼThe Death of a Heroʼʼ and modernist literature, the priority direction of which is experimentation with form.
Literatures at the turn of the century were as follows:
The popularity of G. Spencer's ideas (social Darwinism), which differed from Victorian norms and provided man with society (Biological understanding of social laws, naturalistic source of art - in the needs of the psyche, understanding of art as part of a game that puts man on par with animals).
* Theory of D. Fraser (Head of the Department of Social Anthropology). His work “The Golden Bough” substantiates the evolution of human consciousness from the tragic to the religious and scientific. The theory paid attention to the features of primitive consciousness. She had a greater influence on the development of modernist literature.
* John Ruskin's concept of art and beauty, which served as the basis for aestheticism. In his work “Lectures on Art” (1870) he said that beauty is an objective property
* The teachings of S. Freud and other philosophers of modern times
Intellectual novel in German literature - concept and types. Classification and features of the category "Intellectual Novel in German Literature" 2017, 2018.
The “intellectual novel” united various writers and different trends in world literature of the 20th century: T. Mann and G. Hesse, R. Musil and G. Broch, M. Bulgakov and K. Chapek, W. Faulkner and T. Wolfe, etc. d. But the main feature of the “intellectual novel” is the acute need of 20th century literature to interpret life, to blur the lines between philosophy and art.
T. Mann is rightfully considered the creator of the “intellectual novel”. In 1924, after the publication of “The Magic Mountain,” he wrote in the article “On the Teachings of Spengler”: “Historical and world turning point 1914 - 1923. with extraordinary force intensified in the minds of his contemporaries the need to comprehend the era, which was refracted in artistic creativity. This process erases the boundaries between science and art, infuses living, pulsating blood into abstract thought, spiritualizes the plastic image and creates the type of book that can be called an “intellectual novel.” T. Mann classified the works of F. Nietzsche as “intellectual novels.”
One of the generic characteristics of an “intellectual novel” is myth-making. Myth, acquiring the character of a symbol, is interpreted as a coincidence of a general idea and a sensory image. This use of myth served as a means of expressing the universals of existence, i.e. repeating patterns in the general life of a person. The appeal to myth in the novels of T. Mann and G. Hesse made it possible to replace one historical background with another, expanding the time frame of the work, giving rise to countless analogies and parallels that cast light on modernity and explain it.
But despite the general trend of an increased need to interpret life, to blur the lines between philosophy and art, the “intellectual novel” is a heterogeneous phenomenon. The variety of forms of the “intellectual novel” is revealed by comparing the works of T. Mann, G. Hesse and R. Musil.
The German “intellectual novel” is characterized by a well-thought-out concept of a cosmic device. T. Mann wrote: “The pleasure that can be found in a metaphysical system, the pleasure that is delivered by the spiritual organization of the world in a logically closed, harmonious, self-sufficient logical structure, is always predominantly of an aesthetic nature.” This worldview is due to the influence of Neoplatonic philosophy, in particular the philosophy of Schopenhauer, who argued that reality, i.e. the world of historical time is only a reflection of the essence of ideas. Schopenhauer called reality "maya", using a term from Buddhist philosophy, i.e. ghost, mirage. The essence of the world is distilled spirituality. Hence Schopenhauer's dual world: the world of the valley (the world of shadows) and the world of the mountain (the world of truth).
The basic laws of constructing the German “intellectual novel” are based on the use of Schopenhauer’s dual worlds: in “The Magic Mountain”, in “Steppenwolf”, in “The Glass Bead Game” reality is multi-layered: this is the world of the valley - the world of historical time and the world of the mountain - the world of true essence. Such a construction implied the delimitation of the narrative from everyday, socio-historical realities, which determined another feature of the German “intellectual novel” - its hermeticity.
The tightness of the “intellectual novel” of T. Mann and G. Hesse gives rise to a special relationship between historical time and personal time, distilled from socio-historical storms. This genuine time exists in the rarefied mountain air of the Berghof sanatorium (The Magic Mountain), in the Magic Theater (Steppenwolf), in the harsh isolation of Castalia (The Glass Bead Game).
About historical time, G. Hesse wrote: “Reality is something with which under no circumstances should one be satisfied and which should not be deified, for it is an accident, i.e. the garbage of life."
R. Musil's "intellectual novel" "Man without Properties" differs from the hermetic form of the novels of T. Mann and G. Hesse. The work of the Austrian writer contains the accuracy of historical characteristics and specific signs of real time. Viewing the modern novel as a “subjective formula for life,” Musil uses the historical panorama of events as the backdrop against which the battles of consciousness are played out. “A Man Without Qualities” is a fusion of objective and subjective narrative elements. In contrast to the complete closed concept of the universe in the novels of T. Mann and G. Hesse, R. Musil's novel is conditioned by the concept of infinite modification and relativity of concepts.