Intellectual romance - in a special, genre and terminological meaning, the concept was used by V.D. Dneprov to designate the originality of T. Mann's works. This writer of the XX century. clearly inherits Dostoevsky and at the same time expresses the specifics of the new era. He, according to Dneprov, “... finds so many facets and shades of the concept, so clearly reveals movement in it, so humanizes it, stretches such a mass of connections from it to the image, enriching it with new features and forming a single artistic whole with it. The image is imbued with the most diverse relationships of the author's thought and acquires a conceptual halo. A new kind of storytelling is emerging that might be called reasoning storytelling. ” In a later work, Dneprov rightly points out that “Dostoevsky had already found the relationship between the image and the concept that underlies the intellectual novel, and this created its prototype. He ... immersed philosophical ideas so deeply into the development of reality and the development of man that they became a necessary part of reality and a necessary part of man ... "( V. D. Dneprov Ideas, Passions, Actions: From Dostoevsky's Artistic Image. L., 1978.S. 324).
The complex artistic dialectics in Dostoevsky's novels excludes strict delimitation and the establishment of hierarchical relationships between the phenomena of intellectual life and mental abilities - feeling, will, intuition, etc. It cannot be said about his artistic world, as it is said about the novel by T. Mann, that here “the concept is constantly catching up with fantasy” ( V. D. Dneprov Decree. op. P. 400). And therefore, for Dostoevsky's novels, the framework of an intellectual novel in the genre-terminological sense is too narrow (just like the framework, etc.).
At the same time, the indicator of "intellectualism" for characterizing various aspects and patterns of Dostoevsky's artistic world remains objective and constructive. And therefore it is legitimate to speak of Dostoevsky's intellectual novel in the broad sense of this terminological designation. In the rough notes for 1881, Dostoevsky emphasized in italics as a cry from the heart: “ Mind is not enough !!! We have little intelligence. Cultural "(27; 59 - Dostoevsky's italics. - Approx. ed.). His own work originally filled in the artistic sphere - along the most diverse lines of search - this general intellectual deficit of the era.
It is noted that "the initial merit of introducing into Russian literature an intellectual hero - a person guided ... by a certain way of thinking or even a program, belongs to Herzen and Turgenev" ( G.K. Shchennikov Dostoevsky and Russian realism. Sverdlovsk, 1987.S. 10). It is also true that, simultaneously with them, Dostoevsky renews his own typology of characters in the same direction - the main character appears, in comparison with the former "little man", "more intellectually independent, more active in the philosophical dialogue of the era" ( Nazirov R.G. The creative principles of F.M. Dostoevsky. Saratov, 1982, p. 40). Later, in the 1860s, the foreground in Dostoevsky's novels was firmly occupied by heroes-ideologists, who have largely determined the originality of his typology since then. The same trend continues.
At first (in, partly in) the heroes-ideologists, according to the observation of G.S. Pomerants, clearly "surpass those around them in their mind and play the role of the intellectual center of the novel" (p. 111). For subsequent works, the impression is natural that the author "... everywhere, even in Lebedev or Smerdyakov, finds his own damned questions ... Wednesday itself moves all the time, thinks and suffers ..." (Ibid. P. 55) ... The intellectualization of Dostoevsky's novel along other lines of his creative quest also proceeds in accordance with the tendencies of the time. “... The twentieth anniversary of the 1860s and 70s is considered by researchers to be a special period in the development of Russian realism. The general direction of these changes is the approval of the author's idea as an integral explanation of the laws of life ... "( G.K. Shchennikov Dostoevsky and Russian realism. Sverdlovsk, 1987.S. 178). Starting with "Notes from the Underground", which are rightfully considered ideological and artistic "prolegomena" to the novels, Dostoevsky's decisive, plot-forming role begins to play the principle of testing ideas - both the author's ideas in an equal dialogue with the heroes' ideas, and these latter through their implementation in the behavior and fates of people. This gives grounds to see in Dostoevsky's work the features of a "novel-tragedy" (Viach. Ivanov), then a "philosophical dialogue extended into an epic of adventures" with the personalization of individual opinions (L. Grossman), then a "novel about an idea" or "" ( B. Engelhardt).
Another important aspect of understanding the "intellectual" nature of Dostoevsky's novels was highlighted by R.G. Nazirov: they are “ideological not only because the heroes discuss and try to practically solve“ damned problems ”, but also because the very life of ideas in novels for its perception requires from readers an unusual, new thinking effort - the form is more intellectual than it was before "( Nazirov R.G. The creative principles of F.M. Dostoevsky. Saratov, 1982, p. 100). The same sign of an intellectual novel was pointed out by V.D. Dneprov: “The affinity of poetry with philosophy gives rise to duality in the perception of Dostoevsky's works - a passionate and at the same time intellectual perception. The soul is on fire and the mind is on fire ”( V. D. Dneprov Ideas, passions, deeds: From the artistic image of Dostoevsky. L., 1978.S. 73).
The Intellectual Novel brought together various writers and different trends in the 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. etc. 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": "The historical and world turn of 1914 - 1923. with extraordinary force he sharpened in the consciousness of his contemporaries the need to comprehend the era, which was reflected in artistic creation. 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 attributed the works of F. Nietzsche to "intellectual novels".
One of the generic features of the "intellectual novel" is myth-making. The myth, acquiring the character of a symbol, is interpreted as the coincidence of a general idea and a sensual image. This use of myth served as a means of expressing the universals of being, i.e. recurring 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 substitute one historical background for another, pushing the time frame of the work, giving rise to countless analogies and parallels that throw light on the present day and explain it.
But despite the general tendency of a heightened need for the interpretation of life, for blurring the lines between philosophy and art, the "intellectual novel" is a heterogeneous phenomenon. The variety of forms of the "intellectual novel" is revealed when 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 space device. T. Mann wrote: "The pleasure that can be found in the metaphysical system, the pleasure that the spiritual organization of the world gives in a logically closed, harmonious, self-sufficient logical construction, always predominantly aesthetic." Such a perception of the world 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 the term of 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 the construction of the German "intellectual novel" are based on the use of Schopenhauer's double world: in "The Magic Mountain", in "Steppenwolf", in the "Game of Beads" 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 led to another feature of the German "intellectual novel" - its tightness.
The tightness of the "intellectual novel" by 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 thin mountain air of the Berghof sanatorium (Magic Mountain), in the Magic Theater (Steppenwolf), in the austere isolation of Castalia (The Glass Bead Game).
About the historical time G. Hesse wrote: “Reality is that which under no circumstances is worth satisfying
and what should not be deified, because it is an accident, i.e. waste of life. "
R. Musil's “Intellectual Novel” “Man Without Properties” differs from the hermetic form of the novels by T. Mann and G. Hesse. In the work of the Austrian writer there is the accuracy of historical characteristics and specific signs of real time. Regarding the modern novel as a “subjective formula of life,” Musil uses the historical panorama of events as a background against which the battles of consciousness are played out. "Man without properties" 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 endless mutability and relativity of concepts.
Thomas Mann (1875 - 1955)
T. Mann's creative path covers more than half a century - from the 90s of the XIX century to the 50s of the XX century. In the work of the writer one of the characteristic features art of the XX century. - 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" is very important, glorifying the "life impulse" (irrational foundations of life) and affirming the aesthetic justification of life. The "Dionysian" orgiastic perception is contrasted with the position of contemplation and reflection, which is defined by Nietzsche as the rational Apollo principle that kills the "vital impulse".
T. Mann's creative evolution is conditioned by the constant attraction-repulsion of Nietzschean philosophy. This ambiguous attitude to Nietzsche's ideas will be embodied in the writer's mature works ("The Magic Mountain", "Joseph and His Brothers", "Doctor Faustus") in the idea of \u200b\u200bthe "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 the spirit and the sphere of the irrational).
This idea of \u200b\u200bthe "middle" breaks down into dialectical opposites: spirit - life, disease - health, chaos - order. The idea of \u200b\u200bthe "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 burghers, in the writer's concept, is the eternal evolution of life forms, the crown of which is a person, and the most important conquests are love, kindness, friendship. Linking the emergence of burghers with good times in history - with the Renaissance, T. Mann believed that even in such unfortunate times as the XX 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 formed into the method of "humanistic universalism", i.e. perception of life in all its versatility. T. Mann contrasts the "burgher" culture with decadence based on Schopenhauer's "tragic pessimism", who elevates the troubles and evil of life into a universal law.
Early novels by T. Mann - "Tonio Kroger"(1902) and "Death in Venice"(1912) - are a vivid example of the embodiment of the Nietzschean concept of "Dionysian aestheticism". The bipolar outlook of the writer is expressed in the polarity of the types of heroes: Hans Hansen ("Tonio Kroger") and Tadzio ("Death in Venice") are the personification of healthy organic forces of life, its direct perception, not clouded by the 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 knowing the world, and perceive life through the screen of book experiences. Hans Hansen's appearance: "golden-haired", blue-eyed is not only an individual trait, but also a sym-
an ox of a true "burgher" for the early T. Mann. The longing for blue-eyed and golden-haired, which Tonio Kroger 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 "burghers" at this stage bears clear features of the influence of Nietzschean philosophy and is equivalent to the concept of a life 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 direct 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 contemplators. Therefore, the art they create is contemplative and, from the point of view of T. Mann, defective. Using Nietzsche's term "decadence", which the German philosopher used to denote romanticism and Schopenhauer's philosophy, the writer defines this term as art of the contemplative type, reproducing life only from the standpoint of negative personal experience.
So, in the worldview of 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 new meaning, which will be due to a change in his attitude to the philosophy of F. Nietzsche.
In his final novel, Doctor Faustus, T. Mann calls the reproduction of the irrational foundations of life, which are reflected in the music of Adrian Leverkühn, "blazing with the heat of the underworld" as decadent art.
The basis of the philosophical structure of the novel "Magic Mountain"is the idea of \u200b\u200bthe "middle". The novel is characterized by a special interpretation of the 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. The historical time in the novel is the time in the valley, in the world of everyday life. 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 rather complicated and vague reasons. In a report dedicated to The Magic Mountain, T. Mann emphasized that this novel cannot be attributed to a novel of education, since the main conflict is not in striving for self-improvement and not in gaining positive experience, but in search of new ideas about the essence of man and being. The hero, according to the tradition of German classical literature from Novalis to Goethe, does not change his appearance, his character is stable. There is only, as Goethe said about his Faust, "tireless activity until the end of his life, which is becoming 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.
Sanatorium "Berghof" - 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 a riot of chaos, instincts, as a violation of the ethical principles of life. Many aspects of the idle existence of the inhabitants of the sanatorium 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, impermissible rampant bodily nature. Hans Castorp goes through the temptation of chaos and revelry of instinct in various manifestations: each of the forms of temptation is reproduced according to the principle of antithesis. In essence, the figures of the first mentors of the hero - Settembrini and Nafta - are opposite. Settembrini embodies the spirit of abstract ideals of humanism, which lost their real support in the 20th century, Nafta, as an ideological opponent of Settembrini, personifies the position of totalitarianism. Having experienced a negative experience in his youth, he spreads hatred to all of humanity: he dreams of the bonfires of the Inquisition, the execution of heretics, the prohibition of free-thinking books. Nafta personifies the power of the dark instinctive principle. In the writer's concept, this position is opposite to the burgher element and is one of the forms of decadence.
The next stage of temptation is the temptation by the element 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, Claudia Shoscha and Hans Castorp are explained. 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 that you are looking for all my life, my dream, my destiny, my eternal desire. " For Claudia Shosh, love is in the nature of romantic passion: passion for her is self-forgetfulness, an irrational element of life, merging with chaos, i.e. what T. Mann calls decadence.
The dream, described in the chapter "Snow", which solves ethical and philosophical problems about the relationship between chaos and order, reason and instinct, love and death, is of great philosophical significance for G. Castorp's spiritual experience. “Love is opposed to death. Only she, not the mind, is stronger than her. Only she inspires us with 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 interplay of chaos and order, physical and spiritual, expands in Magic Mountain to the dimensions of universal existence and human history.
Novel "Joseph and his brothers"(1933 - 1942) was created at the height of the Second World War. 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 flock, aroused the envy of his brothers. They threw him into a well. A passing merchant rescued the boy and sold him to a wealthy Egyptian nobleman, Potiphar. In Egypt, Joseph, as if reborn, acquires a different name - Ozarsif. Thanks to his abilities, he managed to earn Potiphar's friendship and become his manager. Potiphar's wife, the beautiful Mut-em-Enet, fell in love with Joseph, but, being rejected, she slandered him and achieved his imprisonment. Joseph is saved this time too. Chance brings him to a young Egyptian fa-
raon. Joseph becomes an all-powerful minister and in difficult years saves Egypt from hunger and pestilence. T. Mann leaves this biblical plot unchanged.
In the foreground, as the writer noted, in this biblical story comes the interest in the typical, eternally human, i.e. to "the given form of characters from ancient times" 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 about Adonis (or among the ancient Greeks - about Dionysus) are preserved. The young hero is humiliated, torn to pieces, the dawn is replaced by darkness. Joseph - Adonis-Dionysus - Gilgamesh - Osiris - this mythological archetype causes the envy of mediocre ones, and they kill him in some particular, specific manifestation. But the power of this archetype is limitless, life generates 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 being has a dual character - evil is also its inevitable element. Therefore, Joseph goes to meet him, not making the slightest attempt to stop the brothers, nor, later, to justify himself before 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 the all-powerful minister who saved Egypt from hunger. The "beauty" of Joseph is the realization of his Adonis destiny, 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 perfection of spiritual life. The story of Joseph for the writer is a symbolic path of humanity. The use of myth made it possible for T. Mann to identify analogies and correspondences throwing light on the terrible era of World War II, to explain how it became possible to combine a high level of culture and wild barbarism, genocide, fires from books, and the extermination of all dissent.
Novel "Doctor Faustus"(1947) T. Mann called the "secret confession", summing up his many years of meditation on the spiritual culture of the XX century. The novel is only superficially constructed as a consistent chronological biography of the German composer Adrian Leverkühn. Leverkühn's friend, the chronicler Zeitblom, tells first about his family, then about Leverkühn's hometown of Kaisersastern, which has preserved its medieval appearance. Then, in a strictly chronological order, about the years of Leverkühn's study of composition with Kretschmar and their general views on music. But in accordance with the genre of the "intellectual novel" we are not talking about the biography of the protagonist, but about a philosophical and aesthetic study of the genesis of the ideology of corruption, which 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 protagonist Adrian Leverkühn are closely interrelated. 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 contemporary 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 the sake of which the "Faustian theme" is being introduced is the problem of the relationship between art and life, the reassessment 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 was it not he (" The Philosophy of Nietzsche in the Light of Our Experience ") who demonstrated the fervor of temperament, an irresistible craving for everything infinite, and alas, groundless identification of his own" I " Leverkühn, like his historical prototype, elevates the "ambiguity of life", "pathos 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. Unsuccessful matchmaking to 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 is not 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 a terrible and special denouement, behind which lies the motive of the devil."
In the article “Germany and the Germans” (1945) T. Mann wrote: “Damn Leverkühn, the devil of Faust seem to me to be a highly German character, and an agreement with him, the laying of the soul to the devil, refusal to save the soul in the name of to own all the treasures, all the power of the world - such a contract is very tempting for a German by his very nature. Isn't now the right moment to look at Germany in this very aspect - now when the devil is literally taking her soul away. " Adrian Leverkühn creates his music under the sign of "pathos of filth", as he believes that "ambiguity in music is systematic." In his oratorios and cantatas there is a thunderous statement of the powerlessness of good. Parody served as an adequate expression of this concept, replacing melody and tonal connections as the basis, fruitful for art. The devil in the novel, as in the tragedy of Goethe, is "a principle in guise", the embodiment of overcoming the impossible. In the case of A. Leverkühn, this is overcoming creative impotence. The devil suggests "to sell time - the time of flights and insights, a sense of freedom, liberty and celebration." The only condition is the prohibition of love. At the same time, the devil emphasizes that "such a general frozen 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 up even at the stake of inspiration."
Leverkühn's last work, the cantata Lamentations of Doctor Faustus, was conceived as the antipode of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony; it is, as it were, “the reversed path of the song to the joy of being”. His cantata sounds not only as a periphery of A Song of Joy, but also as a periphery of The Last Supper, since “holiness” is unthinkable without trial and is measured by the sinful potential of a person, Adrian Leverkühn believes.
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 "the descent of Faust to 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 the "intellectual novel" of Hesse, in contrast to the works of T. Mann, not only Goethe but also German romanticism was a high model. 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 consonant with Novalis's views on the subjective nature of the world, reflected in his theory of "magical idealism": the whole world and all the reality surrounding a person is identical to his "I". The writer adopted and reinterpreted the romantic tradition. The object of the image in his novels is “magical reality”, “reflection of the core,” “the deep essence of the individual,” in the words of the writer. All works of the writer - "Demian" (1919), "Klein and Wagner" (1921), "Pilgrimage to the East" (1932), "Sidhartha" (1922), "Steppenwolf" (1927), "Glass Bead Game" (1940 - 1943) - the search for symbolic correspondences to the universals of being. This is due to the delimitation of the artistic space from the socio-historical context and the tightness of his novels. "Steppenwolf" and "The Glass Bead Game" brought the writer worldwide fame and recognition.
In the novel "Steppenwolf" G.Hesse conveyed not only the disturbing atmosphere of the post-war years, but also the danger of fascism. The “steppe” in the minds of a European is a harsh expanse that contradicts the comfortable and inhabited world, and the image of the “wolf” is inextricably linked with the idea of \u200b\u200bsomething wild, strong, aggressive and untamed.
In his diaries, Hesse emphasized that the novel Steppenwolf has a structure reminiscent of a sonata form: three-stage development of the action, the spiraling of the plot drawing, “turning points”, the binary nature of the organization of leading themes, which generates epic energy. The novel is divided into four parts: "Publisher's Foreword", "Harry Haller's Notes", "A Treatise on the Steppenwolf", "Magic Theater". The movement of the novel is directed by the tendency towards the release of action from socio-historical realities and the transition to an allegory of inner-soul processes. "Harry Haller's Notes" presents a kind of inner self-portrait of the hero. "Publisher's Notes" complements them with an external portrait. The Treatise on the Steppenwolf, like the Magic Theater, is perceived as an insert, a picture in a picture. The need for insertions is due to the writer's desire to delimit unreal and fantastic events from the main plot development, perceived as a definite 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 "round personality", and Hesse, expanding the concept of "round personality", introducing into it the synthesis of "yin" and "yang", Spirit and Nature, calls such an archetype a perfect personality, or "immortal". Goethe and Mozart are the embodiment of this archetype in the novel.
G. Hesse's novel offers not so much "pictures of life" as images of consciousness. The publisher describes Harry Haller as somewhat strange, unusual and at the same time friendly and even attractive person. A sad, soulful face, a piercing desperate look, an unorganized mental-book life, thoughtful, often incomprehensible speeches - all testify to his originality and exclusivity. Harry Haller is surrounded by an atmosphere of mystery: no one knows where he came from and what his origin is. A secluded lifestyle delimits his existence from those around him and gives him a touch of mystery.
In The Treatise on the 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 the Gallery, wildness and indomitability of the Steppenwolf were combined with kindness and tenderness, love for music, especially for Mozart, as well as “with the desire to have human ideals”. The division into a wolf and a man is a division into Spirit and Nature (into instincts), conscious and unconscious. Hesse affirms the idea of \u200b\u200bthe multi-layered, ambiguous personality, refuting the stereotypical idea of \u200b\u200bits integrity and unity.
Hesse generalizes the type of consciousness of his hero, expanding it to the archetype of artistic consciousness. “There are quite a few people like Harry in the world, many artists in particular belong to this type. All these people contain two souls, two beings, the divine principle and the devil. "
The type of consciousness of G. Haller is a modification of the romantic consciousness, which opposed itself to the world of everyday life or, according to Hesse, to the world of philistinism. "According to his own idea, the Steppenwolf stayed outside the bourgeois world, because he did not lead a family life and did not know social ambition, he felt only a loner, now a strange unsociable, sick hermit, now an out-of-the-ordinary personality with the makings of a genius." But, in contrast to the romantic hero, G. Haller with one half of his consciousness always recognized and affirmed what the other half of him denied. He felt connected with the philistine. The bourgeoisie is interpreted by Hesse as a "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 the philistine due to the "vagueness of ideals." Outsiders like G. Haller are generated by this element of equilibrium, but they step beyond it - stereotypes of behavior, common sense.
The whole story of G. Haller is the story of the liberation of the personality from its outer shell, the "social mask" (the external attitude of the psyche) and the search for the true peace of the soul (the internal attitude of the psyche), aimed at achieving harmony
the natural unity of the splitting world of one's own soul, i.e. synthesis of the conscious and unconscious, Spirit and Nature, the feminine ("yin") and masculine ("yang") principles. This striving is guided by the ideal of the "immortals", embodying the synthesis of opposite spheres of the psyche in the highest unity. "Immortals" - Goethe and Mozart - belong to the same archetype as Christ: "the greatness of self-giving, the readiness for suffering, the ability to utter loneliness ... to the loneliness of the Garden of Gethsemane."
"Magic Theater" is the finale of the novel, in which an experiment of building a perfect personality is carried out. This world without time belongs to the realm of fantasy and dreams, fixing internal mental processes in a plastic and visible embodiment. Everything that happens is a symbolic embodiment of the author's ideas. Access to the "Magic Theater" is open only to "crazy". "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 visible unity, were able to see the diversity of the soul. Haller, who discovered in himself the rupture, the polarity of the soul - the 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 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, H. Hesse seeks to show that the death of Harry Haller, or rather his social mask, is associated with the birth of an "inner man", "an image of his soul." Haller's dance with Hermine, the "call girl", is called the "wedding dance" in the novel. This is not an ordinary wedding, but a "chemical" wedding, uniting opposites in the highest hermaphroditic unity. This becomes possible thanks to the numerous symbolism scattered throughout the text of the novel. One of these symbols is the lotus. The lotus in ancient Indian philosophy, which Hesse was fond of, archetypally expressed the hermaphroditic unity of opposites. The lotus with its roots goes into the dark water and black bog and from the pristine mist makes its way to the sunlight in the form beautiful flowerdazzling white in its pristine purity. The lotus symbolizes not only the unity of being, but also the unity of the soul, indicating both the primary materiality of the world and the bottomless depths of the unconscious. The hermaphroditic character of the “wedding dance” is also emphasized by its external imagery: The term appears at the carnival in a man's costume, which accentuates its two-statute character. This bisexualness of Terme is outlined long before the masquerade ball: it vaguely reminds Harry Galler of his childhood friend Herman. The motive of similarity is emphasized by the identity of the names - Herman and Termina. Hesse broadens this rapprochement, finding new perspectives in it; The term 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 the development of an "internal attitude" embodied in the image of the Term. 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 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, symbolic
is embodied in the episode with the magic mirror, in which Harry sees many Gallers - old and young, sedate and funny, serious and funny. The scene of a hunt in a car is also symbolic, when the pacifist and humanist Harry discovers in himself the presence of aggressive and destructive principles, which he did not even know about. The 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 elementary 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, that is, the merging of opposite spheres of the psyche is carried out, harmonious balance and "astral" dispassion are achieved.
Gallier, mixing images of the soul with reality, cannot get rid of his "social mask". The act of the Term entering into a relationship with Pablo is perceived by him as treason, and he reacts to the situation in accordance with the stereotypes of the external attitude - he kills her. Haller is unaware that the term, embodying 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 "Magic Theater", leaves with the intention of returning again to better learn the game.
The playfulness in "Magic Theater" expresses the writer's ironic attitude to the realization of the possibility of a perfect personality. The openness and openness of the final are due to the author's concept of the path to improvement as a path to infinity. In the metaphysical plane, this acquires the role of a symbol, in the event one it means that the hero's life, his inner growth must always remain incomplete.
Over the novel "Glass bead game"Hesse worked for 13 years. The action of the novel is relegated to the distant future, far from the century of world wars "the era of spiritual laxity and shamelessness." On the ruins of this era, out of the inexhaustible need of the spirit to exist and be reborn, a game of beads arises - at first it is simple and primitive, then it becomes more and more complicated and turned into comprehension of a common denominator and a common language of culture. “With all experience, all lofty thoughts and works of art ... With all this huge mass of spiritual values, the Handyman plays an organ like an organist, and the perfection of this organ is hard to imagine - its keys and pedals cover the entire spiritual space, its registers are almost countless, theoretically playing on this instrument can reproduce all the spiritual content of the world ... the idea of \u200b\u200bthe Game has always existed. "
Playful attitude to the entire "spiritual space", establishing the finest patterns of correspondences between different kinds art and science, implies an ironic attitude to the universally significant, once and for all established truth. The world of the game is the world of relativity of concepts and the assertion of the eternal spirit of variability and freedom of choice. The Castalian scientists vow not to develop, but only to preserve, deepen, classify the arts and sciences, since they believe that any development, and even more practical application, threatens the spirit with the loss of purity. The center of the game is the Republic of Kastalia, designed to keep the spiritual wealth accumulated by humanity intact. The republic assumes that its citizens possess not only the skills of the Game, but also contemplative concentration, meditation. Obligatory conditions for the life of the Kastalians are refusal of property, asceticism and disregard for comfort, i.e. a semblance of a monastery charter.
The novel tells about a certain Joseph Knecht, once taken to Kastalia as a modest student, who over the years becomes the Master of the Game, but then, contrary to all traditions and customs, leaves the republic of the spirit for the sake of an anxious and bustle of the world, for the sake of raising a single student. The content of the novel, if you follow the plot, boils down to a denial of Castalian isolation, but the philosophical structure of the novel is much more complex.
The central place in the novel is occupied by the discussions and clashes of the two main characters - Joseph Knecht and Plinio Des-
niori. These disputes began even when Knecht was a modest student in Castalia, and Plinio, the offspring of a patrician family long associated with Castalia, was a volunteer who came to Castalia from the world of noisy cities. The clash of two opposing positions reveals one of the most pressing problems of the 20th century: do culture, knowledge, spirit have the right to be kept in all purity and inviolability in any single place? Knecht is a supporter of the Castalian seclusion, Plinio is his opponent, who believes that "the glass bead game is playing with letters", consisting of continuous associations and playing with analogies. But over the years, the conflict is removed, the opponents go towards each other, expanding their own understanding of life at the expense of the opponent's rightness. 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 Castalia's isolation. On different rights, the novel compares an effective and contemplative attitude to 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 lips of Knecht, Hesse reveals the inferiority and harm of absolute, irrefutable truths: "Because of their attempts to teach" meaning ", the philosophers of history have ruined half of world history, initiated a feuilleton era and are guilty of the streams of shed blood." Hesse, giving his hero the name Knecht (in German - servant), introduces into the novel the theme of service, which he calls "service to the supreme master." This idea is associated with one of the most profound concepts - "insight" or "awakening." The state of "awakening" contains not 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 case concerned the attitude of Kastali spirituality to world history, to life, to man: “You, Kastalians, great scientists and aesthetes, you measure the weight of vowels in an old poem and correlate its formula with the formula for the orbit of some planet. It's amazing, but it's a game ... Glass bead game. " Father Jacob emphasizes barrenness
the creativity of Kastali's isolation, “a complete lack of a sense of history”: “You do not know him, man, you do not know either his animal nature or his godliness. You only know the Castalians, the caste, the original attempt to grow some special species. "
Knecht, for the first time in Mariafels, discovered history for himself, feeling it not as a field of knowledge, but as a reality, and “this means - to correspond, to turn his own individual life into history”. The "enlightenment" of Knecht, who remained loyal to Castalia, made him "awaken, advance, grasp and understand reality", that is, realize the impossibility of continuing life within the same boundaries.
G. Hesse never portrayed the final achievement of the goal by his heroes. Knecht's life, symbolizing the universals of human existence, is a path to infinity. In the last chapters, Knecht dies trying to save his student drowning in the waves of a mountain lake. But the death of Knecht is interpreted by the writer not as an end and destruction, but as a “disembodiment” and the creation of a new one. Knecht's spiritual example will become the starting point in the formation and self-creation of Tito. 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 assertion 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 need, in emigration. All the works of R. Musil, starting with the early novel "The Confusion of Törless's Pupil" (1906), the cycle of short stories "Three Women" (1924) and ending with the grandiose novel "Man without Properties" (1930 - 1934), is an attempt to show the typology of modern consciousness , installation on the "look from the inside". A keen interest in the "anatomy" of consciousness determines the structure artistic images, which are the author's self-projection.
Evaluating modern consciousness as a combination of naked practicality, fruitless reflection and unbridled instincts, Musil sought to destroy the clichédness of stereotyped perceptions and ideas, to change a person who had lost his natural properties. Utopia becomes the main structure in his worldview system, and “otherness” as the harmonious realization of all rational and emotional human capabilities becomes the central concept in his main work - the novel “A Man Without Properties”.
The writer's worldview position is formed in the essay "The Mathematical Man" (1913). The successor of the romantic and Rousseauist traditions, Musil considers the world of social norms and laws to be hostile to the individual, killing his “living soul”. The writer sees the source of the uncloudedness of sensory sensations in mystical "illumination", ie 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 truly rational ("rational" in Musil's terminology) in the educational 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 world perception and the fullness of being.
The writer's ideological position determined the tendency towards the synthesis of various stylistics in the novel. "A man without properties."The first layer on the surface is the layer of objective storytelling, reproducing the epic canvas of the Habsburg empire. With absolute precision Musil determined the time and place of action: Austria, or rather Vienna, 1913, the eve of the assassination of the Habsburg heir to the throne and the beginning of the First World War. The outward movement of events is organized by the famous "parallel action". In circles close to the throne, it becomes known about the preparations in Germany for the celebration in June 1918 of the thirtieth anniversary of the accession of Wilhelm II to the throne. The same year marks the seventy-year anniversary of the reign of the Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Joseph; the Austrians decide to keep up with the "arrogant Germans" and are preparing a "parallel action". But the historical panorama of events for Musil is just a background against which the main battles are being played out - the battles of modern consciousness. As the writer emphasized, the main thing for him is “not a real explanation real events, but spiritually typical ”.
In Musil's understanding, the modern novel is a “subjective formula of life,” embracing the whole person and all the complexity of his relationship with time, history, and the state. This attitude determined the belonging of "Man Without Properties" to the genre of the intellectual novel. Genuine reality in the novel is contrasted with the world of everyday consciousness - the world of properties, i.e. reproduction of erased clichés and stereotypes, once and for all established "great ideals" and laws. This is a world of falsehood, hypocrisy, a world of "inauthentic", "inappropriate" existence. This whole world of banal, everyday consciousness is presented in the planned "parallel action". Participants of the “action” are people of different “professions”. The concept of "profession" acts as a pivotal in Musil's worldview structure and bears features of similarity not only to Hölderlin's definition of inertness of everyday consciousness, but is a kind of petrified social mask once and for all, 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, geographic, sexual, conscious and unconscious, and perhaps also private; he unites them in himself, but they dissolve him, and he is, in fact, nothing but a hollow blurred by these many streams ”. In the characters of Musil, their indigenous properties are perverted, social masks stamped and clichéd with stereotypes.
In the vast space of Muzilev's novel, officials, military men, industrialists, aristocrats, and journalists are depicted - "types of professionals" in whom, according to Hölderlin, the living, immediate essence of the soul is killed. It's just
bureaucratic 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 Leinsdorff, hopelessly conserved in his archaic aristocracy; the intellectual millionaire Arnheim; and the dumb General Stumm trying to capitalize on the "parallel action". This is Tuzzi's wife, whose antique appearance makes Ulrich associate with Plato's Diotima. Inspired by the dream of going down in history, Diotima hopes to accomplish a "spiritual feat" by participating in a "parallel action": Ulrich, as Leinsdorff's secretary, witnesses how the movement called "parallel action" attracts some and repels others. Proposals come in, one more absurd than the other, endless meetings are convened, receptions are arranged; all sorts of inventors, fanatics, dreamers send projects to the committee, one 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 anniversary of the monarch should be celebrated. Everything goes by itself, and this is the main thing. And the idea may follow. At some point, it begins to seem that it promises to be the creation of the "Supra-dispensing dining room of Emperor Franz Joseph."
The witty-satirical model of the doomed world has another dimension: despite the activity of all the participants in the "parallel action", no changes take place. As Ulrich put it, “it’s all the same” or “the repetition of the same”.
"Repetition of the like", included in the title of the second part of the novel, has a functional and semantic load. This aphorism was borrowed by Musil from F. Nietzsche (Nietzsche used it in The Merry Science (1882), Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1884)). Despite all efforts to change something, the immobile world, frozen in cliches and dogmas, produces "its own kind", that is, some sort of ordering system that brings the participants of the action spiritual comfort and satisfaction: “... the most important mental tricks of mankind 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 mankind makes to preserve its sublime peace of mind! " Musil highlights one of the main features of the archetype of everyday consciousness: repetition and stability. No wonder Ulrich defines traditional morality as "the problem of a long-term state, to which all other states are subordinate."
The world of stability and repetition is exposed by Musil with the help of irony. Unlike romantic irony, which overcomes the contradictory nature of life through play, Musil's irony analytically splits the world of "similar repetition." Ulrich, the author's self-projection, constantly maintains a distance to any position, to 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 the concept of Musil, acquires the status of eternal openness and incompleteness of life, conditioning the realization of the unrealized natural possibilities of the individual. The irony of Musil, acting in the function of "tragic negation", embodied the rejection of stable systems that transform the ever-changing substance of life into something immovable, frozen.
Irony splits the world of Muzilev's novel into the world of “reality” (“repetition of the like”) and the world of “otherness”, in which the categories of “possibilities” rule. Such a "double world" defines a two-layered 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 “another state”, a world of possibilities. This narrative plane, defining the internal, deep structure of the novel, represents a constant splitting and polysemy of semantic complexes that personify symbolic correspondences of unrealized, suppressed possibilities. The novel was constructed as an endless game of analogies and similarities (Musil admitted in his diaries his passion for analogies). Analogies that do not obey any laws are based on
associations, which were at the discretion of the author, were most consistent with the writer's intention: not to affirm 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 has a latent passion for violence: he is looking for a penknife to kill the Prussian industrialist Arnheim. Clarissa asks Ulrich to kill her effeminate husband Walter and at the same time is willing 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 for crime, repeated in different situations, reveals the manifestation of the mysterious spheres of the unconscious in the novel. “... It is quite decent people with great pleasure, although, of course, only in imagination, they commit crimes,” Ulrich states.
An important role in the novel is played by the murderer and sexual maniac Moosbruger, who embodies the theme of crime, which, in numerous connections and correspondences, gives rise to analogies and a play of variations. The image of Moosbruger, personifying the unconscious, "overflowing", was associated with a complex of ideas of the conscious and unconscious, the Nietzschean "life impulse" and the superman crossing the line, important for the Musil era. In the resonance of Musilev's heroes, following the fate of Moosbruger, both Nietzschean immoralism and Freudian ideas are ironically played up. Clarissa, a "fan" of Nietzsche's ideas, sees in Moosbruger's crime the fulfillment of a vital impulse, an inner call from the depths of the unconscious. The motive of the unconscious takes on various forms of similarities and correspondences in the novel.
The dance of the insane Moosbruger, which sometimes lasted for several days, epitomizes an "incredible and deathly unchained state" that resulted in an act of rape or murder. The essence of the dance is compared to the incredible pleasure experienced from removing all the prohibitions.
comrade This motive is unexpectedly expanded by the introduction of a definition of musicality as a trait inherent in murderers. Music is interpreted within the framework of Nietzschean philosophy as a reproduction of the irrational foundations of life. The ecstatic state of utmost pleasure, into which music immerses Clarissa and Walter, generates in Clarissa a powerful impulse of associative correspondence with the state of murder. No wonder she calls Moosbruger a "musical man."
The motive of the unconscious embodies in the novel the powerful fundamental principles of life, which determine the endless variability of human actions, the impossibility of their unambiguous interpretation. Musil divided life into "rational" and "non-rational". "Non-rational", in the interpretation of the writer, in contrast to Freudian determinism, is that which cannot be understood, put into the Procrustean bed of formulas and concepts. Therefore, Musil sought to capture the "sliding logic of the soul" in endless analogies and symbolic correspondences. This is due to the constant playing around of repetitive images, objects and phenomena. So, Moosbruger imagines that every thing and phenomenon has an elastic band that prevents them from coming close to others and "passing through each other", ie. do what you want, "and now - these rubber bands are suddenly gone." This state of Moosbruger coincides with his feelings at the time of the murder. The image of the rubber band is repeated on a completely different level of narration - Agatha and Ulrich at the coffin of her father: Agatha suddenly removes the rubber garter from her leg and puts it in the coffin. In a realistic narrative, this act is motivated by the childhood memories of both; once they loved to bury in the garden "a part of themselves" - "clipped nails." In the symbolic plan of the narration of endless similarities and variations, the removed rubber garter embodies the lifting of all prohibitions and the entry of the heroes into an incestuous relationship.
Ideas and positions of heroes are played in the same way. The meaning of each episode fits into the general polyphony of the novel, which is a system of endless reflections. Proceeding from concrete life material, Musil builds a chain of analogies and similarities around the problem of activity and inaction, which is a leitmotif of the era, which runs through the entire novel. Thus, the industrialist Arnheim believes that a thinking person must necessarily be a person 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 for the "parallel action" is action. In the salon of Diotima, the activist of the “parallel action,” something is always happening. Diotima, obsessed with a thirst to go down in history, asserts the need for vigorous activity in the name of uniting a multinational state. The novel repeats many times the characteristic of the Austro-Hungarian Empire as the embodiment of frozen immobility. Scattered throughout the work "thoughts about", ironically commented by the author, merge into one of the main themes of the novel: about the vacuum of ideas in the modern world, about the impossibility of choosing positive activity and about the flawed inaction. The endless variability of these qualities and properties, changing and acquiring new meaning in different situations and positions of the heroes, personifies the universal features of the era.
This technique of assimilations and analogies made it possible for Musil to reveal one of the basic structures (laws) of being: through the properties of the era, stamped in their viscous repetition, the eternal laws of being are visible. Musil stressed 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 schemes. The position of the secretary of the "parallel action" provides him with access to all participants in this action. But Ulrich only observes, not wanting to be realized, i.e. give any real form to your life. He emphasizes that he would like to "live hypothetically." Ulrich as a “hypothetical hero” is not imprisoned in a “profession”, “character”, “clichéd”, stereotyped consciousness. He is a "man without properties." Author's self-projection, Ulrich realized
reveals 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 disunity of life, devoid of purpose and meaning, into the irreducible contradictions of the "rational" and "irrational", the world of reality and the world of "otherness". The utopia of the "millennial kingdom" symbolizes in a symbolic form the possibility of synthesizing these contradictions. In it, according to Musil's plan, the achievement of "other being" is realized, ie. harmony of unity of all rational ("rational") and emotional ("non-rational") human properties. The mythologeme of the "millennial kingdom", or "golden age", which existed in various myths as a symbol of some timeless space, most often the "Garden of Eden", is related to the earthly paradise, being the embodiment of removing any contradictions and differences.
In the center of Muzilev's utopia, aimed at abolishing reality, "its properties" - incest, Ulrich's love for his own sister. Incest, the idea of \u200b\u200bbreaking all moral laws, all taboos and restrictions is extremely sharpened. The seclusion of a brother and sister, who have cut off all external connections and acquaintances, carries a double meaning. On the one hand, this existence together, in the loneliness 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, anticipation, giving rise to a sublime vibration of all feelings: "Dreams of love are closer for both than physical attraction." In this state of "enlightenment" the utopian merging of opposites into one whole takes place, Ulrich feels himself to be a particle of Agatha: "I know that you are: my selfishness."
On the other hand, the myth of the "millennial kingdom", fueled by the Platonic myth of love, of the longed-for merger of two halves - "They hugged, intertwined and, passionately wanting to grow together, died of hunger and inaction, because they did not want to do anything separately" ( Plato) - introduces the motive of ambiguity, ironic playing with the possibility of achieving “otherness”. Ulrich explains to Agatha that “just at the time of the great
with 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 history of Agatha and Ulrich, Musil calls his novel "an ironic novel of education," in which the writer's efforts to synthesize, to harmoniously merge opposites, take place. Musil's analogies, permeated with an infinity of interpretations, never lead to a definite meaning. "Even in any analogy," Ulrich says, "there is some remnant of the magic of identity." The meaning of life for the writer remained a mystery and 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 that you immerse yourself in entirely." The absence of logical, causal connections determines the openness, understatement in the endless game of analogies and assimilations. Muzilev's "dual world", based on the synthesis of logical and sensory ideas, creates a feeling of 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 striving towards infinity. Musil created a form of the novel, in which the aesthetics of analogies and similarities determine the fusion of various stylistics. The layering of the artistic world of the work adequately embodied the main idea: "Everything that we do is only similarity." The novel "Man Without Properties" won the writer immortal fame.
Literature
1. Mann T. Magic Mountain. Doctor Faustus.
2. Hesse G. Steppenwolf. Glass bead game.
3. Musil R. 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 by Robert Musil). - M., 1990.
6. Karalashvili R. The world of novels by Hermann Hesse. - Tbilisi, 1984.
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📖 Main character books by Gabriel Wells. He writes books. Rather, I did. He was killed that night. And now he is busy in the guise of a wandering spirit trying to find out who did this to him.
📖 Agneta Pleyel is a well-known figure in the cultural life of Scandinavia: author of plays and novels, poet, laureate of literary awards, professor of drama, literary critic, journalist. Her books have been translated into 20 languages. main character from the story “To Survive the Winter in Stockholm” (1997) she is going through a painful divorce from her husband and, in order to more easily understand and survive what is happening, begins to keep a diary. Since the heroine is a literary critic, the ideas of world culture are organically interwoven into her life and reflections on life. Records about the problems that concern the heroine, about her relationships with men, memories are filled with echoes of psychoanalysis and overt or hidden allusions.
American colleagues explained to me that the low level of general culture and school education in their country is a conscious achievement for the sake of economic goals. The fact is that, having read books, an educated person becomes a worse buyer: he buys less washing machines and cars, begins to prefer Mozart or Van Gogh, Shakespeare or theorems to them. The economy of the consumer society suffers from this and, above all, the income of the owners of life - so they strive to prevent culture and education (which, in addition, prevent them from manipulating the population like a herd devoid of intelligence). IN AND. Arnold, Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences. One of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century. (From the article "New obscurantism and Russian education")
We offer a choice of five romance novels that will surely appeal to fans of intellectual literature. These are subtle, soulful love stories about strong feelings for smart girls.
In 1942, young Maggie, Kat and Lulu learn to live in difficult conditions - there is a war, and each new day is perceived by them as a gift from above. When Peter appears in their lives, he becomes their reliable support: for baby Lulu - a brother, for beauty Katherine - a protector, and for a pensive Maggie - a lover. But it seems that Peter is hiding something, and not everything is so rosy in their relationship. However, this story has an even more mysterious continuation in our days ...
Failed poet Toby Dobbs owns a huge mansion, which he turned into a kind of hostel. All of its residents are very different, but they have one thing in common - within these walls, they are waiting for difficult times. And now a series of unexpected events forces Toby to sell the house. To free it from its inhabitants, Toby undertakes to solve the problems of friends. Leah, the girl opposite, volunteers to help him with this venture, but their plan is not so easy to translate into reality.
Seven in the morning, train from Brighton to London. Everything is as usual, people are furtively watching each other, there is another working day ahead. But in an instant something changes ... And the fate of Anna, Lowe and Karen will never be the same again. One moment, one extraordinary morning on the train ... Who would have thought that the story that happened then would become for them the starting point of a new life, which they could not even dream of?
Thin and intricately intertwined threads connect loved ones with each other. Both the actions and even the feelings of one of the relatives respond in the life of the other in the most unexpected way. Especially if the feelings are strong: love, attraction, anger ... The mutual echo of strong feelings passes through the Ivlev family - Tamara, her husband, their adult daughter Marina. It seems that each of them have their own difficulties and aspirations. This is natural, because at thirty and fifty you look at life in completely different ways. But there comes a time when the choice made by the mother, in an almost mystical way, affects the life of her daughter ...
The Second World War is over. The Leningrad teenager Grisha Naryshkin, deported to Germany, becomes Herbert Fishbein, a resident of New York and the husband of Evelyn Teige, determined, frank and beautiful. But marriage, as Hippocrates argued, is an inverted fever: it begins with a heat and ends with a cold. At the 1957 Moscow festival, Herbert Fishbein meets a woman with the biblical name Eve ...
- Features of an intellectual novel.
- T. Mann's creativity
- G. Mann.
The term was proposed in 1924 by T. Mann. "Intellectual novel" became a realistic genre that embodied one of the features of 20th century realism. - a heightened need for the interpretation of life, its comprehension and interpretation, exceeding the need for "telling".
In world literature, they worked in the genre of the intellectual novel; Bulgakov (Russia), K. Chapek (Czech Republic), U. Faulkner and T. Wolfe (America), but T. Mann stood at the origins.
Modification of the historical novel has become a characteristic phenomenon of the time: the past becomes a springboard for clarifying the social and political mechanisms of modernity.
The widespread principle of construction is multilayer, the presence in a single artistic whole of layers of reality that are far from each other
In the I half. 20c, a new understanding of the myth was advanced. He acquired historical features, i.e. was perceived as a product of distant prescription, illuminating recurring patterns in the life of mankind. The appeal to myth pushed the temporal boundaries of the work. In addition, it provided an 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 creation, and secondly, because it strove for consistency. The cosmic concepts of the 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.
The laws of construction of the "Intellectual novel":
* The presence of several non-merging layers of reality (In it, I.R. is philosophical construction - the obligatory presence of different levels of being, correlated with each other, evaluated and measured by each other. Artistic tension is in the conjugation of these layers into a single whole).
* Special interpretation of time in the 20th century. (free breaks in action, moving into the past and the future, arbitrary acceleration and deceleration of time) influenced the intellectual novel. Here time is not only discrete, but also torn into qualitatively different pieces. Only in German literature is there such a tense relationship between the time of history and the time of the individual. Different aspects of time are often scattered across different spaces. Inner tension in the German philosophical novel is born in many respects by the effort that is needed to keep together, to match the really disintegrated time.
* Special psychologism: The "intellectual novel" is characterized by an enlarged image of a person. The author's interest is not focused on clarifying the hidden inner life of the hero (after 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 spiritual 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 ("Doctor Faustus"): "... not character, but the world").
The German "intellectual novel" continues the traditions of the educational novel of the 18th century, only education is understood not only as moral improvement, since the character of the characters is stable, the appearance does not change significantly. Upbringing is about liberation from the accidental and unnecessary, therefore, the main thing is not an 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 you can be in harmony or in opposition. Without these laws, a reference point is lost, so the main task of the genre is not to understand the laws of the universe, but to overcome them. Blind adherence to laws begins to be perceived as convenience and as a betrayal in relation to the spirit and to the person.
Thomas Mann (1873-1955). An eminent German writer, novelist, essayist, Nobel laureate in literature for 1929 and one of the most prominent and influential European writers of the 20th century, Thomas Mann viewed himself and was seen by others as a leading champion of Germanic values \u200b\u200band the main representative of German culture from 1900 until his death in 1955. A staunch opponent of National Socialism (Nazism) and the regime of the German dictator Adolf Hitler, he became the custodian of the vitality of these values \u200b\u200band this culture during one of the darkest periods in German history. Countless people from all over the world have read, enjoyed, studied and admired Mann's novels and stories translated into many languages. And his story "Death in Venice" is recognized the best piece literature of the XX century, among those devoted to the topic of same-sex love.
Thomas Mann was born on June 6, 1873, 4 years after the birth of his older brother Henry, into a noble and wealthy merchant family (wealthy grain merchant) in the port of Lübeck, an important center of trade on the North Sea. In this ancient, quiet German city, the upcoming changes associated with the golden rain of contributions from France, the result of the war she lost, did not immediately become tangible. Later, it was he who caused a business fever in Germany, a hasty foundation of all kinds of enterprises and joint-stock companies.
The family in which the future famous writer grew up, with all its habits, way of life, ideals belonged to the previous era. She tried in vain to preserve the traditions of the merchant patrician family, cultivated the customs of the "free city", which Lubeck was and continued to be considered for centuries at the end of the 19th century.
Young Thomas, however, was more interested in poetry and music than in his family business or school. After the death of his father in 1891, the inherited trading office was sold and the family moved to live in Munich. Thomas, while working at an insurance agency and then at university, turned to journalism and freelance writing. It was in Munich that Thomas began his literary career in the most serious way, achieving such decent success with a number of stories that his publisher suggested that he try to create a larger work.
Even after the death of his father, the family was sufficiently wealthy. Therefore, the transformation from a bourgeois into a bourgeois took place in front of the writer.
Wilhelm II spoke of the great changes to which he led Germany, while T. Mann saw her decline.
Both brothers - Thomas and Heinrich Mann - decided early to devote themselves to literature. They took their first steps in this field in full agreement and supporting each other. His relationship with his brother Heinrich Mann was difficult, and soon they parted ways. Far and long. The views, positions of the life of the two brothers (Henry lived longer) differed on many points.
Part of the reason was probably the fame that fell to the lot of the younger as soon as he published the Buddenbrooks. She far surpassed the fame of the elder and could arouse in him a feeling of understandable jealousy. But there were deeper reasons for mutual cooling - differences in ideas about what a writer should and should not do. Heinrich and Thomas became close again decades later. They were united by a common humanistic position and hatred of fascism.
After the Romantics, German literature was moving towards a temporary decline, and the youth was faced with the task of restoring the reputation of German literature. Consequently, here is also a situation when a person enters a creative life, begins to write, the first thing he does is to begin to comprehend what is happening around him, what is the literary situation, which path he must choose. And this rationalistic approach, characteristic of Galsworthy, Rolland, was in the highest degree in the young Mann.
If Heinrich Mann chose Balzac and the traditions of French literature for himself as an ideal and an example (G. Mann's interest in France was constant), and his first novels were generally built on the model of Balzac's narrative, Thomas Mann found a reference point for himself again in Russian literature. He was attracted by the scale of the narrative, the psychological depth of research, but at the same time the still gloomy German genius T. Mann was fascinated by the ability, the desire of Russian literature to get to what was seen as the roots of life, our desire to know life in all fundamental principles. This is characteristic of both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.
The writer was acutely aware of the problematic nature of his place in society as an artist, hence one of the main themes of creativity: the artist's position in bourgeois society, his alienation from "normal" (like everyone else) social life. ("Tonio Kroger", "Death in Venice").
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 composes idylls in prose and poetry. But, having rethought the historical significance of the revolution, in 1924 he finished the educational novel "Magic Mountain" (4 books).
In the 1920s. T. Mann became one of those writers who, under the influence of the war they had gone through, the post-war years, under the influence of the emerging German fascism, felt their duty "not to hide their heads in the sand in the face of reality, but to fight on the side of those who want to give the earth a human meaning."
In 1939. - Nobel Prize, 1936 ... - emigration to Switzerland, then to the USA, where he is actively engaged in anti-fascist propaganda. The period was marked by the work on the tetralogy Joseph and His Brothers (1933-1942), a myth-novel in which the hero is engaged in conscious state activities.
The decline of one family - the subtitle of the first novel "Boudinbrook" (1901). The full title of the novel is "Buddenbrooks, or the life story of one family." The author is Thomas Mann, who was 25 years old. This was his second major publication, and this novel immediately made him famous. But becoming a national genius at the age of 25 is psychologically early, a big burden. And with the knowledge that he is a national genius, Thomas Mann and lived the rest of his life, nothing prevented him from writing wonderful works.
The peculiarity of the genre is the family chronicle (the traditions of the river novel!) With elements of the epic (the historical-analytical approach). The novel absorbed the experience of 19th century realism. and partly the technique of impressionistic writing. T. Mann himself considered himself the successor of the naturalistic direction.
The novel centers on the fate of four generations of Buddenbrooks. The older generation is still in harmony with themselves 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, turns into a decadent. Thomas vigorously preserves the semblance of bourgeois well-being, but collapses, since the external form that you care about no longer corresponds to the state or content.
T. Mann already here opens up new possibilities of prose, intellectualizing it. Social typification appears (a detail acquires a symbolic meaning, their diversity opens up the possibility of broad generalization), features of an educational "intellectual novel" (the characters hardly change), but there is still an internal conflict of reconciliation and time is not discrete.
At the same time, Thomas Mann was a man of his time in a specific national situation. Why did the novel "Buddenbrooks" become so popular? Because the readers who opened this novel, when it was published, found in it a study of the main trends in national life.
"Buddenbrooks" is a work that also differs in its large-scale coverage of reality, and the life of the heroes, the Buddenbrooks, is part of the life of the country. This is the same family chronicle, the same epic novel, before us is a story about the life of 4 generations of the Buddenbrook family. These are burghers from the city of Lubeck, a fairly wealthy family, and the time of the novel is most of the 19th century. Thomas Mann uses in the narration some data and realities of the life of his family, which also came from the city of Lubeck. In the case of the Manns, they are descendants of a clan of free burghers, they carry this feeling of belonging to the clan. But in the case of the Manns, this clan tradition was very abruptly cut short; their father married the daughter of his companion, and when he died, the mother (their stepmother) of 2 more daughters decided that her sons would do anything, but not trade. She sold the company, her sons were prepared in a modern way, for a different life, they were guided to write books, they were taken to Italy, to France from childhood. We will find all these biographical details in the Buddenbrooks. The Manns received an excellent education.
Thomas Mann brought all this material about his family, including the situation with his brothers and sisters, to this novel in the 3rd generation, but this material is undergoing changes in interpretation, something is added to it.
Each representative of the Buddenbrook family is a representative of his time: he carries his time in himself, and somehow tries to build his life in this time.
Old Johann Buddenbrock is a typical representative of a turbulent time, a man of rare intelligence, very energetic, took over the company. And the son? - a product of the era of the sacred union, a man who can only preserve what his father did. There is no such inner strength in him, but there is a commitment to foundations.
Finally, the 3rd generation. More attention is paid to him in the novel: Thomas Buddenbrook becomes the central figure. It falls to the lot of Thomas and his brothers and sisters that period of time when these cardinal changes begin to occur in German life. The family and company must cope with these changes, and it turns out that this adherence to tradition, this deliberate burghers of the Buddenbrooks is already becoming a kind of brake. Buddenbrockn are more decent, perhaps, speculators, they cannot quickly use new forms of relations that arise in the market. Within the family it is the same: adherence to tradition is the source of endless drama, which has absorbed the burgher spirit.
And from whatever side we look at the life of the 3rd generation Buddenbrooks - they are not inscribed in time, somehow conflict with time, with the situation, and this leads to the decline of the family. The result of Ganno's communication with other children is painful for him: his favorite place of life is under the piano in his mother's living room, where he can listen to the music she plays, such a closed life.
(The last representative of the Buddenbrooks is Thomas's son little Hanno, this weak boy gets sick and dies.)
This book is an analysis of family chronicles, one of the first seminal chronicles, the impact of the change of eras on the fate of people. And this was after a long break in German literature, the first work of this scale, such a level, such a depth of analysis. Therefore, Thomas Mann became a genius at the age of 25.
But gradually, when the first impressions and enthusiasm subsided, it began to appear that this book has a second bottom, a second level.
On the one hand, this is a socio-historical chronicle that tells about the life of Germany in the 19th century.
On the other hand, this piece is built with other tasks. It was one of the first works of literature of the 20th century, designed for at least two levels of reading. The second bottom, the second level is associated with T. Mann's philosophical views, with the picture of the world that he creates for himself (Thomas Mann was interested in the highest level of comprehension of reality).
If we look at the history of the Buddenbrook family from a different angle, we see that some constants play as important a role as time and socio-historical changes in their fate.
Mann's Buddenbrooks evolved from burghers to artistic. Johann Buddenbrock Sr. is a 100% burgher. Ganno is a 100% artist.
For Mann, a burgher is not only a person of the 3rd estate, it is a person who is completely merged with the surrounding reality, living in indissoluble union with the outside world, deprived of what Thomas Mann means by the word "soul", but not in the canonical sense of the word "soulless", and in the burgher there is absolutely no artistic principle according to T. Mann, but not in the sense that these people are illiterate, deaf to beauty.
Old Johann is not only an educated man, but also living by what he knows; but this is a person who is inseparably merged with the world in which he lives, who enjoys every minute of his existence, for him life in the physical plane is a great pleasure. All plans of life. This is the type of people.
The opposite type is artists. This does not mean that these are people who paint pictures. This is a person who lives the life of the soul, for him the inner existence, the spiritual life and the outer world seem to be separated from him by a severe high barrier. This is a person for whom contact with this external world is painful, unacceptable.
Very often geniuses, very creatively gifted - they are artists. But not always. There are creative individuals with a burgher mentality. And there are ordinary people with an artist's attitude, as according to Thomas Mann.
His first collection of stories (named after one of the stories included in it) is "Little Herr Friedemann". This little mister Friedemann is a typical philistine, but this little philistine with the soul of an artist who lives within himself, his life of the spirit, he is completely at the mercy of this artistic principle, although he does not produce any artistic activity, he only produces the impossibility of being in this the world, a feeling of impossibility of contact with other people. That is, for Thomas Mann, these words "burgher" and "artist" have a very special meaning. And who does what professionally, whether or not owns a company - it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter whether he paints pictures or not.
Showing this transformation, tragedy, death of the Buddenbrook family, T. Mann also explains how the process of accumulation of artistic qualities in the souls of the Buddenbrooks. which makes their existence in the surrounding reality more and more difficult, and then painful for them and deprives them of the opportunity to live. As for their professional hobbies, this does not play a special role here. Thomas is engaged in trade, he is elected to the Senate. And his brother leaves the family, declaring himself an artist in the literal sense of the word.
The important thing is that they are both half "burgher" and "artist" in Mann's sense of the word. And this half-heartedness does not allow any of them to accomplish anything in this life.
The state of unstable balance in which both Thomas and his brother are, becomes excruciating. On the one hand, Thomas is fascinated by books. But when reading them, something repels him - this is a burgher beginning. And going to the Senate, starting to deal with the affairs of the company, he cannot deal with them, since the artistic principle cannot stand all this. Throwing begins. Thomas also married Gerda, a girl belonging to another world, he felt spirituality in her, an artistic beginning. Nothing succeeded. Ganno's son dwells in the mother's world, this isolation from the world allows Ganno to exist within himself.
T.Mann makes Ganno fall ill with typhus, a crisis ensues. It consists of 2 elements: on the one hand, it approaches the bottom point, but from the bottom point it may start falling down. And Thomas Mann puts Ganneau before a choice, the predestination of the book comes to the fore, since neither Balzac, nor Dickens, nor Galsworthy could afford such arbitrary treatment. Ganno lies in bed in his bedroom, straw is spread out in front of the windows so that the carriages do not rumble. He is very bad, and he suddenly sees a sunbeam breaking through the curtains, hears the muffled, but still the noise of these carts down the street.
“And at this moment, if a person listens to the ringing, light, slightly mocking call of the“ voice of life ”, if joy, love, energy, commitment to the variegated and tough commotion awakens in him again, he will turn back and live. But if the voice life will make you shudder with fear and disgust, if in response to this cheerful, challenging shout, he just shakes his head and shrugs it off, then it is clear to everyone - he will die. "
And here is Ganno, as it were in this situation. This is not caused by the illness itself, by the crisis, not by typhoid itself, but by the fact that Ganno at some point becomes scared when he hears this voice of life, he has a return to this bright, colorful, cruel reality - it is painful. He does not want to re-experience the touch of the surrounding being, and then he dies, not because the disease is incurable.
If we look at what is behind this concept of burghers and art, we will see that behind them is Schopenhauer, above all with his concept of the world as will and representation. Indeed, T. Mann at this time was very fond of Schopenhauer's philosophy. And hence this principle - they abandon the principle of objective evolution. In these philosophies (Nietzsche, Schopenhauer) the opposite tendency appears - the search for absolute rocking. The world is built on some absolute principles, they are very different, but the principle is the same. According to Schopenhauer's system, there are two: will and representation. Will generates dynamics, and representation creates static. And the opposition "artist - burgher" is, as it were, a derivative of Schopenhauer's idea. These are also some absolutes that characterize the inner quality of the human person, they are not subject to time.
Old Johann Buddenbrock is an absolute burgher, not because he lives in his time, but because he is. Ganno is an absolute artist because he is. It's just that the qualities inherent in the human soul do not change, but the situation, shown by T. Mann, is an internal change that can occur; can occur in the opposite direction. Then after that he wrote a whole series of stories about how a simple burgher turns into an artist. This transformation can also take place: from a burgher into an artist, from an artist to a burgher, whatever you like, but these are some absolutes that are realized in the human soul either completely or relatively, but they exist.
That is, the system of the universe thus acquires a certain staticity. And from this point of view, the novel "Buddenbrooks" acquires a completely different quality - it is not so much a socio-historical chronicle, it is a work in which a certain philosophical idea is realized. And therefore, from this point of view, it is tempting to call T. Mann's novel philosophical. But it cannot be called philosophical, since it is not a philosophical story. This is an intellectual romance (analysis of philosophical ideas).
This is about the literary side. As for the place of this novel in the context of world literature, it is obvious that "Buddenbrooks" open a new stage in literary development not only by the type, form of narration, but also open the next page of world literature, which begins to consciously build itself on philosophical absolutes when creating its own picture the world.
Remaining a conservative pessimist who nonetheless believes in progress, Thomas Mann writes his second full-scale novel, The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg, 1924; English translation, 1927), which is a grandiose panorama of the decline of European civilization. With the publication of this novel, Mann established himself as the leading writer of Weimar Germany.
The ambivalent attitude towards same-sex love, which he admires and which he condemns at the same time, is evident in many of the works of Thomas Mann. This novel is not an exception to this.
The protagonist of The Magic Mountain, a young engineer, Hans Castorp, overcomes the obsession of his teenage girl - all the same 14 years! - falling in love with a classmate in fulfilled love for a woman like this boy.
After the publication of The Magic Mountain, the writer published a special article, arguing with those who, not having had time to master new forms of literature, saw in the novel only satire on mores in a privileged high-mountain sanatorium for pulmonary patients. The content of The Magic Mountain was not limited to those frank disputes about important social and political tendencies of the era, which occupied dozens of pages of this novel.
An unremarkable engineer from Hamburg, Hans Kastorp, ends up in the Berghof sanatorium and gets stuck there for seven for long years for rather complicated 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, in whose disputes many of the most important problems of Europe, standing at a historical crossroads, intersect.
The time depicted by T. Mann in the novel is the era that preceded the First World War. But this novel is full of questions that have acquired acute urgency after the war and revolution of 1918 in Germany.
Settembrini represents in the novel the noble pathos of the old humanism and liberalism and therefore is much more attractive than his repulsive adversary Nafta, who defends the strength, cruelty, the preponderance of the dark instinctive principle in man and humanity over the light of reason. Hans Castorp, however, does not immediately give preference to his first mentor.
The resolution of their disputes in general cannot lead to the decoupling of the ideological knots of the novel, although in the figure of Nafta T. Mann reflected many social tendencies that led to the victory of fascism in Germany.
The reason for Castorp's hesitation is not only the practical weakness of the abstract ideals of Settembrini, which lost in the 20th century. support in reality. The reason is that the Settembrini and Nafta disputes do not reflect the complexity of life, nor do they 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 who dreams of totalitarianism and the dictatorship of the church with the bonfires of the Inquisition, executions of heretics, the prohibition of free-thinking books, etc.), the writer expressed in a relatively traditional "representative" way ... Only the emphasis that is placed on the collisions of Settembrini and Nafta, the number of pages that are allotted to their disputes in the novel, is extremely common. But the author needs this very pressure and this extreme 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 the disputes of two mentors, as it is not only in political social programs that it is realized in life.
The intellectual content of the novel is deep and expressed much more subtly. The second layer, on top of what was written, imparting the highest symbolic meaning to the living artistic concreteness (as it was given, for example, to the Magic Mountain, the most isolated from the outside world - a test flask, where the experience of knowing life is set), leads T. Mann the most important topics for him, and the theme about the elementary, unbridled instinctive, strong not only in the feverish visions of Nafta, but also in life itself.
At the very first walk of Hans Castorp along the corridor of the sanatorium, behind one of the doors, an unusual cough is heard, "as if you see the inside of a person." Death does not fit into the Berghof sanatorium in that solemn dress dress in which the hero is used to meeting her on the plain. But many aspects of the idle existence of the inhabitants of the sanatorium are marked in the novel by an emphasized biology. Plentiful meals are intimidating, eagerly consumed by sick, and often half-dead people. The overwrought eroticism reigning here is intimidating. The disease itself begins to be perceived as a consequence of licentiousness, lack of discipline, impermissible binge of the bodily principle.
Through gazing at illness and death (Hans Castorp's visit to the rooms of the dying), and at the same time to the birth, the change of generations (chapters devoted to memories of the grandfather's house and the baptismal bowl), through persistent reading of the hero of books about the circulatory system, the structure of the skin, etc. ... etc. (“I made him experience the phenomenon of medicine as an event,” the author wrote later) Thomas Mann leads one and the same theme, which is most important to him.
Gradually and gradually, the reader catches the similarity of various phenomena, gradually realizes that the mutual struggle of chaos and order, physical and spiritual, instincts and reason occurs not only in the Berghof sanatorium, but also in universal existence and in human history.
Intellectual romance "Doctor Faustus" (1947) - the pinnacle of the intellectual novel genre. The author himself said the following about this book: "I secretly 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 please."
"Doctor Faustus" is a novel about the tragic fate of a composer who agreed to an agreement with the devil not for the sake of knowledge, but for the sake of unlimited possibilities in musical creativity. The reckoning is death and the inability to love (the influence of Freudianism!).
To facilitate understanding of the novel, T. Mann creates "The Story 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 basically a book about the German soul."
“The main benefit - when introducing the figure of the narrator, is the ability to sustain the narrative in a double temporal plane, polyphonically weaving the events that shock the writer at the very moment of work into those events about which he writes.
It is difficult to distinguish here the transition of the tangible-real to the illusory perspective of the drawing. This editing technique is part of the very idea of \u200b\u200bthe book. "
“If you are writing a novel about an artist, there is nothing more vulgar than just praising art, genius, or work. Reality and concreteness were needed here. I had to study music. "
“The most difficult of the tasks is a convincingly reliable, illusory-realistic description of a satanic-religious, demonic-pious, but at the same time something very strict and downright criminal mockery of art: a rejection of beats, even of an organized sequence of sounds ... "
"I carried with me a volume of Schwanks of the 16th century - after all, my story as one bek always left in 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 that predisposes to a deal with the devil."
"I was bewitched by the idea of \u200b\u200ba work that, being from beginning to end a confession" and self-sacrifice, knows no mercy to pity and, pretending to be art, at the same time goes beyond the bounds of art and is a true reality. "
“Was there a prototype for Adrian? That was the difficulty in inventing a musician's figure capable of taking a plausible place among real figures. He is a collective image, a person who carries all the pain of the era.
I was conquered by his coldness, far from life, his lack of soul .. It is curious that at the same time he is almost devoid of my local appearance, visibility, physicality .. Here I had to observe the greatest restraint in the local concretization, which threatened to immediately belittle and vulgarize the spiritual plan with its symbolism and ambiguity. "
“The epilogue took 8 days. The Doctor's last lines are Zeitblom's heartfelt prayer for a friend and Fatherland, which I have heard for a long time. I was mentally transported through 3 years 8 months, which I lived under the stress of this book. On that May morning, when the warriors were in full swing, I took up my pen. "
"Doctor Faustus" is a landmark work, one of the most famous, complex, one of the most consistent versions of literature. The life story of Adrian Leverkühn is a metaphor for important, rather abstract things. Mann chooses a rather complex structure, a frame that bursts under the weight. Firstly, Adrian is perceived as the embodiment of Faust (who sold his soul to the devil). If we take a closer look, we will see that all the canons have been observed. Mann speaks of Faust as a friend, by no means about the same as Goethe's. He is driven by pride and coldness of the soul. Thomas helps to remember from a folk book of the late 16th century.
Mann is the master of the theme song. Coldness of the soul, and who is cold - he became the prey of the devil. (Here is a set of associations, Dante recalls). Meeting with the heterosexual Esmeralda (there is a butterfly that mimics - changes color). She rewards Leverkühn with a disease that is also hiding in his body. Esmeralda warned that she was sick. He tests himself how far he can go. This is egocentrum, admiration. Fate gives him a chance. Last Chance - Echo - a boy who gets meningitis. He fell in love with this boy. If this world allows suffering, then this world stands on evil, and I will worship this evil. And then the devil comes in. The story is sustained in a certain way. Leverkühn paid with his own disintegration, but when this music is played, it terrifies the listener.
Along with the Faust theme, the educated German reader sees that Leverkühn's biography is a paraphrase on the theme of Frederick the Beggars. Lived: 1885-1940. The stages of life are the same. Leverkühn speaks with quotes from Nietzsche (especially the meeting where he talks about art). But the Faustian motif expands the image of Leverkühn.
In 1943, Mann began writing notes about Leverkühn, and finished in 1945. Faustic formation (the time of the formation of these legends - 15-16 centuries) the chain of the novel is very long, from the 15th century to 1940. New time in history is counted from the beginning of the era of the Great Geographical Discoveries (the end of the 15th - I shake the 16th century).
The 16th century is the century in which the Reformation movement began. The Faust motive is not just a fairy tale, it is one of the first attempts to comprehend the new that appears in a person's character when the world changes and the person himself changes. 1945 is a milestone in modern history. Thomas Mann began writing the novel in 1943. This time is the same. Zeitblan (?) Ends his story in 1945. "God have mercy on my friend, my country!" - last words in the notes of Zeitblana. The novel's temporary regime clearly shows that Mann is not considering the outcome of 1945.
1885 - the year of birth of Leverkühn - the year of the beginning of the formation of the empire. Faustian motive pushes the time frame of the novel up to the 16th century, when a new attitude to the world and to oneself is formed, when the development of bourgeois society begins.
The religious issue is the mood, the ideology of the 3rd estate. On these sides Mann writes: "My self" can be established in this world.
This is the selection of a person, a somewhat self-sufficient individual. It all begins with this and everything comes to collapse in 1945. In essence, Mann is assessing the fate of civilization. The final disaster is an assessment of the era. According to Mann, this is natural.
The self-sufficiency of the individual began to move the progress of this world, but at the same time began to lay a mine of selfishness.
Where is the line between self-love and indifference to others? Leverkühn's coldness is selfishness. Mann evaluates one of the realized options for life. Leverkühn could not get over this coldness. Leverkühn's love for music, nephew, etc. sometimes his self-love overpowers. It was this point of view that led him to collapse.
Selfishness gave society enormous opportunities and it also led to its collapse. Art, philosophy led to the "ossification" of the world, to its collapse.
What quality of music did Leverkün write? At one time he wrote music according to Stravinsky, then came across Schomberg, where everything was built on harmony, when closer to the 20th century, harmony was not used more often, moreover, they are disharmonious. This materialized not only in music, but also in the philosophy of music. And Leverkühn wants to create a piece that will "remove Beethoven's 9th Symphony." And Beethoven's 9th symphony - according to all its canons and the motto from Schiller: "From suffering to joy." And Leverkune wants to write music, the epigraph to which would be "through joy to suffering." The opposite is true.
Symphony 9 is one of the highest achievements of art that glorify man. Through drama, through tragedy, man comes to the highest harmony.
Nietzsche just created philosophy, incl. and philosophy of art, cat. also worked to destroy harmony. From Nietzsche's point of view, different eras give rise to different types of art.
Accordingly, the disaster of 1943-1945. - the result of long-term development. It is not for nothing that this novel is considered one of the best novels of the 20th century, one of the most important.
With this novel, Mann drew a line not only in his work (after which he created a number of works), he summed up the development of German art. This novel is incredibly large-scale, as a result, comprehends a colossal period in the history of mankind).
If the previous novels were educational, then in "Doctor Faustus" there is no one to educate. This is really a novel of the end, in which various themes are pushed to the limit: a hero dies, Germany dies. Shows the dangerous limit to which art has come, and the last line to which mankind has approached.
After 1945, a new era begins from all points of view in social, political, economic, philosophical, cultural terms. Thomas Mann realized this before anyone else.
In 1947 the novel was published. And then the question arose: what will happen? After the war, this question occupied everyone and everything. There were many answers. On the one hand - optimism, and on the other - pessimism, pessimism is not straightforward. Humanity began to keep and feel "more modest", primarily because, in connection with discoveries in science and technology, a means is revealed to man how to kill his own kind.
Outstanding German Writer Heinrich Mann (1871 - 1950)was born into an old burgher family, studied at the University of Berlin. Under the Weimar Republic he was a member (since 1926), then chairman of the literature department of the Prussian Academy of Arts. In 1933-40 he emigrated to France. Since 1936, chairman of the Committee of the German Popular Front, created in Paris. From 1940 he lived in the USA (Los Angeles).
M.'s early works bear traces of the contradictory influences of the classical traditions of German, French literature, and modernist currents of the end of the century. The problem of art and the artist is viewed by M. through the prism of social contrasts and contradictions of modern society.
In the novel Promised Land (1900), the collective image of the bourgeois world is given in tones of satirical grotesque. M.'s individualistic, decadent hobbies were reflected in the trilogy "Goddesses" (1903).
In subsequent novels M. the realistic principle is strengthened. The novel "Teacher Gnus" (1905) is a denunciation of the Prussian drill, which pervaded the system of youth education and the entire legal order of Wilhelm Germany.
The novel "Small Town" (1909), in the spirit of cheerful irony and tragicomic buffoonery, depicts the democratic society of an Italian town. Since the beginning of the 10s of the 20th century, the journalistic and literary-critical activity of M. has developed (articles "Spirit and Action", "Voltaire and Goethe", both - 1910; pamphlet "Reichstag", 1911; essay "Zola", 1915).
A month before the outbreak of World War I, 1914-18, M. completed one of his most significant works, the novel Loyal Subject (1914, Russian translation from a manuscript in 1915; first published in Germany in 1918). It provides a deeply realistic and at the same time symbolically grotesque depiction of the mores of the Kaiser's empire. The hero Diederich Gesling - a bourgeois businessman, an outrageous chauvinist - anticipates in many ways the type of Hitler. The "Loyal Subjects" opens the "Empire" trilogy, continued in the novels "The Poor" (1917) and "The Head" (1925), which summarizes a whole historical period in the life of various strata of German society on the eve of the war.
These and other novels by M., created before the beginning of the 30s, are inferior in realistic clarity and depth to Loyal Subject, but they are all marked by sharp criticism of the predatory essence of capitalism. In the same vein, M.'s journalism developed in the 1920s and early 1930s. M.'s disillusionment with the ability of the bourgeois republic to change social life in the spirit of genuine democracy gradually leads him to an understanding of the historical role of socialism. In the practice of joint anti-fascist struggle, M. in emigration draws closer to the leaders of the KKE, asserts itself in the positions of militant humanism, and realizes in a new way the historical role of the proletariat (article "The Way of the German Workers"); the collections of M.'s articles "Hatred" (1933), "The Day Will Come" (1936), and "Courage" (1939) were directed against Hitlerism.
In the historical dilogy "The Young Years of King Henry IV" in 1936 and "The Mature Years of King Henry IV" in 1938, he managed to create a convincing and vivid image of the ideal monarch. The historical narrative is built by the writer as a biography of the hero from childhood to the tragic end of his life. This is evidenced by the very names of the novels that created the dilogy.
The historical background of the dilogy is the French Renaissance; the hero Henry IV, "a humanist on horseback, with a sword in his hand," is revealed as the bearer of historical progress. The novel has many direct parallels with modernity.
The biography of Henry opens with a significant phrase: "The boy was small, and the mountains were up to the sky." In the future, he was to grow up and find his special place in the world. The dreaminess and carelessness characteristic of his young years gives way to wisdom in his mature years in the course of the work. But at the very moment when all the terrible dangers of life were revealed to him, he declared to fate that he accepts its challenge and will forever preserve both his original courage and his innate gaiety.
Traveling through the country towards Paris, Henry was never alone. "The whole group of his young like-minded people, who were also looking for adventure and the same pious and daring as he, united around him, drew him forward with incredible speed." Everyone around the young king was no more than twenty years old. They did not know troubles, misfortunes and defeats, and “did not want to recognize either earthly institutions or the mighty this ". Full of the conviction that his cause was just, Heinrich remembered a poem by his friend, Agrippa d'Aubigne, and decided "that because of him people will never lie killed on the battlefield, paying with their lives for the expansion of his kingdom." ... And also, only he fully realized that “he and his comrades can hardly count on the company of our Lord Jesus Christ. In his opinion, they had no more hope for such an honor than the Catholics. " In this he significantly differed from many Protestants, zealots of the true faith, and Catholics, who are similar in their striving for superiority over the rest - heretics. Heinrich never had such cardinal inclinations, which he will tell people about in the future.
But nevertheless, after getting acquainted with the Parisian court, its morals and rules, some of the young king's early convictions had to disappear, and some once again proved their accuracy and justice. Only one feeling that life is more important than revenge accompanied him throughout his life, and Heinrich always adhered to this conviction.
The next stage of his life - a stay in Paris, the capital of the French state, he began with an acquaintance with the Louvre and the people who lived in this palace. There he "was not betrayed by his critical wit, and no ostentatious brilliance could obscure the vigilance of his gaze." In this environment, Henry learned to remain calm and cheerful in the most difficult situations, and also gained the ability to laugh at his associates in order to earn the favor and much-needed trust of the royal court. But then he still had no idea how many times he would have to experience loneliness and become a victim of betrayal, and therefore "argued, turning to the fragment of the past century (Admiral Coligny) sitting in front of him, his bold and forward-looking face, although not yet minted by life" calling his generation youth and striving to rally his country against its enemy. Looking ahead confidently, he laughed merrily and sincerely. And this laughter helped him many times in the future, in those hours when Henry, who knew hatred, appreciated the great benefits of hypocrisy. “Laugh in the face of danger” - this is the motto of the young king for life.
But, of course, St. Bartholomew's Night greatly influenced the views and psychology of Henry. In the morning, a completely different Henry appeared at the Louvre than the one who had merrily feasted in the great hall in the evening. He said goodbye to the friendly communication of people among themselves, to a free, courageous life. This Heinrich in the future "will be submissive, will be completely different, hiding under a deceptive mask the former Heinrich, who always laughed, loved indefatigably, did not know how to hate, did not know suspicions." He looked with completely different eyes at his subjects, commoners, and realized that it is much easier and faster to get evil from them than anything good. He saw that he "acted as if people could be restrained by the demands of decency, mockery, lightweight benevolence." True, after that, he did not betray his humanistic convictions and chose the difficult path, that is, the one whose goal is still to achieve kindness and mercy from people.
Nevertheless, Henry still had to go through all the circles of hell, to endure humiliation, resentment and insults, but one special feature inherent in his character helped him go through this - the awareness of his chosenness and understanding of his true destiny. Therefore, he bravely walked along his life path, confident that he must go through everything that was destined for him by fate. St. Bartholomew's Night gives him not only the knowledge of hatred and "hell", but also the understanding that after the death of his mother, Queen Jeanne, and the main zealot of the true faith - Admiral Coligny, he had no one else to rely on and he had to help himself out. Cunning becomes his law because he has learned that it is cunning that rules this life. He skillfully hid his feelings from others, and only "under the cover of night and darkness, Navarra's face finally expresses his true feelings: his mouth twisted, his eyes flashed with hatred."
“Unhappiness can bestow unfinished paths to the knowledge of life,” the author writes in a moralite to one of the chapters. Indeed, after numerous humiliations, Heinrich learned to laugh at himself, "as if a stranger," and one of his few friends, D'Elbeuf, says about him: "He is a stranger who goes through a harsh school."
After going through this school of misfortunes called the Louvre, and finally breaking free, Heinrich once again confirms his own conclusions that religion does not play a special role. ”“ Whoever does his duty is my faith, but I profess the religion of those who are courageous and is kind ”, and the most important task of the king is to strengthen and unite people and the state. This is another difference between him and other monarchs - the desire for power not in order to satisfy his own interests and gain benefits for himself, but in order to make his state and subjects happy and protected.
But in order to achieve this, the king must be not only brave, because there are many brave people in the world, the main thing is to be kind and courageous, which is not given to everyone. This is exactly what Henry could learn in life. He more easily excused others for their misdeeds than himself, and also acquired a quality rare for that time that was new and unfamiliar to the people - humanity - which made people doubt the strength of their familiar world of debt obligations, payments and cruelty. As he approached the throne, he showed the world that you can be strong while remaining human, and that by protecting clarity of mind, you are protecting the state.
The upbringing he received during the years of captivity prepared him for the fact that he became a humanist. The knowledge of the human soul, given so hard to him, is the most precious knowledge of the era in which he will be the sovereign.
Despite such a stormy life that Heinrich led, and all his many hobbies, only one name played a really big role in his youth. The Queen of Navarre, or simply Margot, can be called a fatal figure in the life of Henry. He loved and hated her, “you can part with her as well as with any other; but her image was imprinted on all his youth, like magic or a curse, and both capture the very essence of life, not like the exalted muses. " Margot did not give him special gifts, did not leave her family for him, but it is with her that all the tragic and wonderful moments of King Henry IV's youth are associated.
But even after his marriage to the Princess of Valois, Henry did not become a serious enemy in the eyes of the royal house and the mighty year of Guise, he was not a tragic figure and was not in everyone's sight, in the center of events. And now, during a clash with the royal army, a turning point comes. “He even becomes something more: a fighter for the faith in the image and likeness of biblical heroes. And all the doubts of people in it disappear. After all, he is no longer fighting for the sake of land or money and not for the sake of the throne: he sacrifices everything for the glory of God; with unshakable determination he takes the side of the weak and oppressed, and on him is the blessing of the King of Heaven. He has a clear look, like a true fighter for the faith. "
At this time, he takes his biggest and most significant step towards the throne. But the final triumph will be bought not only at the cost of his own sacrifices: “Heinrich is witnessing how people whom he would like to keep are sacrificed. On the battlefield of the Arch, King Henry, drenched in sweat after so many battles, cries to the song of victory. These are tears of joy, others he sheds about the killed and about everything that ended with them. That day his youth ended. "
As we can see, his road to the throne was filled with harsh schools and trials, but his true luck lies in the fact that he possessed a great innate firmness of character, expressed in the belief that this long road, despite all adversity, was victorious, that through tragic mistakes and shocks, Henry is slowly moving along the path of moral and intellectual improvement, and that at the end of this road, a just and sure end awaits the young king.
M.'s last books - the novels Lidice (1943), Breathing (1949), Reception in the Light (published 1956), The Sad Story of Frederick the Great (excerpts published in the GDR in 1958-1960) are marked by a great severity of social criticism and at the same time the sharp complexity of the literary manner.
The result of M.'s journalism is the book Review of the Century (1946), which combines the genres of memoir literature, political chronicle, and autobiography. The book, which gives a critical assessment of the era, is dominated by the idea of \u200b\u200bthe decisive influence of the USSR on world events.
In the postwar years, M. maintained close ties with the GDR, was elected the first president of the German Academy of Arts in Berlin. M.'s move to the GDR was prevented by his death. National Prize of the GDR (1949).