“The Sorrows of Young Werther. The sufferings of the young Werther

The history of the creation of the novel “The Sorrows of Young Werther”

The tragic soil that nurtured The Sorrows of Young Werther was Wetzlar, the seat of the imperial court, where Goethe arrived in May 1772 at the request of his father, who dreamed of a brilliant legal career for his son. Having signed up as a practicing lawyer at the imperial court, Goethe did not look into the building of the court chamber. Instead, he visited the house of the amtman (that is, the manager of the vast economy of the Teutonic Order), where he was drawn by an ardent feeling for Charlotte, the eldest daughter of the owner, the bride of the secretary of the Hanoverian embassy, ​​Johann Christian Kesgner, with whom Goethe maintained friendly relations.

On September 11 of the same 1772, Goethe, suddenly and without saying goodbye to anyone, left Wetzlar, deciding to escape from the ambiguous situation in which he found himself. A sincere friend of Kesgner, he became interested in his bride, and she did not remain indifferent to him. Each of the three knows this - most clearly, perhaps, the sober and intelligent Kästner, who is already ready to return the word she gave to Charlotte. But Goethe, although in love, although mad, shied away from his friend’s generous sacrifice, which from him, Goethe, would have required a reciprocal sacrifice - a renunciation of absolute freedom, without which he, a stormy genius, could not imagine his literary career, which was just beginning to unfold. activities - their struggle with the wretched German reality. She was not reconciled with any kind of peace, any kind of structure of life.

The bitterness of separation from the lovely girl and the suffering of young Goethe were genuine. Goethe cut this tightly drawn knot. “He is gone, Kästner! When you receive these lines, know that he is gone...” - this is what Goethe wrote on the night before his flight from Wetzlar. - Now I am alone and have the right to cry. I leave you happy, but I will not stop living in your hearts."

“Werther,” said Goethe in his old age, “is also a creature that I, like a pelican, fed with the blood of my own heart.” All this is true, of course, but still does not give reason to see in Werther just a chapter of autobiography, arbitrarily equipped with a tragic ending with the suicide of a fictional hero. But Goethe is in no way Werther, no matter how much the author endows the hero with his own mental and spiritual qualities, including his own lyrical gift. The difference between the writer and the hero of the novel is not erased by the fact that “The Sorrows of a Young Man” Werther" are so densely saturated with episodes and moods taken from life itself, as it developed during Goethe's stay in Wetzlar; the poet's original letters, almost unchanged, also found their way into the text of the novel... All this "autobiographical material", more abundantly presented in "Werther", than in other works of Goethe, still remained only material that was organically included in the construction of an artistic and objective novel. In other words, "Werther" is a free poetic invention, and not a wingless recreation of facts that are not subordinated to a single ideological and artistic concept.

But, not being Goethe's autobiography, "The Sorrows of Young Werther" can with all the more justification be called a characteristic, typical "history of his contemporary." The commonality between the author and his hero comes down, first of all, to the fact that both of them are sons of pre-revolutionary Europe of the 18th century, both are equally drawn into the stormy cycle of new thinking, which broke with the traditional ideas that dominated human consciousness throughout the Middle Ages until the late baroque. This struggle against dilapidated traditions of thinking and feeling covered the most diverse areas of spiritual culture. Everything was questioned and revised back then.

Goethe for a long time toyed with the idea of ​​responding literary to everything he experienced in Wetzlar. The author of Werther connected the beginning of work on the novel with the moment he received news of the suicide of Jerusalem, whom he knew from Leipzig and Wetzlar. The plot, apparently, in general terms, took shape precisely then. But Goethe began writing the novel only on February 1, 1774. "Werther" was written extremely quickly. In the spring of that year it was already completed.

From life, from his expanded experience, Goethe drew other traits. Thus, he assigned the blue-eyed Charlotte the black eyes of Maximiliana Brentano, née von Laroche, with whom he maintained loving and friendly relations in Frankfurt; This is how he brought into the image of Albert the unattractive features of Maximiliana’s rude husband.

Werther's letters do not consist only of sorrowful lamentations. Out of his own needs and in accordance with Wilhelm’s wishes, some of his letters are narrative in nature. This is how the scenes that played out in the old man's house arose. Or the sharply satirical depiction of the arrogant aristocratic nobility at the beginning of the second part of the novel.

“The Sorrows of Young Werther,” as it is said, is a novel in letters, a genre characteristic of the literature of the 18th century. But while in the novels of Richardson and Rousseau the common narrative thread is woven by a number of correspondents and the letter of one character continues the letter of another, in Werther everything is written by one hand, the hand of the title character (minus the postscript of the “publisher”). This gives the novel a purely lyrical and monological quality, and this also allows the novelist to follow step by step the growth of the emotional drama of the ill-fated young man.

"The Sorrows of Young Werther"

In 1774, while in Wetzlar, Goethe met Charlotte Buf, the bride of his friend Kästner. The poet felt attracted to the girl, but left, not wanting to break up the union of young people. Charlotte married Kästner. There, in Wetzlar, the secretary of the embassy committed suicide from unhappy love. All this gave Goethe the idea of ​​writing a novel. This was the reason for the creation of Werther.

The novel is presented in the form of letters, which is very consistent with its content, revealing the life of the heart, the logic of feelings and experiences. Lyrics in prose, lyrics in the form of a great novel. Werther is a young, talented and educated man, the son, obviously, of wealthy parents, but not belonging to the nobility. He is a burgher by birth. The author does not say anything about his parents, except for some mentions of his mother. The local nobility does not like the young man, envying his talents, which, as she thinks, were not given to him by right. The local nobility are also enraged by Werther's independent views, his indifference and sometimes disdainful attitude towards the titles of aristocrats. Werther in his letters accompanies the names of titled persons with unflattering characteristics. (“This breed of people disgusts me with all my heart”)

Goethe speaks very sparingly about the external situation surrounding Werther. All his attention is turned to the spiritual world of the young hero. At first, Werther's letters reveal his tastes, habits, and views. Werther is sensitive and somewhat sentimental. The young man's first letters reveal the bright harmony that reigns in his heart. He is happy, he loves life. “My soul is illuminated by unearthly joy, like these wonderful mornings, which I admire with all my heart,” he writes to his friend. Werther loves nature to the point of self-forgetfulness: “When steam rises around me from my sweet valley, and the midday sun stands above impenetrable thicket of a dark forest, and only a rare ray slips into its holy of holies, and I lie in the tall grass by a fast stream and, clinging to the ground, I see thousands of all kinds of blades of grass and I feel that a tiny world is close to my heart, scurrying between the stalks... when my gaze mine is clouded in eternal bliss and everything around me and the sky above me are imprinted on my soul, like the image of a beloved - then, dear friend, I am often tormented by the thought! Oh! How to express, how to breathe into a drawing what lives so fully, so reverently in me.”

Werther carries with him a volume of Homer's poems and reads and rereads them in the lap of nature. He admires the naive worldview, artless simplicity and spontaneity of the great poet’s feelings. In his last letters, Werther is gloomy, despondency and thoughts of death come to his mind, and from Homer he moves on to Ossian. The tragic pathos of Ossian's songs appeals to his painful mood.

Werther leads a contemplative life. Observations entail sad reflections. “The destiny of the human race is the same everywhere! For the most part, people work almost tirelessly just to get by, and if they have a little freedom left, they are so frightened of it that they look for some way to get rid of it. This is the purpose of man!”

A faithful follower of Rousseau, Werther loves simple people living in the lap of nature, he also loves children who innocently follow the dictates of their hearts. He communicates with peasants, with peasant children, and finds great joy in this for himself. Like the Sturmers, he protests against the philistine understanding of life, against the strictly regulated way of life for which the philistines stood up. “Oh, you wise men! - I said with a smile. - Passion! Intoxication! Madness! And you, noble people, stand calmly and indifferently on the sidelines and blaspheme drunkards, despise madmen and pass by, like a priest, and like a Pharisee, thank God that he did not create you like one of them. I have been drunk more than once, my passions have always been on the verge of madness, and I do not repent of either one or the other, for to the best of my understanding I have understood why all the outstanding people who have done something great, something seemingly incomprehensible, have long been declared drunk and insane. But even in everyday life, it is unbearable to hear how, after anyone who has dared to do anything more or less bold, honest, unforeseen, they certainly shout: “He’s drunk! He's crazy! Be ashamed, you sober people, be ashamed, you wise men!”

Like the Stürmers, Werther is an opponent of rationalism and contrasts feeling and passion with reason: “Man always remains a man, and that grain of reason that he may possess has little or no meaning when passion is rampant and he becomes cramped within the framework of human nature."

There have been attempts in literature to identify Goethe with his hero, Werther. However, the poet in his novel did not portray himself (although, as already mentioned, some autobiographical traits were reflected here), but the mood and feelings typical of the youth of his time. In Werther, he portrayed those young people of Germany who were dissatisfied with the existing situation, who were looking for something new, but had neither clear principles and clear ideas, nor sufficient will to implement them.

The novel “The Sorrows of Young Werther” can be divided compositionally into three parts: Werther’s acquaintance with Charlotte, service at the embassy and return to Charlotte. Charlotte is a very serious girl with strong moral principles, somewhat rational and virtuous. Werther fell in love with her, although she was already engaged and was soon to marry someone else.

Werther often visited her house, everyone in the household fell in love with him, and the girl herself became attached to him. Soon Charlotte's fiancé, Albert, arrived, a serious young man, quite businesslike, quite practical. Werther's nature was incomprehensible to him.

Werther suffered, but, in essence, he himself did not know what he wanted, what he sought. He leaves and enters the diplomatic service. Lotte is getting married. Werther was not a diplomat for long. One day he stayed in the house of a friend of the aristocrat, Count B. Titled guests gathered, they were shocked that a person from a different circle was in their midst. It ended with the count calling him aside and, apologizing, pointing out this circumstance. Werther was forced to leave. The next day the whole city was talking about the expulsion of the young “proud man” from the aristocratic house. Rumors reached Werther. Outraged, he resigned and left town.

Now he meets Lotte again, often visits her, unable to live a day without seeing her. His behavior was already beginning to attract attention. Albert expressed his displeasure to Charlotte and suggested that Werther should be made to understand that they needed to stop their compromising visits. Charlotte did not answer and this aroused some suspicions. Werther understood the inadmissibility of his behavior, but could not help himself.

His mood becomes more and more depressed. If the first pages of the novel are full of sun and joy, then in the last pages the shadows thicken, despondency and melancholy take possession of the hero, tragic events unfold. Once Werther met a young peasant woman and her two children. He often brought gifts to the younger one. Now he learns that the boy has died.

Once Werther met a crazy young man who kept talking about days of happiness. Werther asked the madman’s mother what those days of happiness were that he so regretted. “These are the days when the violent madman was in the insane asylum,” answered the mother. “This is happiness, it is in madness,” Werther thinks gloomily. This is how Goethe prepares the reader for the sad denouement of the novel.

One day Werther found Lotte alone. He read to her the songs of Ossian, filled with mournful and mystical moods. For the first time there was a declaration of love. Lotta persuades the young man to leave, find another woman, forget her, become a man, pull himself together. (Deep down in her heart, she would like him to stay near her.) The next day, Werther sends a servant with a note to Albert, asking him to lend him pistols. Charlotte handed them to the servant, brushing off the dust. Werther, having learned that the pistols were given by Lotte herself, sees this as destiny, he kisses the pistols. At night he shot himself. “The bottle of wine had barely been started; Emilia Galotti lay open on the table.

Lessing condemned Werther's character and the conditions that gave rise to such a character. “It was left only to our new European upbringing to produce such petty-great, despicably sweet originals,” he wrote. Heinrich Heine spoke of the hero Goethe with even greater intolerance. In the cycle “Modern Poems” there are the following lines:

Don't whine like this Werther in life

Who loved only Charlotte,

Ring like an alarm bell,

Sing about the dagger, about the damask sword

And don’t let your fatherland sleep.

Don't be a flute, soft, tender

And an idyllic soul,

But be a trumpet and a drum...

Heinrich Heine lived and wrote in different times. For the time when Goethe’s novel appeared, the image of a gentle youth who did not get along with his age was a reproach to all of Germany and just as did not allow the “fatherland to slumber,” like the poetry of Heinrich Heine himself in the 19th century.

Let us move away from traditional views of Werther as the apostle of lack of will. Let's take a slightly different look at his behavior, his actions, etc. to his final act - suicide. It's not that simple here. Werther understood that his love for Charlotte was madness. This madness did not lie in the fact that it was impossible to love someone else’s bride, and then someone else’s wife, that it was impossible to insist on her breaking up with the groom or then with her husband. Werther would have had the will and character to do this. The madness was that he encroached on the harmony in which Charlotte lived.

She was in the world of reason, where everything was regulated, ordered, and she herself was part of this world, i.e. just as orderly and rational. To take Charlotte away from this world would mean to destroy her. Werther had no moral right to do this. He himself lived in the world of feelings, he accepted only it, did not want, did not tolerate any guardianship over himself, he would like complete uninhibition, complete freedom and independence in feelings. Live and act not out of duty, but out of feeling. Werther understood that in the society in which he lived, this in itself was madness. Could he persuade the woman he loved to go mad? He knew that Albert, rational, practical, flesh and blood of the rational, practical world, would make Charlotte happy, would give her that comfortable harmony with society that he, Werther, could not give her. And he left, withdrew completely. He would have done it even sooner if Charlotte had responded to his feelings. Werther acted as any decent person would do, suffering, for example, from an incurable disease. It was not a defeat, but a moral victory, ultimately a victory of duty over feeling.

Soon after the publication of Goethe's novel, Christoph Friedrich Nicolai, one of the figures of the German Enlightenment, published his “improved” “Werther” (“The Joys of Young Werther - The Sorrows and Joys of Werther the Husband”). Nikolai gave a different ending: Werther marries Charlotte and finds family happiness, becoming a reasonable and respectable husband. The question arises: did Goethe’s Werther want such happiness and did the author want such a fate for his hero?

What was the protesting, rebellious spirit of Goethe's book? In the very rejection of the atmosphere in which Germany lived then, the entire way of life of society.

The book created a sensation. It immediately gained worldwide resonance. Translated into all European languages, it spread around the world. Two generations lived it. The young Napoleon read it seven times and took it with him as a Bible during the Egyptian campaign. She created a fashion for love suffering, even for suicide because of love (what people don’t do because of fashion!).

Goethe's book provoked interesting thoughts among Dostoevsky. He wrote in 1876: “The suicide Werther, ending his life, in the last lines he left, regrets that he will no longer see the “beautiful constellation Ursa Major,” and says goodbye to him. Oh, how the novice Goethe affected this line. Why were these constellations so dear to Werther? Because he, contemplating, each time realized that he was not an atom at all and not nothing in front of them, that this whole abyss of the mysterious miracles of God was not at all above his thoughts, not above his consciousness, not above the ideal of beauty... and, therefore, equal to him and makes him related to the infinity of being... and that for all the happiness of feeling this great thought, revealing to him who he is, he owes only to his human face.” ("A Writer's Diary")

“The Sorrows of Young Werther,” a summary of which should be well known to any connoisseur of German literature, is one of the most famous novels of the German classic Johann Wolfgang Goethe. This work is written in letters. A striking example of sentimental prose of the 19th century.

Roman Goethe

The novel “The Sorrows of Young Werther,” a summary of which is given in this article, is the second major success of Johann Goethe. The first, by the way, was a drama not so well known in Russia called “Götz von Berlichingen”. Both of these works by the German classic are considered a popular movement at that time called “Storm and Drang”. This is how they characterize the period in German literature when writers abandoned “reasonable” classicism in favor of maximum emotionality. This period became the harbinger of romanticism.

Literary researchers have noted that this novel is largely autobiographical. In it, Goethe, in a free interpretation, described his platonic relationship with Charlotte Buff, whom he met in 1772, when he was practicing in the imperial court.

The tragic ending was inspired by the death of the writer's friend, Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem, who committed suicide, suffering from love for a married woman.

Publication of the novel

Goethe's novel The Sorrows of Young Werther was first published in 1774. The summary of the work from the first days after publication interested the majority of connoisseurs of German literature. After all, the book immediately became a bestseller. It was widely distributed at the Leipzig book fair. After the release of this work to the general public, the writer became popular throughout the country.

Many researchers claim that the spread of this novel in Europe led to a series of suicides among boys and girls. This phenomenon received a special name - the Werner effect. The number of deaths was so great that in some countries the novel was even banned.

Novel structure

Goethe himself defines the genre of his work as an epistolary novel. Sentimentalism was a very popular trend at that time, which had many followers, including in Russia. For example, Karamzin with “Poor Liza”.

The action of the novel "The Sorrows of Young Werther", a summary of which is given in this article, takes place in a small German town at the very end of the 18th century. The structure of the book consists of two parts, which are supplemented by small messages from the publisher to the reader.

Werner himself in his letters addresses a close friend named Wilhelm. They describe their own feelings, as well as events from life.

Summary of Goethe's work "The Sorrows of Young Werther"

The main character of the novel is Werther. This is a young man from a very poor family. He is educated and loves to draw and write poetry. He comes to a small town to be completely alone for a while.

Here he draws for pleasure, reads Homer, talks with the ordinary people who surround him. One day he goes to a country ball, where he meets a girl named Charlotte. Werther falls in love with her immediately and without memory.

Close friends call the young man's beloved Lotta. This is the eldest daughter of the princely ataman. Her mother died, so Charlotte had to stand in for her for her many sisters and brothers. Werner is attracted to a girl not only by her appearance, but also by the originality of her judgment. Already on the first day of acquaintance, young people discover a coincidence of views in many respects.

In the chieftain's house

Having fallen in love with Charlotte, Werner begins to spend most of his time at her family's house. The novel “The Sorrows of Young Werther,” a summary of which is presented in this article, describes in detail how young people care for the sick together and spend a lot of time together.

The tragedy is that Charlotte has a fiancé who is not yet there, as he is arranging a prestigious position for himself on the eve of the wedding.

When the groom Albert returns, he treats Werther very kindly, but the main character tries with all his might to hide the jealousy raging within him. The prudent Albert perceives Werther as an extraordinary creative person, and for this forgives his waywardness.

History with pistols

When reading “The Sorrows of Young Werther” in a chapter-by-chapter summary, it is necessary to pay special attention to the case when Werther is about to go to the mountains. To do this, he takes pistols from Albert. He agrees, warning that the weapon is not loaded.

At this time, the main character takes one of the pistols and brings it to his forehead. This joke leads to a serious argument between the young people. His main themes are reason and human passions. Giving his own arguments, Werther talks about a girl who threw herself into the river after her lover left her. His opponent is sure that this is a rash and stupid act.

Birthday

If you don’t have time to read The Sorrows of Young Werther in its entirety, a summary on Briefly (the largest online library of summaries in Russian) will help you get a general idea of ​​this work. The next important episode happens at the main character's birthday. Werther receives an unusual gift from Albert - a bow from Charlotte's dress.

The young man suffers greatly, understands that he needs to leave the city, but constantly postpones everything. When he finally decides to break up, he comes to Charlotte to say goodbye.

They are talking in their favorite gazebo, when the girl, unaware of the impending separation, begins to talk about death and the afterlife.

Departure

A summary of Goethe's novel "The Sorrows of Young Werther" describes the departure of the main character. In a new place, Werther begins to work as an official. He meets a new girl who somewhat reminds him of Charlotte.

At the same time, the young man is annoyed by the life around him, and because of this, problems arise at work. Eventually, an incident occurs that forces him to leave both the city and his service.

While visiting a friend of the count, Werther stayed up late when the noble society began to arrive. His low origin was treated with disdain, which the main character did not immediately understand. When he realized this, he hastily left the meeting. The next morning, gossip spread throughout the city that the count had kicked him out of the house. Not wanting to follow the development of the conflict, the young man resigns on his own and leaves the city.

He heads to his native place, where he immerses himself in childhood memories. Then he visits a friend of the prince, but when visiting he constantly feels out of place. Unable to bear the separation any longer, he comes to the city where Charlotte lives.

By this time, the girl had already married Albert. The newlyweds are happy. Werther's arrival brings discord into their calm family life. Charlotte sympathizes with his hopeless love, but is unable to bear the torment and suffering of the latter. Werther finds no place for himself. Increasingly, he falls asleep in his dreams and never wakes up again. Or he wants to commit a sin and then spend the rest of his life atoneting for it.

Death of Werther

The meeting with the crazy Heinrich becomes key in the ending of the novel “The Sorrows of Young Werther.” A summary with quotes describes him as a man "in a shabby green dress, climbing rocks in search of healing herbs." In fact, Heinrich is collecting a bouquet of flowers for his beloved. Later, Werther learns that his new acquaintance worked as a scribe for Charlotte's father, also fell in love with the girl and literally lost his mind.

The main character begins to feel that the image of his beloved is constantly haunting him. He does not dare to put an end to this suffering. The young man’s notes end with a description of these experiences. We learn about his death from the words of the publisher.

He became unbearable in society. At the same time, the young man’s decision to leave this world on his own becomes stronger, because he is not able to simply leave his beloved. On Christmas Eve, the main character finds Charlotte sorting through gifts for her family. She asks him not to come to them for a while. For Werther, this means losing the last joy in life - seeing her.

Not listening to Charlotte, Werther comes the very next day. Together they read Ossian's songs. Overwhelmed by feelings, the young man gets too close to her, she asks him to leave.

Once at home, Werther carefully finishes all his work. Leaves a farewell letter to Charlotte. Then he sends a servant with a note to Albert asking him to lend him pistols. At the stroke of midnight, a deafening shot is heard in his room.

A servant finds the seriously wounded Werther in the morning. They urgently call a doctor, but it’s too late. The young man dies in the doctor's arms. Charlotte and Albert take his death hard. Werther finds his peace in a grave outside the city. In a place that he himself chose.

100 banned books: the censorship history of world literature. Book 1 Souwa Don B

The Sorrows of Young Werther

The Sorrows of Young Werther

Year and place of first publication: 1774, 1787, Germany

Literary form: novel

The Sorrows of Young Werther is the first novel by the great German poet, playwright and novelist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The success of this epistolary novel about a young man's unrequited love and suicide was immediate and resounding. The twenty-five-year-old author became famous. Published in Germany in 1774 and then translated into major European languages, the novel became one of the main literary sensations of the 18th century. The novel's romantic sensibility struck a chord with the youth of Europe, whose admiration for the book bordered on cultishness.

The novel is epistolary: for a year and a half - from May 1771 to December 1772 - a young man named Werther sends letters to his friend Wilhelm. In Book One, Werther writes to a friend about an idyllic spring and summer in the village of Valheim. He talks about the pleasure of contemplating the beauty of the surrounding nature, describes his peaceful existence in a secluded house surrounded by a garden, and the joy of communicating with the villagers.

“I am experiencing such happy days as the Lord reserves for his holy saints...” (hereinafter - translated by N. Kasatkina), he writes on June 21. At the ball he meets a girl named Charlotte (Lotte), the charming daughter of a judge. Although he knows that she is engaged to Albert, who has left, Werther passionately, to the point of madness and obsession, falls in love with Lotte. He visits the girl every day and is jealous of her other acquaintances. At the end of July, Albert returns, and the happy idyll with Lotte should end.

He spends six agonizing weeks in the company of the couple, suffering from unrequited and fruitless passion. In August, he writes: “My powerful and ardent love for living nature, which filled me with such bliss, turning the entire world around me into paradise, has now become my torment and, like a cruel demon, haunts me on all paths.” At the beginning of September he leaves to relieve tension.

The second book tells about the last thirteen months of Werther's life. He becomes the secretary of a certain ambassador who is unpleasant to him. He responds with boredom to the ambitious thoughts of the “vile people” with whom he has to communicate, and he is irritated by the dependence of his position. When he learns that Lotte and Albert have gotten married, he leaves his post and accompanies the prince to his country estates as a companion, but this does not bring him any relief. Returning to Valheim, he begins dating Lotte and Albert again. His letters become increasingly sad: he writes about the feeling of emptiness, about his desire to fall asleep and never wake up again.

Werther's last letter is dated December 6, 1772. Next, the nameless publisher undertakes to tell about the last weeks of Werther’s life, citing surviving letters and notes. Werther is depressed, exhausted and anxious. Lotte advises him to visit her less often. One evening, in Albert's absence, Werther comes to Lotte's house. He embraces her passionately, but Lotte runs away in fear and locks herself in her room. The next day, Werther sends his servant to Albert, asking him to lend him a pair of pistols for a walk in the mountains. Having written a farewell letter to Lotte: “Only a glorious few are given the opportunity to shed their blood for their loved ones and through their death to breathe renewed, hundredfold life into their friends...” Werther shot himself in the head. He died the next day without regaining consciousness. The village workers buried him under the canopy of trees in Valheim, "with none of the clergy accompanying him."

Goethe once remarked regarding the autobiographical nature of most of his works that all his works are “parts of a great confession.” The Sorrows of Young Werther was inspired by two events in Goethe's life. Werther's relationship with Lotte is based on the writer's unhappy infatuation with Charlotte Buff, the fiancée of his friend I. K. Kästner. Suffering from depression due to his unfulfilled feelings for Charlotte, Goethe was deeply shocked by the suicide of Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem, his Wetzlar friend and secretary to the Brunswick ambassador. Offended by aristocratic society, in love with the wife of a colleague, Jerusalem shot himself.

In his memoirs - “From my life. Poetry and truth” - Goethe wrote: “Suddenly I heard about the death of Jerusalem, and immediately after the first news came a most accurate and detailed description of the fatal event. At that very moment, “Werther’s” plan matured; the constituent parts of the whole rushed from all sides to merge into a dense mass. So the water in the vessel, already close to the freezing point, turns into strong ice at the slightest shock” (translated by N. Man). Goethe said that he breathed into this novel a passion that blurs the distinction between fiction and reality.

CENSORSHIP HISTORY

The publication of The Sorrows of Young Werther in 1774 was greeted with enthusiasm by readers throughout Europe. Thomas Mann, the 20th-century German writer whose novel “Lotte in Weimar” is dedicated to the central event of “The Sorrows of Young Werther,” wrote: “The whole wealth of [Goethe’s] talent was reflected in Werther... The nervous sensitivity of this little book, pushed to the limit... caused a storm admiration and, having overcome all boundaries, miraculously intoxicated the whole world.” The novel became “a spark that fell into a barrel of gunpowder and awakened the forces that were waiting for it.”

Proclaiming the right to emotions, the book expressed the creed of youth - a protest against the rationalism and moralizing of the older generation. Goethe spoke for an entire generation. The novel became a great embodiment of the spirit of the age of sensitivity and the first experience of literature, which would later be called confessional.

The news that Goethe's story was based on real events, in particular the suicide of young Karl Wilhelm of Jerusalem, played into the hands of the “Werther fever” that swept the continent and continued to rage for several decades after the publication of the novel. There have been sequels, parodies, imitations, operas, plays, songs and poems based on this story. Werther eau de toilette came into fashion, and ladies preferred jewelry and fans in the spirit of the novel. And the men sported blue tailcoats and yellow Werther-style vests. In China, figurines of Werther and Lotte were made from famous porcelain for export. Over twelve years, twenty pirated editions of the novel were published in Germany. By the end of the century, there were twenty-six different editions of translations of the novel from French in England. Napoleon admitted to Goethe that he had re-read his book seven times. Travelers from all over Europe made pilgrimages to the grave of Charles Wilhelm of Jerusalem, where they made speeches and laid flowers. In the 19th century, the grave was included in English guidebooks.

Werther's suicide caused a wave of imitations among young men and women in Germany and France: volumes of Goethe were found in the pockets of young suicides. It is difficult to say whether suicides would have happened if Goethe had not written a novel. However, critics attacked the writer with accusations of corrupting influence and encouraging morbid sensitivity. The clergy spoke out against the novel in sermons. The Leipzig Faculty of Theology called for the book to be banned on the grounds that it advocated suicide. In 1776, the translation of the book was banned in Denmark as being contrary to Lutheran doctrine, recognized by the crown as the state religion.

In his memoirs, Goethe wrote about his novel: “This thing, more than any other, gave me the opportunity to escape from the raging elements... capriciously and menacingly throwing me in one direction or the other. I felt just like after confession: joyful, free, given the right to a new life. […] But if I, having transformed reality into poetry, now felt free and enlightened, at this time my friends, on the contrary, mistakenly believed that poetry should be transformed into reality, act out such a romance in life and, perhaps, shoot themselves. So, what at first was the delusion of a few, later became widespread, and this little book, so useful for me, earned the reputation of being extremely harmful” (translated by N. Man).

In 1783–1787 Goethe revised the book. In the final version of 1787, he added material emphasizing Werther's mental disorder to discourage readers from following his example of suicide. The appeal to the readers that precedes the first book reads: “And you, poor fellow, who has succumbed to the same temptation, draw strength from his suffering, and let this book be your friend if, by the will of fate or through your own fault, you do not find a closer friend.” .

After 163 years, the novel “The Sorrows of Young Werther” was again subjected to censorship persecution. In 1939, the government of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco ordered libraries to be cleared of the works of “disgraceful writers like Goethe.”