Satire and fantasy in prose by E. (“Little Tsakhes”, “Everyday views of the cat Murr”, “Golden Pot”, “Elixirs of Satan”)

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Satire(lat. satira) - a manifestation of the comic in art, which is a poetic, humiliating denunciation of phenomena using various comic means: sarcasm, irony, hyperbole, grotesque, allegories, parodies, etc.

Humor in satire is used to dilute direct criticism, otherwise satire can look like a sermon. This is typical already for the first satirical works.

But should Hoffmann be credited with justifying earthly existence? Is it him, who, like no one else, created a murderous panopticon of philistine nonentity?

However, here everything is not so simple. It would be the greatest injustice to Hoffmann to suspect him of elitist arrogance. People are born artists, but they become philistines. And he, the most sophisticated mocker, punishes not congenital vices, but acquired ones. A person may or may not devote himself to serving the muses - but he should not devote himself to serving Mammon, he should not extinguish the “divine spark” in himself. It is then that an irreversible perversion of humanity occurs in him.

In "The Sandman" the already mentioned story of how in a "well-meaning society" a mechanical doll became a trendsetter is described by the pen of a brilliant humorist. Just look at Hoffmann’s summative remarks about the atmosphere established in this society among the “highly respected gentlemen” after the discovery of the deception with the mannequin: “The story about the machine gun sank deep into their souls, and a disgusting distrust of human faces was instilled in them. Many lovers, so as to completely to make sure that they were not captivated by a wooden doll, they demanded from their lovers that they sing slightly out of tune and dance out of tune... and most of all, that they not only listen, but sometimes speak themselves, so that their speeches really expressed thoughts and feelings. For many, love ties strengthened and became more intimate, while others, on the contrary, calmly parted ways." This is all, of course, very funny, but in an ironic-satirical arrangement, a very serious social problem: mechanization and automation of social consciousness.

In "Little Tsakhes" the story of a vile freak who, with the help of magic spells received from a fairy, bewitched an entire state and became its first minister is also funny - but the idea that formed its basis is rather terrible - a nonentity seizes power by appropriating (alienating!) merits, do not belong to him, and a blinded, stupid society, which has lost all value criteria, no longer simply takes “an icicle, a rag for important person", but also in some kind of perverted self-beating he creates an idol out of an imbecile.

Hoffmann's panopticon, upon closer examination, is a sick social organism; the magnifying glass of satire and grotesque highlights the affected places in it, and what at the first moment seemed stunning ugliness and a challenge to common sense, in the next moment is realized as the inexorability of the law. Hoffmann's irony and satire in such passages are, of course, murderous, but a strange thing: at the same time there is not the slightest note of disgusting contempt, no schadenfreude - but the pain that was heard later in Gogol's famous exclamation: “And A person could stoop to such insignificance, pettiness, disgusting! He could change so much! " Moreover: Hoffmann is really not happy about this gift of his to see everything as if through a magnifying glass, and he left unambiguous evidence of this.

Hoffmann's entire worldview, his poetics and the nature of his romantic irony were largely influenced by both the time in which he wrote and his social position as a representative of the burgher intelligentsia of Germany, that social stratum, the best representatives of which, painfully trying to escape from the stuffy atmosphere of their philistine existence, they did not know and were afraid of the people, they could not overcome the loyal attitude of their environment towards the privileged ruling classes. Hence, along with the intense tragedy and social satire of a number of Hoffmann’s works, the writer’s attempts to resolve the conflict by the victory of the world of magical fiction over the real, prosaic world are so frequent (“The Unknown Child”, “The Nutcracker and mouse king", "Lord of the Fleas", "Little Tsakhes", "Princess Brambilla").

18. Satire and fiction in prose E.T.A. Hoffmann (“Little Tsakhes”, “Everyday views of the cat Murr”, “The Golden Pot”, “Elixirs of Satan”)

The introduction about music conventionally represents that part of the ticket - about Hoffmann's poetics - which is not on the ticket, but which is necessary there, since everything else comes from it.

The antithesis of music (spiritual) and non-musical worlds. They are parallel. The revolt of things is the power of things over people (in Novalis, things simply acquire a soul). Infinity m.b. positive and negative. Theme: machine gun, dolls. Man is a game of things. He is the way things made him. Late tragic romanticism is tragic.

I. Mirimsky

Hoffmann created a most original style, unknown before him in world literature, which we will conventionally call musical-pictorial-poetic, a style that perfectly reflects the world of his soul.

The main theme to which all of Hoffmann’s work rushes is the theme of the relationship between art and life; the main images are the artist and the philistine.

“As the highest judge,” Hoffmann wrote, “I divided the entire human race into two unequal parts. One consists only of good people, but bad people or not musicians at all, the other - of true musicians... But none of them will be cursed, on the contrary, bliss awaits everyone, only in a different way.”

“Good people” are philistines, satisfied with their earthly existence. They obediently play their meaningless role in this tragicomedy, in this simultaneously terrible and funny phantasmagoria called life, and in their complacency and spiritual poverty they do not see the fatal secrets hiding behind the scenes. They are happy, but this happiness is false, for it was bought at the high price of self-denial, voluntary renunciation of everything truly human and, above all, freedom and beauty.

“True musicians” are romantic dreamers, “enthusiasts”, people not of this world. They look at life with horror and disgust, trying to throw off its heavy burden, to escape from it into the ideal world created by their imagination, in which they supposedly find peace, harmony and freedom. They are happy in their own way, but their happiness is also imaginary, apparent, because the romantic kingdom they have imagined is a phantom, a ghostly refuge, in which they are continually overtaken by the cruel, inevitable laws of reality and are brought down from poetic heaven to prosaic heaven. land. Because of this, they are condemned, like a pendulum, to oscillate between two worlds - the real and the illusory, between suffering and bliss. The fatal duality of life itself, as in a microcosm, is reflected in their soul, introducing painful discord into it, dividing their consciousness. However, unlike the stupid, mechanically thinking philistine, the romantic supposedly has a “sixth sense,” an inner vision that reveals to him not only the terrible mystery of life, but also the joyful symphony of nature, its poetry, “the sacred consonance of all beings, which constitutes its deepest secret.” " Art is called upon to express this poetic spirit of nature, which is, according to Hoffmann, the only goal and meaning of human existence.

Sculpture and music, as the romantics taught, stand at different poles - the first as an ancient ideal, the second as a modern or romantic one. The ancient Greeks did not know the bifurcation of the sensual and spiritual principles, so their thoughts received material, plastic embodiment in beautiful works of sculpture. The peoples of modern times, as F. Schlegel wrote, “have come to the consciousness of their internal duality, which makes such an ideal unattainable. Hence the desire of their poetry to reconcile, to merge together these two worlds - spiritual and sensual, between which we hesitate.”

But what poetry only strives for has already been realized in music due to the fact that its material, sound, is transformed by the composer into “melodies that speak the language of the kingdom of spirits.” Music takes a person into a world of fantasy and uncertain feelings.

Only a musician can subjugate nature, just as a magnetizer subjugates a somnambulist, which the word is powerless to do. But the goal of the poet and musician is one: to express “that same endless desire that is the essence of romanticism,” and therefore poetry must get as close as possible to music, erase the boundaries separating them.

In accordance with this, Hoffmann gives a subjective interpretation of the instrumental music of his favorite composers Beethoven, Mozart and Haydn, whose works, despite their programmatic nature, are classified as romantic in the sense in which his own opera “Ondine” was romantic, that is, fabulously fantastic. "

In Hoffmann's work, irony turns into satire, turned outward and thereby acquiring greater power. Hoffmann's laughter in general is distinguished by the extraordinary mobility of its forms; it ranges from good-natured humor, from a smile of compassion to destructive sarcasm, to satire incandescent with anger, from harmless caricature to monstrously ugly grotesquery. In his satirical manifestations, he performs a social function, which Hoffmann described in the dialogue between Kreisler and advisor Bentzon: “... your fantastic exaltation, your heart-breaking irony will always bring anxiety and confusion, - in a word, complete dissonance into generally accepted relations between people - O wonderful bandmaster, in whose power is it to create such dissonances! - Kreisler laughed” (“Everyday views of the cat Murr”)

The main object on which Hoffmann attacks his satire is philistinism.

In the fairy tales of Hoffmann, true to his dual vision of the world, the basis on which the fantastic grows is reality in its modern, specifically German appearance. The combination of the real with the fantastic, the real with the fabulous is the fundamental principle of Hoffmann's poetics.

Duality becomes one of Hoffmann’s favorite motifs and is an approach to his “nightmare” fiction. We first encounter the image of a double in the novel “The Devil's Elixir” (1815).

From “The Golden Pot,” which stands in the very middle of Hoffmann’s creative path, roads diverge to two groups of works, different in artistic means, internal tonality, nature of fiction.

Through all of Hoffmann's work, with the exception of his realistic works, two streams of fantasy pass, now merging, now separating from each other. On the one hand, the joyful multicolored fantasy of the fabulous Djinnistan and Atlantis, poetic fantasy, which has always brought pleasure not only to children, but also to adults, and has inspired the marvelous creations of such composers as Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Offenbach, Schumann. In the works “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King”, “Alien Child”, “The Royal Bride” and others we find magnificent examples of this fantasy, enriched with images and motifs borrowed from the treasury of folk fairy-tale literature. On the other hand, there is the fantasy of “nightmares and horrors”, all kinds of madness and mental paroxysms, as an artistic expression of the “night side” of the soul and social life of people, over whom dark, elemental, terrible forces supposedly rule, controlling them according to their will. . All the shades of this fantasy, which sometimes bursts into Hoffmann’s light works, are embodied in a condensed form in his novel “The Devil’s Elixir” and in the cycle of the so-called “Night Tales”, which includes “ Sandman”.

Simultaneously with the fairy tale “The Golden Pot,” Hoffmann wrote his novel “The Devil’s Elixir,” which represents the type of novel that developed in England in the second half of the 18th century and is known as “black” or “Gothic.” Everything in this novel, from the demonic hero, the criminal monk Medard, to the external props designed to enhance the ominously romantic flavor of the story (monasteries, mysterious castles, ghosts, executions, murders), makes it similar to English examples.

The plot of the novel is dizzyingly complex and confusing, like life itself as imagined by Hoffmann. The novel unfolds the criminal story of the young monk Medard. Out of curiosity, he drinks some liquid that was kept among the “sacred” relics of the monastery museum, which turns out to be the very elixir with which the devil tempted St. Anthony. Along with the elixir, Medard is infused with satanic power and an extraordinary thirst for life and activity. He becomes the best preacher of the monastery, but his fiery speeches are inspired not by piety, but by vanity and pride. He plots to kill the abbot of the monastery in order to clear the way for his career, but the abbot prevents this crime: he sends him with a letter to the pope in Rome. Medard sets off on a long journey, but his personal goal does not coincide with the assignment given to him: he is obsessed with the devilish desire to find the woman who once appeared to him in the confessional, awakening his dormant lust, and to take possession of her. In search of this beautiful stranger, Medard commits a series of bloody crimes, obeying the devilish will living within him, and until then he rushes about in the labyrinth of events until he ends up in Rome, where, having rejected the offer of the pope, who guessed a kindred soul in him, to become a prior and his confessor, ends his life in one of the monasteries in humility and repentance.

Hoffmann's last fairy tale is “The Lord of the Fleas.” He wrote it without interrupting work on the novel “The Everyday Views of Murr the Cat,” in which domestic animals—cats and dogs—parody human morals and relationships. In “Lord of the Fleas,” trained fleas also create a parodic model of human society, where everyone must “become something, or at least represent something.” The hero of this tale, Peregrinus Thys, the son of a wealthy Frankfurt merchant, resolutely does not want to “become something” and take his rightful place in society. “Big money bags and account books” disgusted him from a young age. He lives in the power of his dreams and fantasies and is carried away only by what affects his inner world, his soul. But no matter how Peregrinus Tys flees from real life, she powerfully asserts herself when he is unexpectedly taken into custody, although he does not know any guilt behind him. But there is no need for guilt: for Privy Councilor Knarrpanti, who demanded the arrest of Peregrinus, it is important first of all to “find the villain, and the crime will be revealed by itself.” The episode with Knarrpanti - a caustic criticism of Prussian legal proceedings - led to the fact that “The Lord of the Fleas” was published with significant censorship removals, and only many years after Hoffmann’s death, in 1908, the tale was published in full.

        A. Karelsky. Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann.
       
        The text is taken from the portal Philology.ru, reproduced from the publication: Hoffman E. T. A. Collected Works. In 6 volumes - T. 1. - M., 1991.
       
       
 
     
        "...I must consult with you, with you, the beautiful, divine secret of my life!.. You know that I have never been a person of low motives, although many considered me such. For in I was burning with all that love that from time immemorial we call the World Spirit, its spark smoldered in my chest until the breath of your being fanned it into a bright joyful flame.”
        ...The old man suddenly woke up from his sublime oblivion, and his face, which had not happened to him for a long time, grinned in that strangely amiable smile or grin, which was in striking contradiction with his original innocence creatures and gave his whole appearance a feature of a certain even sinister caricature.
       
        E.-T.-A. Hoffman. Everyday views of the cat Murra.

        Hoffmann is one of those writers whose posthumous fame is not limited to the rows of collected works, standing row after row from century to century and turning bookshelves into silent but formidable shelves; it does not settle down into pyramids of fundamental research - monuments to the persistent victory of these regiments; It’s as if she doesn’t even depend on all this.
        She is rather light and winged. Like a strange spicy aroma, it is diffused in the spiritual atmosphere that surrounds you. You don’t have to read “Hoffmann’s tales” - sooner or later they will be told to you or pointed out to you. If in childhood you were bypassed by the Nutcracker and Master Coppelius, they will still remind you of themselves later - in the theater at the ballets of Tchaikovsky or Delibes, and if not in the theater, then at least on a theater poster or on a television screen. The shadow of Hoffmann constantly and beneficially overshadowed Russian culture in the 19th century; in the 20th century, it suddenly fell on her like an eclipse, materialized by the burden of a tragic grotesque - let us recall at least the fate of Zoshchenko, in which the role of an aggravating circumstance was played by his membership in a group with the Hoffmannian name “Serapion Brothers”. Hoffmann found himself under suspicion of unreliability, he himself was now also published sparingly and fragmentarily - but this did not stop him from being present around, in literature and, most importantly, in life - only his name from now on became to a greater extent a sign and symbol of atmospheric troubles (“Hoffmannianism”!), rivaling here only the name of Kafka; but Kafka owes much of the same to Hoffman.
        (Suspicion of unreliability, the excitement of persecution and the syndrome of investigative jurisdiction... Hoffmann already knew the mechanics of these processes. In his story “The Lord of the Fleas” a case is fabricated against an innocent person, and the investigative method is described, in particular, as follows : “The astute Knarrpanti had at least a hundred questions ready with which he attacked Peregrinus... Mostly they were aimed at finding out what Peregrinus was thinking about both in general throughout his life, and in particular, under certain circumstances, for example when recording suspicious thoughts in his diary. Thinking, Knarrpanty believed, in itself, as such, is a dangerous operation, and the thinking of dangerous people is even more dangerous." And further: "... I will present our fellow in such an ambiguous light, that everyone will just open their mouths, and from here a spirit of hatred will rise, which will bring all sorts of troubles to his head and turn even such impartial people against him, calm people, like this gentleman deputy.")
        Today, the time has finally come to present our readers with a worthy Collected Works of Hoffmann; as for his literary and artistic works, it is almost complete. Hoffmann is being honored as a classic for the first time, and readers will now be able to judge for themselves what this writer was thinking about “both throughout his life, and, in particular, under certain circumstances.”
        * * *
        Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann (1776-1822) entered the literary path late: at the age of thirty-three, if you count from the magazine publication of the short story “Cavalier Gluck” in 1809; thirty-eight years old, if we bear in mind the first major publication that brought him fame - a collection of short stories, Fantasies in the Manner of Callot, the first three volumes of which were published in 1814.
        Contemporaries greeted the new writer with confusion and wariness. His fantasies were immediately recognized as romantic, in the spirit of the then popular mood, but what did such belatedness mean? Romanticism was associated primarily with the generation of young people infected with the French revolutionary virus, those who sneered at the “reasoner” Schiller and were eager, like Kleist, to “pull the wreath from Goethe’s brow.” Germany had time to get used to the fact that its brilliant romantic poets started early, flashed with fireworks and meteors, while others died out very early, like Novalis and Wackenroeder - having blinded and faded away, they turned into legends; Many of their oddities were attributed to youth and attributed to youth.
        How would you like to understand the fireworks suddenly set off by a gentleman of no certain age? social status? He was a judicial official somewhere on the outskirts, in Poland, then a bandmaster in Bamberg, Leipzig and Dresden, now he is making a living as an official in the Ministry of Justice in Berlin, without a salary; they say that he is quarrelsome and strange, he was expelled from Poznan to Plock for caricatures of his superiors; Looks like he's still drinking. In any case, in the fairy tale “The Golden Pot,” the studious Anselm’s romantic-fantastic love dreams of a beautiful green snake are too openly fueled by a bowl of punch, and it would only be good for his dreams: after the aforementioned bowl, such respectable, sedate people as the conrector become romantic dreamers Paulman and registrar Geerbrand. What kind of strange, suspiciously frivolous revaluation of values ​​is this? Romantic dreams are supposed to be of a purely spiritual, unearthly origin, they are ignited in the soul by a heavenly spark, but here their source is so kitchen-simple, and the recipe is included: “a bottle of arrack, a few lemons and sugar.”
        Eight years after the release of Fantasia, Hoffmann passed away. He died as a writer, not exactly a famous one (this epithet is more suitable for an impeccable classic or an undisputed genius), but very - let's put it in modern terms - popular. He managed to write surprisingly a lot in eight years - the novels “Elixirs of the Devil” (1816) and “The Everyday Views of Murr the Cat” (1821), a huge number of stories, short stories and fairy tales, partly combined into the cycles “Night Studies” (1816-1817) to "The Serapion Brothers" (1819-1821). Hoffmann was eagerly read, and after the publication of his story “Little Tsakhes, nicknamed Zinnober” (1819), the romantic writer Chamisso called him “our indisputably first humorist.”
        But throughout the entire 19th century, Germany still kept him in the second category: he did not fit into the “high” tradition. First of all, humor in this tradition was not particularly in honor - it was allowed there whenever possible in appropriate metaphysical garb: at least the ponderous and florid humor of Jean-Paul or the theoretically calculated humor of the early romantics (so solidly and comprehensively philosophically substantiated that about laughter at You already forget about it, God forbid you understand the depths). With Hoffmann, at first you laugh, but then you realize about the depths - and, as we will see, they are revealed.
        By the very freedom and recklessness of his laughter, Hoffman aroused suspicion: this is very simple, this is “for the poor,” this is a mass amusement. Irony, satire? The attitude towards them was approximately the same - this was confirmed by the fate of Heine in Germany. As for Hoffman’s “serious” problems - the collision of poetry and prose, the artistic ideal and reality - it was perceived by that time as deja vu, again thanks to the early romantics. It turned out that Hoffmann only coarsened everything, brought the spirit down from the empyrean to the market square. He himself openly admitted this towards the end: in the short story “Corner Window”, written before his death, he left a covenant to his poetic heirs not to neglect the market square and “its incessant bustle.”
        In the 20th century, Germany became more attentive to Hoffmann. But well-meaning readers and interpreters also developed their own system of clichés. Hoffmann's name was associated primarily with the famous principle of "two worlds" - a romantically pointed expression eternal problem art, the contradiction between ideal and reality, “essentiality,” as Russian romantics used to say. “Significance” is prosaic, that is, petty and wretched, it is an inauthentic, undue life; the ideal is beautiful and poetic, it is true life, but it lives only in the chest of the artist, the “enthusiast,” but in reality it is persecuted and unattainable. The artist is doomed to live in the world of his own fantasies, fenced off from the outside world with a protective wall of contempt or bristling against it with the prickly armor of irony, mockery, and satire. And in fact, Hoffmann seems to be like this in “The Cavalier Gluck”, and in “The Golden Pot”, and in “The Dog Berganze”, and in “Little Tsakhes”, and in “The Lord of the Fleas”, and in “Murre the Cat”. .
        There is another image of Hoffmann: under the mask of an eccentric amuse-bouche lies a tragic singer of duality and alienation human soul(not excluding the artistic soul), a gloomy conductor of nightly fantasies, organizer of a round dance of doubles, werewolves, automata, maniacs, rapists of body and spirit. And it is also easy to find reasons for this image: in “The Sandman”, “Majorat”, “Elixirs of the Devil”, “The Magnetizer”, “Mademoiselle de Scudéry”, “The Happiness of the Gambler”.
        These two images, shimmering, shimmering, appear to us, so to speak, on the proscenium of Hoffmann's world theater. But in the depths, closer to the scenes, other images loom, now outlined, now blurred: a cheerful and kind storyteller - the author of the famous "Nutcracker"; singer of ancient crafts and patriarchal foundations - author of "Master Martin the Cooper" and "Master Johannes Wacht"; selfless priest of Music - author of "Kreisleriana"; secret admirer of Life - author of "Corner Window".
        In his civilian life, Hoffmann was, depending on the turns of fate, alternately a judicial official and a bandmaster; he saw his true calling in music, and gained fame through writing. The existence of Proteus. Many interpreters are inclined to believe that his original element is music: not only was he a composer himself (in particular, the author of the opera “Ondine” based on the story by the romantic Fouquet, known to us from Zhukovsky’s translation), music permeates all of his prose not only as a theme, but also as a style. In fact, Hoffmann's soul, the soul of his art, is broader than both music and literature: it is theater. In this theater there is, as it should be, music, drama, comedy, and tragedy. Only genera and types are not separated: connect the image of Hoffmann the actor (and director) with one, momentary hypostasis - in the next second, having stunned you with a somersault, he will appear completely different. Hoffmann both organizes this theater and exists in it; he himself is a werewolf, a performer, a histrion to the tips of his nails.
        For example, describing your hero, giving his portrait - this is most often boring for him, if he does it, it will be in passing, not embarrassed by templates; like in the theater: stage directions are ballast. But he will willingly show it, show it in action, facial expressions, gesture - and the more grotesque, the more willingly. The hero of the fairy tale “The Golden Pot” flies onto its pages, immediately landing in a basket with apples and pies; the apples are rolling in all directions, the traders are scolding, the boys are rejoicing at their gain - the scene is staged, but the image is also created!
        Hoffmann is in a hurry not to sculpt and mint a phrase, not to build an openwork or monumental edifice of a philosophical system, but to release a living, seething, pressing life onto the stage. Of course, against the backdrop of detachedly philosophizing romantic developments, dreamlike confidently and fearlessly walking through the empyrean of the spirit above its abysses, the stumbling, balancing Hoffmann looks like an amateur, a joker - a child of the square and the booth. But, by the way, the square with the booth, let’s not forget, also has its own philosophy; only it is not built, but revealed. They, too, are a manifestation of life, one of its sides. And as we will see, it is precisely this side from which Hoffmann, with all his undoubted craving for the empyrean of the spirit, is unable to tear himself away.
        It would seem - what kind of life is this? Is this round dance of fantasies and phantoms a life? Half-real, half-ghostly - operatic - Donna Anna in "Don Giovanni", green snakes with their father, the prince of spirits Salamander in "The Golden Pot", the mechanical doll Olympia and the half-man, half-werewolf Coppola in "The Sandman", the fantastic freak Tsakhes with his magical benefactors and opponents, ghosts and maniacs of bygone times in “Majorata”, “The Bride’s Choice”, “Mademoiselle de Scudéry”... What does this have to do with life?
        Not direct, no. But not a little.
        * * *
        Every true artist - both as a person and as a creator - embodies his time and the situation of a person in his time. But what he tells us about them is expressed in a special language. This is not just the language of art, a “figurative” language; its components also include the artistic language of time and the individual artistic language this creator.
        The artistic language of Hoffmann's time is romanticism. In his richest grammar, the main rule and initial law is the inflexibility of the spirit, its independence from the course of things. From this law is derived the requirement for absolute freedom of the earthly bearer of this spirit - a creative, inspired person, to designate which in the romantic language the Latin borrowing is readily used - "genius", and in Hoffmann's language - also the Greek "enthusiast" ("divinely inspired"). Hoffmann’s embodiments of such divine inspiration are, first of all, musicians: “Cavalier Gluck”, and the creator of “Don Juan”, and the bandmaster Kreisler, created by Hoffmann himself, is the author’s double and the collective image of the artist in general.
        Why did the question of the freedom of genius arise so acutely among the romantics as never before? This is also dictated by time. The French bourgeois revolution of the late 18th century is the font of all European romanticism. She instilled the freedom gene into the romantic nature. But the very real practice of inculcating “freedom, equality, fraternity,” especially at the last stage - the fierce mutual destruction of parties and factions in the struggle for power, appeal to the instincts of the crowd, the rampant mass denunciation and mass ritual reprisals - the revolution significantly shook the romantic souls. And the post-revolutionary development of Europe gave the romantics a clear lesson that the expansion of the range of personal freedom brought by the bourgeois revolution is not an absolute benefit, but a very relative one. Before their eyes, the freedom gained in the revolution resulted in a selfish struggle for a place in the sun; before their eyes, the liberated bourgeois, petty-bourgeois, plebeian element overflowed its banks, the masses, seduced by the specter of power, but in fact manipulated from above and demonstrating this power where only it could: in envious and malicious intolerance to everything extraordinary, to dissent, to independence of opinion and spirit.
        It is also important to take into account that it was precisely at this time that there was a sharp expansion in the possibilities of mass production of artistic products, an increase in their accessibility to the general public, as well as general awareness and erudition. Modern researchers point out that by 1800, already a quarter of the German population was literate - every fourth German became a potential reader. Accordingly, if in 1750 28 new novels were published in Germany, then in the decade from 1790 to 1800, 2500 of them appeared. These fruits of the Enlightenment were also not clearly considered good by the romantics; For them, the irreversible losses included in the price of “broad success” became increasingly clear: the subordination of art to market conditions, its openness to any, including arrogantly ignorant judgment, increased dependence on the demands of the public.
        Servants and bearers of spirituality increasingly felt themselves in a hopeless and suppressed minority, in constant danger and siege. Thus arose the romantic cult of genius and poetic license; it merged the original revolutionary temptation of freedom and an almost reflexive reaction of self-defense against the establishing triumph of the masses, against the threat of oppression, no longer class, not social, but spiritual.
        Loneliness and defenselessness of a person of spirit in the prosaic world of calculation and benefit is the initial situation of romanticism. As if to compensate for this feeling of social discomfort, the early German romantics sought to stimulate their sense of participation in the mysteries of the spirit, nature and art. The romantic genius, in their opinion, initially contains the entire Universe; even setting out to understand the outside world, their hero ultimately discovers that all the secrets of this world worthy of knowledge are already resolved in his own soul and, it turns out, it was not worth traveling so far. “Everything leads me to myself” is the famous Novalis formula. One can, as it were, do without the outside world; it is all already in your “I” - like “infinity in a single handful”, like “the sky in a flower’s cup” (this is the formula of another early romantic, the Englishman Blake).
        But it is possible to do without peace, of course, only in theory. The moment of such freedom is elusively brief, it is only a sublime philosophical construction, a speculative dream. Wake up from it - and all around you is the same life and the same damned questions. One of the first: who is to blame?
        The good dreamer Novalis avoided this question, did not descend to earth and, in fact, did not blame anyone - except perhaps the enlightenment philosophers with their rationalism and utilitarianism. Other romantics - Tieck, Friedrich Schlegel, Brentano - took up arms primarily against modern philistinism. There were also those who wanted to look deeper and wider. Kleist suspected tragic breaks in the original structure of both the world and man. Doubts arose and intensified about the very extraterritorial status of the romantic genius: was there not an arrogant - and then sinful - lurking behind his sublime detachment from the world? - individualism and selfishness? One of the first to feel this was Hölderlin, who once exclaimed in contrition: “Let no one justify himself by the fact that the world destroyed him! Man destroys himself! In any case!” Growing, such sentiments very soon took shape among the romantics into a specific complex of patriarchal populism and religious renunciation. This is the other pole of early romanticism: the individual has just been raised to heaven, placed above the whole world - now he is cast into the dust, dissolved in a nameless stream of people.
        Romantic castles in the air were built and collapsed, one utopia was replaced by another, sometimes the opposite, thought feverishly rushed from extreme to extreme, recipes for the rejuvenation of humanity crossed out each other.
        It was into this atmosphere of ferment and confusion that Hoffmann came. He, as already mentioned, was in no hurry to build a universal philosophy capable of once and for all explaining the mystery of existence and embracing all its contradictions with a higher law. But he also dreamed of harmony, of synthesis; only he saw his path to a possible synthesis not in the fiercely utopian extremes into which romantic philosophy was cast again and again, but in something else: he could not imagine this path without a courageous immersion in the “incessant vanity” of life, in the zone of its real contradictions , which so tormented other romantics, but were only selectively and reluctantly allowed into the pages of their works and comprehended as abstractly as possible.
        Because Hoffmann, like Kleist before him, first of all posed questions, and did not give ready-made answers. And therefore he, who so idolized harmony in music, embodied dissonance in literature.
        Every now and then fireworks of fantasy explode on the pages of Hoffmann's fairy tales, but the brilliance of amusing lights will illuminate either a remote city alley where villainy is brewing, or a dark nook of the soul where destructive passion bubbles. “Kreisleriana” - and next to it “Elixirs of the Devil”: the shadow of Medardus’s criminal passion suddenly falls on Kreisler’s sublime love. "Cavalier Gluck" - and "Mademoiselle de Scudéry": the inspired enthusiasm of the gentleman Gluck is suddenly overshadowed by the manic fanaticism of the jeweler Cardillac. Good sorcerers gift the heroes with the fulfillment of their dreams - but nearby demonic magnetizers take their souls full. Either we see cheerful performers of a comedy of masks, or creepy werewolves - the whirlwind of a carnival swirls over the abyss. All these models of artistic structure are collected, as if in focus, in Hoffmann’s final work - the novel “The Everyday Views of Murr the Cat.” It opens with a vast picture of fireworks that ends in fire and confusion; and it is no accident that in it the romantic sufferings of the brilliant bandmaster are inexorably methodically interrupted and drowned out by the prosaic revelations of the learned cat.
        No one before Hoffmann embodied the instability, anxiety, and “upside-downness” of the era in such an impressively figurative, symbolic expression. Again: philosophers from romanticism, predecessors and contemporaries of Hoffmann, talked a lot and willingly about symbol, about myth; for them this is even the very essence of genuine - and above all romantic - art. But when they created artistic images in support of their theories, they transferred symbolism into them so much that disembodied phantoms, mouthpieces of ideas, and ideas that were very general and vague, often appeared.
        Hoffmann - not a philosopher, but just a fiction writer - takes on the matter from the other end; its source material is modern man in the flesh, not the “universal” but the “individual”; and in this individual, with his tenacious gaze, he suddenly snatches something that explodes the framework of singularity, expanding the image to the volume of a symbol. A natural child of the romantic era, by no means alien to its fantastical and mystical trends, he nevertheless firmly adhered to the principle he formulated in one of his theater reviews: “not to neglect the evidence of the senses when symbolically depicting the supersensible.” It is clear that he neglected these evidence even less when depicting the actually “sensual”, the real.
        This is what allowed Hoffmann, with all his penchant for symbolism, fantasy, grotesque exaggerations and exaggerations, to impressively recreate not only the general existential situation of contemporary man, but also his mental constitution.
        * * *
        Of course, any romantic writer, no matter what historical or mythological distance he placed his hero, kept in mind precisely the contemporary situation. The medieval knightly poet Heinrich von Ofterdingen in Novalis, the ancient Hellenic philosopher Empedocles in Hölderlin, the mythical queen of the Amazons Penthesilea in Kleist - under the archaic clothes of these heroes, completely modern hearts beat, languish, and suffer. In some short stories and in the novel “Elixirs of the Devil,” Hoffmann also moves his hero to a greater or lesser historical distance (in the novel it is quite small - within half a century). But in general, he makes a radical shift in the angle of view in romantic literature: his inspired “enthusiast” hero is secularized, placed in the midst of modern everyday reality. The setting in most of his works is not an idealized Middle Ages, like Novalis’s, not a romanticized Hellas, like Hölderlin’s, but modern Germany, perhaps romantically ironically or satirically caricatured - like, say, Gogol’s contemporary Little Russia and Russia in Mirgorod and Petersburg stories. Here the most unimaginable fantastic adventures and misadventures happen to Hoffmann’s heroes - fairy-tale princes and wizards jostle among Dresden or Berlin students, musicians and officials.
        We’ll leave the officials alone for now, and let’s take a closer look at the wizards, musicians and students. These are, as a rule, characters marked by the author's undoubted sympathy; they make up a circle of predominantly “positive” heroes. But here too there are significant gradations.
        Hoffmann's students, all these romantically enthusiastic young men (Anselm in "The Golden Pot", Nathanael in "The Sandman", Balthasar in "Little Tsakhes"), are beginner enthusiasts, amateurs; they are inexperienced and naive, they often get into trouble, and you have to constantly watch them. This is the responsibility of wizards and musicians - they are older and more experienced, they bestow young enthusiasts with their vigilant care (Lindhorst-Salamander in The Golden Pot, Prosper Alpanus in Little Tsakhes, Maestro Abraham in Murr the Cat).
        One of the most touching features of Hoffmann is his constant focus on the problem of learning, protecting - one would like to say in a modern way: protecting youth. If we consider that Hoffmann’s “wizard teachers” are abundantly endowed with his own characteristic traits, then it is not difficult to guess that all these students for him are hypostases of their former selves. Here the wisdom of age stands face to face with the ignorance of youth.
        Ignorance is blissful, but wisdom is bitter. The success of Anselm or Balthasar can be - at least in the plot - helped by blessed sorcery; but those who have already experienced the dawn of foggy youth know very well the value of these miracles. Re-read carefully at the end of “Little Tsakhes” the enchanting scene of the unmasking of the evil dwarf. The triumphant victory of the “enthusiasts” over the “philistines” is presented here in an emphatically theatrical manner, with a lot of auxiliary stage effects. The author - or more precisely, the director - throws a whole machine of miracles, dizzying transformations and tricks onto the battlefield. In this latest Hoffmannian fireworks display, we can clearly feel the deliberate overkill: the author is playing at a fairy tale, and all this poetic pyrotechnics is intended to form a smoke screen, so that behind it the victory of good will appear all the more convincing “for youth.” The same thing happens here as in Hoffmann’s “fairy tales proper,” which were created specifically for children (whom he himself loved so much and his heroes love so much, understanding them perfectly).
        Hoffmann’s wizards and maestros themselves stand face to face with real world and are not protected from it by anything. The true drama of human existence in the modern world plays out in the destinies of Hoffmann's mature heroes.
        In all these heroes, one feature is striking first of all: a sharp change in mood, sudden - and discouraging to others - transitions from “normal”, calm behavior to eccentric, defiant, shocking. The most condescending reaction from others to this is “weirdos”; but not far from it is another, more severe one - “madmen”. Meanwhile, if you thoughtfully analyze each such moment of turning point, you will find that it does not at all express an unmotivated reaction. “A strangely amiable smile or a grin” appears on the face of Hoffmann’s hero every time when the outside world, voluntarily or involuntarily, violates the conditional “consensus” established over time between him and the hero, an unstable balance - when the world suddenly finds in the acquired an accidental breach in the armor and it no longer affects the armor, but the soul. As it is said in “Majorata” about one of the heroes, he “was afraid of battle, believing that any wound would be fatal to him, for he consisted entirely of one heart.”
        The point here, therefore, is not simply a matter of some innate Hoffmannian inclination towards acting and buffoonery. It is not without reason that this buffoonery is the lot of the wisest, artistically organized and poetically inclined in Hoffmann - “thin-skinned”, as he says elsewhere. This is their, defenseless, defensive reaction against the alien and hostile world surrounding them. In any case, to any attack, even one made by chance, out of tactlessness, and sometimes out of simplicity of soul, they react with lightning speed - only not with a retaliatory strike, but with an almost childishly impulsive and, what can we say, powerless demonstration of their contempt for the norm , an outburst of his originality. These are spasms of individuality in a tight and ever-narrowing ring of vulgarity, mass, thick-skinnedness.
        But this is only one - and undisguisedly romantic - layer of Hoffmann's characterology. Hoffman goes even deeper.
        In the striking etude “Counselor Crespel” from “The Serapion Brothers”, perhaps the most masterly development of this psychological - and also social - problematic is given. About the title character it says: “There are people whom nature or an merciless fate have deprived of the cover, under the cover of which we, the rest of mortals, go unnoticed to the eyes of others in our follies... Everything that remains a thought in our minds is immediately transformed in Krespel into action. The bitter mockery, which, one must assume, is constantly hidden on its lips by the languishing spirit within us, squeezed in the grip of insignificant earthly vanity, Krespel shows us with our own eyes in his extravagant antics and antics. But this is his lightning rod. Everything that rises in us from the earth he returns to the earth - but keeps the divine spark sacred; so his inner consciousness, I believe, is quite healthy, despite all the seeming - even glaring - extravagance."
        This is a significantly different turn. As is easy to see, we are talking here not about a romantic individual only, but about human nature in general. Krespel is characterized by one of the “other mortals” and always says “we”, “in us”. In the depths of our souls, it turns out, we are all equal, we all “go forth in our follies,” and the dividing line, the notorious “two worlds” begins not at the level of the internal, mental structure, but at the level of only its external expression. What “the rest of the mortals” reliably hide under a protective cover (everything “earthly”), in Krespel, in a direct Freudian way, is not repressed into the depths, but, on the contrary, is released outward, “returned to the earth” (psychologists of the Freudian circle would call it that "catharsis" - by analogy with Aristotle's "purification of the soul").
        But Crespel - and here he again returns to the romantic chosen circle - sacredly preserves the “divine spark”. And it is possible - and quite often - it is also such a situation when neither morality nor consciousness is able to overcome “everything that rises up in us from the earth.” Hoffmann fearlessly enters this area. His novel “Elixirs of the Devil,” at a superficial glance, may now seem like just a picky mixture of a horror novel and a detective story; in fact, the story of the unrestrained moral sacrilege and criminal offenses of the monk Medardus is a parable and a warning. What, in relation to Crespel, is softly and philosophically abstractly designated as “everything that rises up in us from the earth,” here is called much more sharply and harshly - we're talking about about the “blind beast raging in man.” And here not only does the uncontrolled power of the subconscious, the “repressed”, rage, but here the dark power of blood and bad heredity also presses in.
        Hoffmann’s man is thus oppressed not only from the outside, but also from the inside. His “extravagant antics and antics,” it turns out, are not only a sign of dissimilarity and individuality; they are also Cain’s seal of the family. The “cleansing” of the soul from the “earthly”, its outburst outward, can give rise to the innocent eccentricities of Krespel and Kreisler, and perhaps the criminal unbridledness of Medardus. Pressed on both sides, torn by two impulses, a person balances on the verge of rupture, splitting - and then true madness. Carnival over the abyss...
        * * *
        But this means that the romantic Hoffmann commits a crushing sabotage in the camp of the romantic warriors of the spirit: he destroys the very core, the core of their system - their reckless faith in the omnipotence of genius.
        Other romantics also felt a lot of what Hoffmann felt, and often expressed it (especially Hölderlin and Kleist). Romanticism is full of prophetic anticipations, sometimes stunning for our time - it is not without reason that it peers into the era of romanticism with such attention. But still, the majority of Hoffmann’s romantic brethren, “disregarding the evidence of the senses,” tried to “remove” the contradictions of human existence that had revealed themselves to them purely philosophically, to overcome them in the spheres of the spirit, with the help of ideal speculative constructions. Hoffman rejected all these theoretical seductions - or assigned them the status that alone suited them: the status of a fairy tale, an illusion, a comforting dream. Intoxicated by fantasies, Hoffmann turns out to be almost disconcertingly sober.
        Novalis passionately and tirelessly argued that a piece of genius lies in each of us, it seems to be dormant for the time being in our soul, only buried under the layers of eras of “civilization.” Hoffmann earnestly and tirelessly probed this soul, peered into it closely - and instead of the original harmony he discovered a fatal duality, instead of a strong core, an unsteady, changeable contour; If in these depths the secrets of the universe are hidden, then not only good ones - zones of light and darkness, good and evil are mixed there.
        In Novalis, the hero of his novel "Heinrich von Ofterdingen", a young man preparing for the vocation of a poet, meets in his wanderings with a certain hermit (both, of course, predecessors of Hoffmann's heroes - both his young enthusiasts and his hermit Serapion); Leafing through one of the ancient historical books in the hermit's cave, Henry is amazed to discover his own image in its pictures. This, of course, is a symbol, an allegory: Novalis materializes the figurative expression “the poet lives through the centuries” and suggests taking it literally; he not only expresses here the general idea of ​​the “pre-existence” of personality, popular among romantics, but also applies it to the personality of, first of all, the poet. “I am omnipresent, I am immortal, I only change hypostases” - this is the Novalisian meaning of the idea of ​​pre-existence and transformation.
        In Hoffmann we encounter transformations at every step; in fairy tales themselves, this may look quite harmless, such is the law of the genre, but when the round dance of doubles and werewolves swirls more and more irrepressibly, capturing story after story and sometimes becoming truly terrible, as in “Elixirs of the Devil” or in “Sandman”, the picture becomes decisive changes, becomes irrevocably darkened. “I am falling apart, I am losing the feeling of my integrity, I don’t know who I am and that I am a divine spark or a raging beast” - this is Hoffmann’s twist on the theme.
        And this, let us remind you, concerns not only the souls of “other mortals” - the soul of Medardus or the owner of the majorate, Cardillac or the player - this applies, alas, to “enthusiasts” and geniuses too! Together with other romantics, rejecting the Enlightenment image of a “reasonable”, rational and calculated person - as already untenable and not justified, Hoffmann at the same time strongly doubts the romantic reliance on uninhibited feeling, on the arbitrariness of poetic fantasy; According to Hoffmann's verdict, they also do not provide strong support.
        Should we attribute doubts about artists, about “enthusiasts” to Hoffmann? Is it him, who on so many pages glorified music, art, the very “soul of the artist”?
        After all, in the end, one can object to the previous arguments that Hoffman, having looked into the abyss of human nature, still did not bring his beloved heroes to a moral decline. Moreover, he even forced Medardus to repent of his crimes in the end; and shortly before this end he forced him to listen to the following teaching from the Pope: “The Eternal Spirit created a giant who is able to suppress and keep in check the blind beast raging in man. This giant is consciousness... The victory of the giant is virtue, the victory of the beast is sin.” .
        But the whole problem is in consciousness. When Hoffman directs his tenacious, drilling gaze directly at the consciousness of the “enthusiast,” when he not only recklessly idealizes this consciousness, but also soberly analyzes it, the result is far from unambiguous. Here it is revealed that Hoffmann’s attitude towards artists does not only lead to unconditional acceptance and glorification.
        It would seem that everything is simple: Hoffmann’s dual world is the sublime world of poetry and the vulgar world of everyday prose, and if geniuses suffer, then the philistines are to blame for everything. In fact, with Hoffmann everything is not so simple. This typical initial logic of romantic consciousness - Hoffmann knew it thoroughly, he tested it on himself - in his writings it was given over to precisely these naive young men of his. The greatness of Hoffmann himself lies in the fact that, having suffered through all this, he managed to rise above the seductive simplicity of such an explanation, was able to understand that the tragedy of an artist who is not understood by the crowd can turn out to be a beautiful self-deception and even a beautiful banality - if this idea is allowed to freeze, ossify , turn into an indisputable dogma. And Hoffman also fights against this dogma of romantic narcissism - in any case, he analyzes it earnestly, fearlessly, even if he has to, as they say, cut to the quick.
        Him young heroes- all, of course, romantic dreamers and admirers. But all of them are initially immersed in the element of that dazzling and omnipresent irony, of which Hoffmann was an unsurpassed master. When in “Little Tsakhes” the lover Balthasar reads his poems to the sorcerer Alpanus (“about the love of a nightingale for a scarlet rose”), he, with hilarious authority, qualifies this poetic opus as “an experience of a historical kind,” as a kind of documentary evidence written, moreover, “ with pragmatic breadth and thoroughness." The irony here is as thin as a blade, and its subject is romantic poetry and pose. Truly, the cosmic side of things is separated from the comic by one whistling consonant, as Nabokov aptly punned later.
        Irony pursues Hoffmann's heroes, like Nemesis, until the very end, even until the happy ending. In the same "Little Tsakhes" Alpanus, having arranged the successful reunion of Balthazar with his beloved Candida ("simple-minded"!), gives them a wedding gift - a "country house", on the plot of which grows "excellent cabbage, and all sorts of other good vegetables" ; in the magical kitchen of the house “the pots never boil over”, in the dining room the porcelain does not break, in the living room the carpets and chair covers do not get dirty... The ideal, having been brought to life, by the crafty will of Hoffmann turns into a completely philistine comfort, the very one that he shunned the hero ran; this is after the nightingales, after the scarlet rose - perfect kitchen and excellent cabbage! Among other romantics - the same Novalis - heroes found their love (along with the secret of the universe) at least in the sanctuary of Isis or in a blue flower. And here, please, in the story “The Golden Pot” this very “title” vessel appears as a symbol of a fulfilled romantic aspiration; again kitchen paraphernalia - like the already mentioned “a bottle of arrack, a few lemons and sugar.” Enthusiasts are invited to cook either a romantic punch or soup in the scarce pot they have acquired.
        True, here the “sins” of Hoffmann’s heroes are still small, and such ridicule does not make these dreamers any less attractive to us; in the end, all these author’s tricks can also be perceived as ironic symbolism of the intransigibility of the earthly limit: the heroes are burdened by the chains of the prosaic world of “essentiality,” but they are not given the opportunity to throw them off, even with the help of magic. However, the problem here is not only in the earthly limit: Hoffman aims precisely at the romantic consciousness itself, and in other cases the matter takes a much more serious, fatal turn.
        In the story "The Sandman" (created, by the way, immediately after "Elixirs of the Devil") its hero Nathanael - another young representative of the clan of "enthusiasts" - is obsessed with a panicky fear of the outside world, and this fear of the world gradually becomes painful, essentially clinical in nature. Nathanael's fiancee Clara tries to reason with him: "... I think that everything terrible and terrible that you are talking about happened only in your soul, and the real outside world has very little to do with it... If there is a dark force that hostilely and treacherously throws a noose into our soul... then it must take on our own image, become our “I,” for only in this case will we believe in it and give it the place in our soul that it needs for its mysterious work.”
        Not giving dark forces a place in your soul is the problem that worries Hoffmann, and he increasingly suspects that it is the romantically exalted consciousness that is especially susceptible to this weakness. Clara, a simple and sensible girl, tries to heal Nathanael in her own way: as soon as he starts reading his poems to her with their “gloomy, boring mysticism,” she knocks down his exaltation with a sly reminder that her coffee can run away. But that’s precisely why she’s not a decree for him: it turns out she’s a wretched bourgeois! But the clockwork doll Olympia, who can sigh languidly and, when listening to his poems, periodically emits “Ah!”, turns out to be preferable to Nathanael, seems to him like a “soul mate,” and he falls in love with her, not seeing, not understanding that this is just a cunning mechanism , automatic
        This attack, as it is easy to feel, is much more deadly than ridicule of the youthful quixoticism of Anselm or Balthasar. Hoffmann, of course, does not judge entirely from the “sober” positions of the outside world; he did not defect to the camp of the philistines; This story contains brilliant satirical pages telling how “well-meaning” residents of a provincial town not only accept the doll into their society, but are also ready to turn into automata themselves. But it was the romantic hero who first began to worship her, and it is no coincidence that this grotesque story ends with his true madness. Moreover, this time the logic of the mastery of the “dark force” already leads to a criminal line: only by force are they restraining the distraught Nathanael from killing Clara.
        This is, of course, a “case history”; The consciousness described here is incapable of a correct, identical perception of the world, because, to put it in modern terms, it is romantically complex. At one time, Hoffmann’s turn of the problem was very correctly described by our Belinsky, who highly valued the German writer: “In Hoffmann, a person is often a victim of his own imagination, a toy of his own ghosts, a martyr of an unhappy temperament, an unfortunate structure of the brain.”
        For orthodox romantics, genius is something self-sufficient, not requiring justification or justification. Hoffman does not so much contrast creative life with prosaic life, but rather compares them, analyzes artistic consciousness in its indispensable correlation with life. This, by the way, is the essence of the intense aesthetic discussion that forms extensive intermediate “joints” in the cycle of short stories “The Serapion Brothers.”
        And this is the deep meaning of Hoffmann’s last major work, the famous novel about Kapellmeister Kreisler and the cat Murr.
        This time Hoffmann embodied the phantom of duality, which had haunted his soul and occupied his mind all his life, in an unprecedentedly daring artistic form, not only by placing two different life stories under one cover, but also by demonstratively mixing them. With all this, both biographies reflect the same epochal issues, the history of Hoffmann’s time and generation, that is, one subject is given in two different light and interpretations. Goffman sums it up here; the result is ambiguous.
        The confessional nature of the novel is emphasized primarily by the fact that the same Kreisler appears in it. Hoffmann began with the image of this literary double of his - "Kreisleriana" in the cycle of the first "Fantasies" - and ends with it.
        At the same time, Kreisler in this novel is by no means a hero.
        As the publisher (fictitious, of course) immediately warns, the proposed book is precisely the confession of the learned cat Murr; he is both the author and the hero. But when preparing the book for printing, it is sadly explained further, there was an embarrassment: when the publisher began to receive proof sheets, he was horrified to discover that the notes of the cat Murr were constantly interrupted by scraps of some completely different text! As it turned out, the author (that is, the cat), while expressing his worldly views, tore into pieces the first book he came across from the owner’s library in order to use the torn pages “partly for padding, partly for drying.” The book, cut up in such a barbaric manner, turned out to be a biography of Kreisler; Due to the negligence of the typesetters, these pages were also printed.
        The biography of a brilliant composer is like scrap paper in a cat's biography! One had to have a truly Hoffmannian imagination to give such a form to bitter self-irony. Who needs Kreisler's life, his joys and sorrows, what are they good for? Perhaps to dry out the graphomaniacal exercises of the learned cat!
        However, with graphomaniac exercises everything is not so simple. As we read Murr's autobiography itself, we become convinced that the cat is also no stranger and, not without reason, lays claim to the main role in the novel - the role of the romantic "son of the century." Here he is, now wise and life experience, and literary and philosophical studies, argues at the beginning of his biography: “How rarely, however, is true kinship of souls found in our wretched, inert, selfish age! the cat has a high flame of poetry... and another noble young cat will be completely imbued with the sublime ideals of the book that I now hold in my paws, and will exclaim in an enthusiastic outburst: “Oh Murr, divine Murr, the greatest genius of our illustrious feline race! Only to you I owe everything, only your example made me great! "Remove the specifically feline realities in this passage - and you will have a completely romantic style, vocabulary, and pathos.
        To portray a romantic genius in the image of an imposingly pampered cat is in itself very funny idea, and Hoffmann takes full advantage of her comic potential. Of course, the reader quickly becomes convinced that by nature Murr is a typical philistine; he simply learned the fashionable romantic jargon. However, it is not so indifferent that he dresses up as a romantic with success, with an extraordinary sense of style! Hoffmann could not help but know that such a masquerade risks compromising romanticism itself; This is a calculated risk.
        Here we are reading “scrap sheets” - with all the “Hoffmannian” reigning here, the sad story of the life of Kapellmeister Kreisler, a lonely, little-understood genius; inspired, sometimes romantic, sometimes ironic tirades explode, fiery exclamations sound, fiery gazes blaze - and suddenly the narrative breaks off, sometimes literally mid-sentence (the torn page has ended), and the same romantic tirades mutter with delight scientist cat: “...I know for sure: my homeland is an attic! The climate of the fatherland, its morals, customs - how inextinguishable these impressions are... Where do I have such an elevated way of thinking, such an irresistible desire for higher spheres? Where does such a rare gift come from in an instant? soar upward, such envy-worthy brave, most brilliant leaps? Oh, sweet languor fills my chest! Longing for my native attic rises in me like a powerful wave! I dedicate these tears to you, oh beautiful homeland..."
        For the German reader of that time, this one passage was a short course in history modern literature and social thought; the desire for higher spheres as for one’s homeland - these are the romantic empyreans of Jena (“If your gaze is inextricably fixed on the sky, you will never lose your way to your homeland,” was the admonition of the hermit Heinrich von Ofterdingen); the idealization of the darling attic is already Heidelbergian Germanophilism.
        At first, this hierarchy of irony can make your head spin. But the demonstrative, almost literal fragmentation of the novel, its external narrative confusion (again: either a fireworks extravaganza, or the whirlwind of a carnival) are compositionally welded tightly together, with a brilliant calculation, and it must be realized.
        At first glance it may seem that the parallel lives of Kreisler and Murr are new option traditional Hoffmannian dual world: the sphere of “enthusiasts” (Kreisler) and the sphere of “philistines” (Murr). But even a second glance complicates this arithmetic: after all, in each of these biographies, in turn, the world is also divided in half, and each has its own sphere of enthusiasts (Kreisler and Murr) and philistines (Kreisler and Murr’s entourage). The world is no longer doubling, but quadrupling - the count here is “twice two”!
        And this very significantly changes the whole picture. If we isolate the experiment for the sake of Kreisler’s line, we will have before us another “classical” Hoffmann story with all its characteristic attributes; If we isolate Murr’s line, there will be a “Hoffmanized” version of the very widespread genre of satirical allegory, “animal epic” or fable with a self-revealing meaning in world literature (say, like “ The wise minnow"). But Hoffman mixes them up, collides them, and they must certainly be perceived only in mutual relation.
        These are not just parallel lines - they are parallel mirrors. One of them - Murrov's - is placed in front of the previous Hoffmannian romantic structure, again and again reflecting and repeating it. Thus, it, this mirror, inevitably removes absoluteness from history and the figure of Kreisler, giving it a flickering ambiguity. The mirror turns out to be a parody, “the worldly views of the cat Murr” - an ironic paraphrase of “the musical suffering of Kapellmeister Kreisler.”
        The novel about Murr and Kreisler is a grandiose monument to a biased, blood reckoning with romanticism and its belief in the omnipotence of poetic genius. One of the most ardent apologists of art, Hoffmann at the same time is not satisfied with the romantic thesis that it is a panacea for all ills. His artists are unhappy not only because the philistine world does not understand and does not accept them, but also because they themselves cannot find “adequate consciousness,” a natural and beneficial connection with the real world. A world artificially constructed by art is also not a solution for a soul wounded by the disorder of human existence.
        * * *
        But should Hoffmann be credited with justifying earthly existence? Is it him, who, like no one else, created a murderous panopticon of philistine nonentity?
        However, here too everything is not so simple. It would be the greatest injustice to Hoffmann to suspect him of elitist arrogance. People are born artists, but they become philistines. And he, the most sophisticated mocker, punishes not congenital vices, but acquired ones. A person may or may not devote himself to serving the muses - but he should not devote himself to serving Mammon, he should not extinguish the “divine spark” in himself. It is then that an irreversible perversion of humanity occurs in him.
        In “The Sandman” the already mentioned story of how in a “well-meaning society” a mechanical doll became a trendsetter is described by the pen of a brilliant humorist. Just look at Hoffmann’s summative remarks about the atmosphere established in this society among the “highly respected gentlemen” after the discovery of the deception with the mannequin: “The story about the machine gun sank deep into their souls, and a disgusting distrust of human faces was instilled in them. Many lovers, so as to completely to make sure that they were not captivated by a wooden doll, they demanded from their lovers that they sing slightly out of tune and dance out of tune... and most of all, that they not only listen, but sometimes speak themselves, so that their speeches really expressed thoughts and feelings. For many, love ties strengthened and became more intimate, while others, on the contrary, calmly parted ways." This is all, of course, very funny, but in an ironic-satirical arrangement, a very serious social problem appears here: mechanization and automation of social consciousness.
        In "Little Tsakhes" the story of a vile freak is also funny, with the help of magic spells received from a fairy he bewitched an entire state and became its first minister - but the idea that formed its basis is rather scary: a nonentity seizes power by appropriating ( alienation!) of merits that do not belong to him, and a blinded, stupid society, which has lost all value criteria, no longer simply mistakes “an icicle, a rag for an important person,” but also, in some kind of perverted self-beating, creates an idol out of a half-wit.
        Hoffmann's panopticon, upon closer examination, is a sick social organism; the magnifying glass of satire and grotesque highlights the affected places in it, and what at the first moment seemed stunning ugliness and a challenge to common sense, in the next moment is realized as the inexorability of the law.
        Hoffmann's irony and satire in such passages are, of course, deadly, but a strange thing: at the same time there is not the slightest note of disgusting contempt in them, there is no schadenfreude - but the pain that was heard later in Gogol's famous exclamation: “And a person could condescend to such insignificance, pettiness, disgusting! He could change so much!”
        Moreover: Hoffmann is really not happy about his gift of seeing everything as if through a magnifying glass, and he left unambiguous evidence of this.
        In the later story “The Lord of the Fleas” (where, as we remember, a serious social problem is also revealed through the means of the grotesque - abuse of law and order by official representatives of the law), its hero, Peregrinus Tys, receives a wonderful magnifying glass from “his” wizard, allowing him to read people's minds. And he doesn’t take the opportunity to “see through” for long - he can’t stand it: “... I take the unfortunate glass - and gloomy distrust fills my soul; in unjust anger, in insane blindness, I push away my true friend, and the poison becomes deeper and deeper doubt undermines the very roots of life and brings discord into my earthly existence, alienates me from myself. No!.. Away, away from this ill-fated gift!”
        Peregrinus renounces magic glass- because it, as he immediately says, is capable of destroying in the soul all traces of “a truly human principle, expressed in heartfelt gullibility, meekness and good nature.” Hoffmann does not renounce his gift; At the same time as The Lord of the Fleas, he is working on the second volume of Murr the Cat. We have seen what kind of glass is aimed at the soul of Kapellmeister Kreisler: it does not destroy the “human element” in it, but truthfully records its unwanted distortions. The same glass is aimed at Kreisler's antagonists - the society at the court of Prince Irenaeus: it truthfully records the unwanted distortions of the human principle in them, but does not exterminate it.
        Advisor Bentzon in the novel is a court intriguer who dreams of giving her daughter Julia, Kreisler’s love and dream, as a wife to the heir to the dwarf Irenaean throne, Prince Ignatius; the prince is weak-minded - according to Hoffman’s delicately sympathetic formula, “doomed to eternal childhood” (and this delicacy, we note in passing, is not just irony - Hoffman actually sympathizes with the prince, entrusting “according to the plot” this sympathetic attitude specifically to Julia, his “positive” heroine). So, Maestro Abraham, defending his ward and favorite Kreisler, reproaches Mrs. Benzon for having “a heart frozen forever, where there has never been a spark.” “You can’t stand Kreisler,” he continues, “because you don’t like his superiority over you... you shun him as a person whose thoughts are directed to higher objects than is customary in your little world.”
        We are back to where we started. Two worlds: enthusiast - philistines. Let us now listen to Mrs. Bentzon’s answer.
        “Maestro,” Benzon said dully... “are you saying my heart is frozen? Do you know if it has ever heard the friendly voice of love and if I have not found consolation and peace only in those conventions that so despised the unbridled Kreisler? And don’t you think, old man, who also experienced a lot of suffering, that the desire to rise above these conventions and join the world spirit, deceiving oneself, is a dangerous game? I know, Kreisler scolds me in cold and soulless prose in the flesh , and you only repeat his thoughts, calling me frozen; but have you ever penetrated this ice, which has long become a protective shell for me?”
        The maestro will not let it go, he will not make a mistake, he will defend Kreisler and his common position with him with new arguments, but this is no longer important. The important thing is that the other side of the dual world, it turns out, also has its own right! Some are “enthusiasts,” others are “philistines,” but all are human; Even the “protective shell” has returned - it is a privilege (or fate?) not only of “enthusiasts”.
        “Two Worlds” was most poignantly embodied in the art of words by Hoffmann; it is his identification mark. But Hoffmann is not a fanatic or a dogmatist of dual worlds; he is its analyst and dialectician.
        * * *
        We have come to Hoffmann’s innermost and most simple secret. It was not without reason that he was haunted by the image of his double. He loved his Music to the point of self-forgetfulness, to madness, he loved Poetry, he loved Fantasy, he loved the Game - and every now and then he betrayed them with Life, with its many faces, with its bitter and joyful prose. Back in 1807, he wrote to his friend Hippel - as if justifying himself to the fact that he had chosen not a poetic, but a legal field as his main one: “And most importantly, I believe that, thanks to the need to send, in addition to serving art, and civil service, I acquired a broader view of things and largely avoided the egoism due to which professional artists, if I may say so, are so inedible."
        (Civil service helping to avoid selfishness... The legal theme of "Lord of the Fleas" arose from a real situation: serving in Berlin as an adviser to the court of appeal and being in 1819 appointed a member of the "highest commission of inquiry to identify anti-state groups and other dangerous intrigues,” Hoffmann acted as a courageous human rights activist in a battle with high-ranking lawbreakers. The fight continued in connection with the publication of “The Lord of the Fleas” - this time the fight was also against censorship.)
        Hoffmann's “broader view of things” turns out to be extremely simple. The fellow narrators in The Serapion Brothers, having practiced a variety of storytelling styles, ultimately express distrust of any excess, unbridledness, or “excitement” of the imagination. And here’s why: “The foundation of the heavenly ladder, along which we want to ascend to the higher spheres, must be strengthened in life, so that everyone can ascend after us. Climbing higher and higher and finally finding ourselves in a fantastic magical kingdom, we can then believe, that this kingdom also belongs to our life - it is, in essence, nothing more than its integral, wonderfully beautiful part.”
        The director's concept of Hoffmann's world theater is described here. And here is her “super task” - in the last lines of “The Serapion Brothers”: “The most important condition for all creativity and mastery is that kind unpretentiousness, which is the only thing capable of warming the heart and giving a beneficial impulse to the spirit.”
        “Warm the heart”... Probably, the German writer Willibald Alexis thought about these lines later when he wrote about Hoffmann: “Had he lived longer, his subjective flame would have turned into the warmth of objectivity.”
        Hoffmann did not have time to live longer - but he managed to express everything he wanted. In the already mentioned short story “The Corner Window,” its dying hero, “a writer... distinguished by his particularly lively imagination,” says to his cousin, who had hoped that the patient would still recover: “What the hell, you think that I’m already getting better?” or even completely recovered from my ailments? Not at all... But this window is a consolation for me: here life again appeared to me in all its diversity, and I feel how close its never-ending bustle is to me. Come, brother, look out out the window!"
        That’s what Hoffman called us before he left. But, before you begin to get acquainted with his worldly and other views, before opening the window into this world, take a look, reader, once again at the epigraph from Hoffmann that opens the article - and, in order to completely get used to this bizarre language, keep in mind that in the quoted Hoffmann text there are also the following words:
        "- Yes, let me hear your voice, and with the speed of a young man I will run towards its sweet sound until I find you, and we will live together again and in a magical community we will engage in the highest magic, which we are approaching willy-nilly everything, even ordinary people, not believing in her at all...
        Having said this, the maestro jumped around the room with youthful speed and liveliness, started the cars, and installed magic mirrors. And in all corners everything came to life and moved: the mannequins walked and turned their heads, and the mechanical rooster flapped its wings and crowed, and the parrots chattered shrilly..."
        Now - read Hoffman.
       
       

Introduction

Romanticism in Germany

Biography of Ernst Theodor Amadeus (Wilhelm) Hoffmann

Laughter culture and grotesque in the works of Hoffmann.

Conclusion.

Introduction

Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann... There is something magical in this name. It is always pronounced in full, and it appears to be surrounded by a dark ruffled collar with fiery reflections.

However, this is how it should be, because in fact Hoffmann was a magician. Yes, yes, not just a storyteller, like the Brothers Grimm or Perrault, but a real wizard. After all, only a true magician can create miracles and fairy tales... out of nothing. From a bronze doorknob with a grinning face, from nutcrackers and the hoarse chime of an old clock; from the sound of the wind in the leaves and the night singing of cats on the roof. True, Hoffmann did not wear a black robe with mysterious signs, but wore a shabby brown tailcoat and used a quill feather instead of a magic wand.

Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann was one of the most prominent figures of late German romanticism. Writer, composer, artist, theater director - everything was harmoniously intertwined in one person, in a great creator. He was a writer of European scale, his work resonated in the souls of not only his compatriots, but also outside his homeland. Especially in Russia.

Russia, agitated by unrest, the war with Napoleon, and the Decembrist uprising, was the best soil for Hoffmann’s ironic, sometimes comical creations. Hoffmann's work influenced the works of many Russian writers. Here we can name both Pushkin ("The Undertaker" and "The Queen of Spades") and Lermontov ("Shtoss"). It had the most profound impact on Gogol (The Nose, Portrait, Notes of a Madman) and Dostoevsky (The Double). This is what Belinsky wrote, comparing Hoffmann with Jean Paul Richter: “Hoffmann’s humor is much more vital and burning than Jean Paul’s humor - and German gophrats, philistines and pedants should feel to their bones the power of Hoffmann’s humorous scourge.”

My first acquaintance with the work of E.T.A. Hoffman happened in childhood; even then I was amazed by the scale and multi-layered nature of his fairy tales and short stories. Little Tsakhes, The Nutcracker, The Golden Pot, and many other fairy tales of this writer filled my childhood years, and, for sure, influenced my worldview. I have always been amazed by the multidimensionality of his views on the world, the magic that permeates every work and the tragic sense of the duality of existence.

The problems that Hoffmann raised in his works have not lost their relevance to this day. The posthumous fame of this remarkable writer long outlived him. And these days, a wave of interest in Hoffmann has risen again, he has again become one of the most widely read German writers. authors XIX centuries, his works have been published and reprinted. romanticism Grotex Hoffmann carnivalization

In my work, I would like to consider such techniques and principles of Hoffman’s work as carnivalization, grotesque, dual worlds. I would like to consider the features of German romanticism and the biography of the writer, and also, using the example of several works, consider the features of Hoffmann’s work and his author’s techniques.

Romanticism in Germany

Romanticism is spiritual movement in all areas of culture, primarily in literature, music, philosophy, historical sciences, etc.

Romanticism (from the French word romantique, which meant something mysterious, strange, unreal), which constituted an entire era in the history of philosophy (late 18th - early 19th centuries), unfortunately, is often considered only as a literary and artistic movement.

German romanticism was one of the broadest, grandest experiments in the criticism of bourgeois culture.

The peculiarity of the romantic worldview is such that it was most fully manifested in art due to the fact that it is intuitively more complete, holistic and earlier than other forms of knowledge it grasps and comprehends the essential aspects of the era. Considering art to be synthetic in its essence, the romantics called for music to be able to paint, to tell the content of a novel and tragedy, so that poetry in its musicality would approach the art of sound, so that painting would strive to convey images of literature, etc.

Even before the French Revolution, the culture of Europe - in particular the literature of Germany - drew attention to the tensions of the escalated social contradictions, contradictions between the individual and society. The revolution completed the formation of those impulses towards freedom, which from now on became the enduring personal orientations of young philosophers.

In 1806 - 1815, Germany experienced perhaps one of the most dynamic and controversial eras of its history. The occupation and the presence of Napoleonic troops created a contradictory situation in the country: on the one hand, the conquerors pushed Germany to follow the more advanced French state. Under these conditions, major state reforms, long overdue, but carried out under very diverse social influences, unfolded. On the other hand, among the people, especially towards the end of this period, patriotic feelings, anti-French sentiments awakened, and resistance to foreign invasion began.

The first decades of the 19th century. - the heyday of German classical philosophy, represented primarily by the works of Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, but also the German romantics. The work of A. Schopenhauer stands somewhat apart, who in 1818 created his main work, “The World as Will and Representation.” Later, in the 20s - 40s of the 19th century, when Hegel, Schelling, Schopenhauer “compete” in Germany, when after Hegel’s death right and left Hegelians and, above all, L. Feuerbach began to enter the arena of thought, when the first works appeared K. Marx and F. Engels, - new socio-political movements are emerging in the culture and philosophy of other countries: socialism, positivism, anarchism.

The romantics were able to grasp the deepest, archetypal states of culture: life and death, eternity, time, space, the organic principles of the world, suffering as a feeling common to all living things. Not “I think - therefore I exist” - the statement of an intellectual, but “I suffer - therefore I exist” - the deep (unconscious, instinctive) confidence of all living things in nature. Thus, on the more ancient, archetypal basis of the “I” is not the mind, but the feeling - suffering, as one of the most elementary and primary feelings, close to all living things in nature.

The literature introduces special shape thinking is a fragment. It must be said that as a genre it is accepted almost axiomatically. Its development, not without reason, is associated with the work of the Jena people, and first of all F. Schlegel. Each fragment of F. Schlegel or Novalis is a clot of thought, monological in form and dialogical in content. Many passages seem to suggest an opponent; in their intonation they are affirmative and interrogative at the same time, often having the character of reflection. They have no beginning or end and are “excerpts” of some unfinished conceptual book, a chain of unrealized plans, i.e. retain their generic essence. The fragment is a picture of the birth and decay of a beginningless and endless thought. It exists on its own, has its own internal structure, and by the will of the author is attached to the whole, “built in” into the structure of this whole. The fragment, on the one hand, works to destroy classical genres, on the other hand, it returns literature to its original forms, to artistic syncretism, when a work begins to imitate nature, its forms, and is not constructed according to the rules of poetics.

For example, the interest of the romantics in the arabesque is known, which F. Schlegel considered “a completely definite and essential form, or method of expression, of poetry” and at the same time considered not a work of art, but a work of nature, “a natural creation.” At one time, Goethe expressed an idea that made it possible to understand not only the development of literary genres in Germany during the period under study, but some features of artistic thinking in general. “Literature,” he wrote, “from the very beginning of its existence, has been fragmentary.

Romantic poets were predominantly lyricists and nature poets. They wrote about what they saw directly - in themselves and around them. Goethe said, for example, that he did not have a line that was not inspired by his own experience.

The imagination of romantics was excited by the mystery of ancient castles, Gothic cathedrals, ruins, and knights dressed in steel armor. Along with the romance of the Middle Ages, medieval fantasy was also resurrected. This was an era when they believed that ghosts roamed the ruins of castles, a ghostly ship rushed across the seas, finding no shelter, and at night ghouls, ghouls and vampires appeared from their graves.

The fantasy novels and stories of the German writer Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann embodied the spirit of German romanticism. Already in early age he discovered the talents of a musician and a draftsman. Hoffmann took up literature late. Among Hoffmann's most famous stories are the fairy tale "The Golden Pot", the Gothic story "Majorat", "Mademoiselle de Scudéry", "The Nutcracker and the Mouse King".

Brilliant imagination combined with a strict and transparent style provided Hoffmann with a special place in German literature. The action of his works almost never took place in distant lands - as a rule, he placed his incredible heroes in everyday settings. It is because of this that he is sometimes called a romantic realist. He brought the views of the romantics to life in his own way. The feeling of the duality of existence, the painful discord between ideal and reality permeates all of his work, however, unlike most of his brothers, he never loses sight of earthly reality and, probably, could say about himself in the words of the early romantic Wackenroder: “despite everything no matter how hard our spiritual wings try, it is impossible to tear ourselves away from the earth: it forcibly pulls us towards itself, and we again plop down into the most vulgar midst of humanity.” Hoffmann observed the “vulgar crowd of people” very closely; not speculatively, but from his own bitter experience, he comprehended the full depth of the conflict between art and life, which especially worried the romantics. A multi-talented artist, he with rare insight caught the real contradictions of his time and captured them in the enduring creations of his imagination.

With the era of romanticism, not only the formation of a new worldview began, but, accordingly, the disintegration of old, outdated artistic forms formed in previous centuries began. And if romanticism was preceded by styles in art, then romanticism is not a style, “romanticism is loneliness, still rebellious or reconciled; romanticism is the loss of style!” He identifies the following features of the artistic situation that developed in the era of romanticism: the loss of style, the irrational basis of artistic creativity, the growing feeling of abandonment and loneliness throughout the 19th century creative soul. Veidle believes that gradually with the loss of style came impotence different arts: first in architecture and applied arts, then in music, painting, poetry and in the art of words, etc. Veidle considers romanticism as the will to art, as an awareness of the need for art against the background of its loss, therefore romanticism is a disease, Veidle believes. But he admits that great souls and geniuses suffered from this disease.

In romanticism, new ideas were embodied not only regarding the nature of art, the characteristics of artistic creativity, the relationship between philosophy and art, the cognitive capabilities of the latter, but the problem of forming a holistic worldview was posed, bridging the gap between individual spheres of knowledge, which was further developed in subsequent theoretical thought and artistic thought. practice.

Biography of Ernst Theodor Amadeus (Wilhelm) Hoffmann

Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffmann was born in January 1776. But already in 1779, his parents’ marriage broke up, and, having divided the children among themselves, they separated. Karl, the eldest son, went to his father, and Ernst, apparently due to his young age (three years), remained with his mother. Ernst never saw his father again. Mother and little Ernst move to their father's house. The boy finds himself in a large Derffer family, where his grandmother Louise Sophia Derffer, two unmarried aunts and an uncle, Otto Wilhelm Derffer, live. “The Everyday Views of Murr the Cat” immerses us in this time. This is typical for the writer - almost all experiences from childhood are picked up later in his works. Hoffman lived in this house until he was 20 years old.

The mother was sick all the time, and mental anguish completely turned her away from this world, therefore, she did not take part in raising her son at all. It turned out that Hoffmann grew up almost an orphan. Uncle Otto, however, considered it his civic duty to give the boy a strict and pious upbringing; in addition, he did not have his own family, so all the teacher’s energy was directed towards young Ernst.

From the age of six (from 1782 to 1792), Ernst Theodor attended a Protestant school in Königsberg, the Burg Schul. The orthodox ideas of John Calvin penetrated the educational institution; in general, students were brought up in the spirit of strict pietism. At the Burg Shul, Ernst met his classmate Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel, and from then on their close friendship began.

Hippel became a loyal friend and “big brother” for Hoffmann - many years later, friends maintained relations through correspondence. Together they read the chivalric novels of that time and discussed Rousseau's Confessions. His father, Theodor von Hippel, burgomaster of Konigsberg, as many biographers of Hoffmann suggest, served as the prototype for Uncle Drosselmeyer in The Nutcracker - a very contradictory nature, somewhat mysterious, but ultimately still positive.

In 1792, Hoffmann graduated from school. He cannot decide on one thing: should he become an artist or a musician? But his family still convinces him of the need for a legal education, which will always provide him with a sure piece of bread, and he begins studying law at the Albertina University of Königsberg. Perhaps the fact that Gippel’s friend began his studies at the same university played a role here.

Ernst here amazingly continues to study well, and this despite the fact that at the same time he composes music, draws, writes and plays music. In addition, in order to have some money, he gives music lessons.

His student is the married Dora (Cora) Hutt. Hoffmann falls passionately in love, and his chosen one reciprocates his feelings.

Among Albertina's professors was Immanuel Kant himself. Some Hoffman researchers claim that he had a significant influence on the writer. Meanwhile, friend Hippel completed his study of jurisprudence and left Königsberg in 1794. From now on, a correspondence began between friends that lasted for years.

No matter how much Hoffmann and Dora Hutt hid their love, rumors about their “scandalous” relationship spread through the houses of Derffer’s acquaintances and after some time became the subject of wide discussion among the inhabitants of Königsberg. On July 22, 1795, he passed the first exam in jurisprudence, successfully graduated from the university and became a forensic investigator at the Königsberg district administration. Thus, he becomes financially independent from the Derfer family. And so his double game begins again: during the day he leads the life of a conscientious German worker, and devotes his nights and weekends to his favorite work - his various musical, artistic, and literary interests. This discord in the needs of the soul and the material need for reliable work as a lawyer will become a tragedy in Hoffmann’s life and will be reflected in his works.

Hoffmann's mother dies in March. Over the years, she became more and more withdrawn into herself and slowly aged. Hoffmann writes to Hippel: “Death paid us such a terrible visit that with a shudder I felt the horror of its despotic greatness. This morning we found our good mother dead. She fell out of bed - a sudden apoplexy killed her at night...”

And in June 1796, Hoffmann went to Glogau: leaving Königsberg, he hoped that he would definitely return here, because the world would still change... for the better.

In May, E. Hoffmann goes to Konigsberg, lives there until June, and then sees Dora Hutt for the last time. It is not known exactly what happened, but it so happened that with the willing help of relatives, Hoffmann became engaged to his cousin, her full name was Sophie Wilhelmina Constantine ("Minna"), this happened in 1798.

In 1800, after the brilliant surrender State exams, he is appointed to the ancient Polish city of Poznan to the post of assessor at the supreme court.

In March 1802, he broke off the engagement, especially since, as he learned, marriage would have made not only him, but also his cousin unhappy.

February 1802 Hoffmann married Mikhalina. To do this, he had to convert to Catholicism (previously he belonged to Protestants). All his life, Misha (as he affectionately called her) will help him - simply, dispassionately, unromantically, and will always forgive his talented Ernst for his misadventures, and will not abandon him even in the most difficult times. She was a wonderful housewife and the writer's faithful companion. Hoffmann lived with her for 20 years, and thanks to her support, he found greater stability in his life, although she could not completely calm her husband’s demons and distract him from his alcohol addiction.

A new turn in the fate of the composer (not yet a writer), and not for the better, was the carnival masquerade of 1802, at which disguised individuals suddenly began to appear among the guests, distributing certain caricatures. The drawings depicted influential people from among the local Prussian nobility who were present here, and their characteristic funny sides were noted with amazing accuracy.

The general joy lasted only until the cartoons fell into the hands of those famous personalities, such as major generals, officers and members of the noble class, who immediately recognized themselves. That same night, a detailed report, simply put, a denunciation, was sent to Berlin, and an investigation began. The distributors of the cartoons were not caught, but their talented hand was immediately recognized. The authorities quickly realized that the group of young government officials to which Hoffmann belonged was responsible for all this, and he also made available his talent as an artist for this unheard-of action. This ball, which lasted three days, cost Hoffmann dearly. Any day now he was expecting a promotion and transfer to a more western city, and most likely it was supposed to be Berlin, but in the end they got rid of him, sending him even further east - to the city of Plock. True, he still received a promotion - now he is a state councilor, but the document that had already been signed about Hoffman receiving the academic degree of Candidate of Sciences was annulled.

In the same year, the city recognized Hoffmann the writer: the Berlin “Nezavisimaya” newspaper published his essay “A Letter from a Monk to His Friend in the Capital.” In the same year it was published as musical critic, and is a success. In particular, one of the topics of the articles was the relationship between singing and recitation in Schiller's drama The Bride of Messina. He will return to the theme of synthesis of arts more than once. In a certain literary competition he takes second place.

At the end of 1803, Aunt Johanna died. Around January 13-18, 1804, Ernst Theodor receives the long-awaited will; most likely he hopes with its help to somehow improve his financial situation. Without Aunt Johanna, Uncle Otto's house has become completely uninviting, and Ernst Theodor visits the theater every evening. He watches plays and operas by W. Müller, K. Dittersdorf, E.N. Megul, arias from operas by Mozart, F. Schiller and A. Kotzebue.

In February 1804, Ernst Theodor left the city of his childhood, never to return here again. On February 28, 1804, he received an appointment to be transferred to Warsaw as a state councilor of the Prussian Supreme Court. In the spring, a move to Warsaw follows.

The years spent in the Polish capital became very important for Hoffmann: here he improved as a composer and achieved some (albeit very local) fame; he wrote his first musical critical articles.

And in the July (1805) issue of “Collected Beautiful Works of Polish Composers,” which was compiled by Elsner, an A major sonata for piano is published. This is the only sonata published during Hoffmann's lifetime. It is known that there were many more of them, but no one knows the exact number.

Interestingly, the work does not suffer in any way from Hoffmann’s involvement in various arts. He always receives commendable reviews and receives a quite acceptable (albeit small) salary and, among other things, studies Italian - after all, throughout his adult life, Hoffmann dreamed of traveling to Italy to see with his own eyes the masterpieces of fine (and not only) art.

Hoffmann also met the romantic Zachary Werner (1768-1823(8). Inspired by his drama “The Cross on the Baltic Sea,” he adapted the melody of the Polish folk song “Don’t Go to the Town”).

In July 1805, Hoffmann's daughter Cecilia was born. The Warsaw years played a huge role in Hoffmann's life. His singspiels are staged here, he conducts his own works, designs stage sets, and his major work, a piano sonata played at the Maltese Palace, was published. And he begins to think about leaving the hated law and making a living from music. But one day it all ended. In the vicinity of Jena and Auerstan there is a battle with Napoleonic troops, which are victorious, and in November 1806 Warsaw is occupied by the French. According to some sources, Hoffmann is accused of spying for the Prussian king. Soon the family is left without an apartment; Hoffman and his family and 12-year-old niece huddle in the attic of the Musical Collection. In January, Michalina and Cecilia leave for Poznan, to visit her relatives, and Hoffmann is going to go to Vienna, but the new government refuses to issue a passport. During one of Mikhalina's moves with her daughter to another city, a mail carriage overturned and little Cecilia died. Michalina received a serious wound to the head, due to which she suffered for a long time.

In July 1807, he decided to leave the city that had become his home. And here he is in Berlin. Ernst Theodor is only 30 years old, but his health is broken by illnesses, he is constantly worried about his liver, stomach, and is tormented by cough and nausea. He settles on the second floor of Friedrichstrasse 179, where he occupies two rooms. His portfolio includes scores of several operas, and he firmly intends to devote himself entirely to art. Hoffman goes to music publishing houses and offers his works in theaters, but all to no avail. Also, no one is interested in him either as a music teacher or as a conductor. These were months of complete despair. Only three of his cantatas are published in Berlin, for two and three voices (with Italian and German texts) (1808), the singspiel “Love and Jealousy”. (1807).

At the beginning of 1813, Hoffmann's affairs went a little better - he received a small inheritance, and on March 18 he signed an agreement under which he became conductor in the opera troupe of Joseph Zekondas (Seconda, Joseph Secondas). At the end of April, he and his wife moved to Dresden. His financial situation is improving. For two years (1813-1814) he toured with the troupe in Dresden and Leipzig, mainly conducting. In addition, he composes and writes a lot, and serves at the Leipzig Theater. An essay entitled "Beethoven Instrumental-Musik" appears in the newspaper "Zeitung fur die elegante Welt". The essay "Jacques Callot" was written.

Dresden became another source of inspiration for Hoffmann, who admired its architecture and art galleries.

Meanwhile, the fire of the Napoleonic War reaches the city, and on August 27 and 28, 1813, battles take place near Dresden. Hoffmann survived all the horrors of the war, did not try to somehow protect his life, and several times found himself in mortally dangerous situations.

Finally, his worst enemy Napoleon is defeated. "Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!" - he writes jubilantly in his diary. Until the end of 1813, he was busy as a conductor in the Zecondas troupe, in addition to this he continued to compose and write: in November he wrote “The Sandman”, “The Hypnotist”, “News about the further fate of the Berganz dog”. Then he prepares all the stories for publication, compiling a kind of collection called “Fantasies in the manner of Callot” (Phantasiestucke in Callot's Manier. Blatter aus dem Tagebuche eines reisenden Enthusiasten), where he included all the stories and novellas he wrote.

Fees for books and articles bring meager income, and dire need forces him to turn to Hippel for help. Hippel applied for a vacancy in Berlin, and at the end of September 1814 the writer and his wife left for the capital. On September 26, he signs an agreement according to which he accepts the position of lawyer at the Royal Berlin Court of Appeal with the note “provisionally without salary.” He expresses his thoughts on this matter as follows: “I am returning to the state stall.” Only after a few months does he begin to receive a salary. From now on, a double life begins - as an official and as an artist, as in his youth.

April 1816, with the help of his faithful friend Hippel, Hoffmann was appointed adviser to the Berlin Court of Appeal. If he had devoted himself only to gray clerical work and, like his colleagues, strived to secure a position for himself, then, without a doubt, he would have very quickly reached great heights. But Hippel did it for him. His financial position has strengthened, especially compared to Leipzig times. Now, it would seem, he could lead a quieter life and meet in the evenings with officials of his rank over a cup of tea. But Hoffmann still prefers a wild tavern life. Coming home after another meeting with friends, he suffers from insomnia and sits down to write. Sometimes his imagination, fueled by wine, gave rise to such nightmares that he woke up his wife, and she sat next to him knitting. Stories flowed from his pen one after another. This is how things appeared that were included in the future in a separate collection, rightly called by him “Night Stories” (“Night Stories”, “Nachtstucke”). The book includes the dark short stories "Majorat" and "Sandman". The second volume of "Elixirs" will be published in May.

In August, the first romantic opera in three acts, “Ondine,” on which Hoffmann had been working for the last two years, was staged at the Royal Theater in Berlin (Burgomistra Street 8/93). Starring Johanna Evnike, who became the latest passion of the forty-year-old writer-musician. The opera is very popular and runs for twenty performances. After the success of Ondine, society, as usual, begins to show interest in his other compositional experiments, and his other opera, Rusalka (1809), also has some success among critics and the general public.

In the autumn of the same year, he wrote a fairy tale for children - "The Nutcracker and the Mouse King", which later appeared in a collection of children's fairy tales, where, in addition to Hoffmann, Fouquet, Watt Eontessa and others were present.

Meanwhile, the Berlin publishing house publishes "Night Stories" and the fairy tale "Alien Child", published in the second volume of the "children's" collection. "The Nutcracker and the Mouse King" and "The Celebration of King Arthur" are published in Leipzig. The publication is published in a special “pocket format” intended for ladies. In the same “ladies’” version, the story “Counselor Krespel” (“Rat Krespel”) was published in Nuremberg in 1818. In addition, in 1818, the short story “Doge and Dogaresse” (“Doge und Dogaresse”), Madame de Scudéry, was published, which was extremely popular with the public, and “An Excerpt from the Life of Three Friends” was published in Frankfurt.

So, he continues to lead a crazy life, from the point of view of the average person. During the day - work in court, requiring concentration of thought, in the evening - meetings with people of art in a wine cellar, at night - putting down on paper the thoughts of the day, bringing to life images heated by wine. His body forgave him such a lifestyle for quite a long time, but in the spring of 1818 he gave in - the writer developed a spinal cord disease. From this time on, his condition worsened more and more. In the summer, friends give the writer a tabby kitten, which he calls Murr. Hoffmann is working on his next major work, Little Zaches, (Little Zaches, nicknamed Zinnober), while his cat sleeps peacefully on his desk. One day, the writer saw his pupil opening his desk drawer with his paw and going to bed on the manuscripts. In letters to friends, the writer talks about Murr’s extraordinary intelligence and hints that, perhaps, in the absence of the owner, the cat reads his manuscripts and writes his own. November 14 Hoffmann and his associates, namely J. Gitzig, Contessa, F de la Motte Fouquet, A. von Chamisso, D.F. Koreff form a community - now they call themselves "Serapion Brothers". The circle is named after the clairvoyant hermit Serapion. Their charter states: “Freedom of inspiration and imagination and the right of everyone to be themselves.” From the endless discussions of friends about art and philosophy, the book “The Serapion Brothers” would later emerge. (In 1921, Russian writers such as M. Zoshchenko, Lev Lunts, Vsevolod Ivanov, Veniamin Kaverin will create their “Serapion Brotherhood” in honor of Hoffman).

In January (according to other sources - in February) 1819, the Berlin publishing house "Reimer" published the first volume of "The Serapion Brothers". A serious illness prevents a writer from enjoying his creative success.

Also in 1819, “Little Zaches, nicknamed Zinnober,” (“Klein Zaches genannt Zinnober”) was published. People of keen minds enthusiastically accepted this work, and Hoffmann's friend, Peter Chamisso, called him “indisputably our first humorist.”

From mid-July to early September, the writer is in the mountains of Silesia and Prague to relax and improve his health. However, during the treatment period he spends all his time working on manuscripts.

Already in December 1819, the country, or at least Berlin, was reading the first volume of “The Everyday Views of Murr the Cat.” The very double form in which the novel is written seems unheard of to the general public. Cats and dogs are immediately recognized by certain sections of society, and government agencies are already beginning to show interest in the writer’s politically inappropriate jokes. At the end of 1819, the first of the four-volume Serapion Brothers was published, which, among other things, included “The Extraordinary Sufferings of a Theater Director” (which was based on facts from Holbein’s biography).

In October 1821, Hoffmann was transferred to the Supreme Senate of Appeal, and in early November he sent the first manuscripts of “The Master of the Fleas” to the publisher in Frankfurt am Main.

Around January 18, 1822, the last, most difficult period of the writer’s illness began; he developed something like tabes corsalis. Over the course of several months, paralysis will gradually take over his body. Right now, when death is near, he writes: “to live, just to live - no matter what it costs!” He wants to come to terms with paralysis, he is ready to work with the help of a secretary - just to have time to write down everything that he has in mind.

In the first half of April, the writer dictates the story “The Corner Window,” which became the founder of a special genre in literature and was immediately published. In May, his condition completely worsened - the doctor does everything that medicine could do at that time: hot iron strips are applied to his spine to wake up the body.

June, waking up, Hoffmann suddenly felt that he was completely healthy, since he did not feel pain anywhere else, he did not understand that the paralysis had already reached his neck. He died on June 25 at 11 ½ o'clock in the morning. Death finds him while working on the short story "Enemy". True friend Hippel, who sat at his deathbed, writes that he and Hoffmann dreamed of someday settling in the neighborhood, instead of engaging in correspondence, but it turned out that only the fatal illness of a friend accelerated their meeting.

THIS. Hoffmann was buried on June 28 in the third cemetery of the Temple of John of Jerusalem. The tombstone was installed at the expense of the judicial department, so hated by Hoffmann. The inscription on it reads:

The appellate court adviser distinguished himself as a lawyer, as a poet, as a composer, as an artist. From his friends.

Instead of the pseudonym "Amadeus", the name "Wilhelm" given to him at birth was indicated on the monument.

In 1823 Hitzig would write excellent biography about his friend (Aus Hoffmann s Leben and Nachlass), and the newspaper "Der Zuschauer" will publish his "Corner Window". A few years later, “The Last Stories” would be published, and much later, in 1847, Mikhalina presented the Prussian king with Hoffmann’s scores, consisting of 19 originals of his musical works, including “Ondine.” He handed them over to Royal Library, where they are stored from now on.

Laughter culture and grotesque in the works of Hoffmann

Even during Hoffmann's lifetime, his work aroused interest. But even recognition of his skill did not bring satisfaction to the writer. As a born critic of reality, Hoffmann put all human shortcomings on public display, which, as a rule, people did not like. But the champions of justice saw one of their own in Hoffman and recognized him. This is how two camps of criticism emerged: opponents and admirers. Opponents accused Hoffmann of madness and even schizophrenia. The theme of dual worlds and doubles in his works suggested the idea of ​​a split personality. His opponents took advantage of this - it is much easier to impose on society the opinion that one should not read the works of a madman.

Each writer, artist, creator embodies his time and the position of man in his time. And everything he communicates is expressed in a special language. This is not just the language of art, "figurative" language; its components also include the artistic language of time and the individual artistic language of a given creator.

The time in which Hoffmann's artistic language was formed - romanticism. In his richest grammar, the main rule and initial law is the inflexibility of the spirit, its independence from the course of things. From this law is derived the requirement for absolute freedom of the earthly bearer of this spirit - a creative, inspired person, to designate which in the romantic language the Latin borrowing is readily used - "genius", and in Hoffmann's language - also the Greek "enthusiast" ("divinely inspired"). Hoffmann’s embodiments of such divine inspiration are, first of all, musicians: “Cavalier Gluck”, and the creator of “Don Juan”, and the bandmaster Kreisler, created by Hoffmann himself, is the author’s double and the collective image of the artist in general.

The French bourgeois revolution of the late 18th century is the font of all European romanticism. She instilled the freedom gene into the romantic nature. But the very real practice of inculcating “freedom, equality, fraternity,” especially at the last stage, is the fierce mutual destruction of parties and factions in the struggle for power. Before our eyes, the freedom gained in the revolution resulted in a selfish struggle for a place in the sun; the liberated bourgeois, petty-bourgeois, plebeian element overflowed its banks, the masses, seduced by the specter of power, but in fact manipulated from above and demonstrating this power where only it could: in envious and malicious intolerance to everything extraordinary, to dissent, to independence of opinion and spirit.

It is also important that this period saw a sharp increase in the possibilities of mass production of artistic products, its accessibility to the general public increased, as well as general awareness and erudition.

Modern researchers point out that by 1800, already a quarter of the German population was literate - every fourth German became a potential reader. Accordingly, if in 1750 28 new novels were published in Germany, then in the decade from 1790 to 1800, 2500 of them appeared. These fruits of the Enlightenment were also not clearly considered good by the romantics; For them, the irreversible losses included in the price of “broad success” became increasingly clear: the subordination of art to market conditions, its openness to any, including arrogantly ignorant judgment, increased dependence on the demands of the public.

Servants and bearers of spirituality increasingly felt themselves in a hopeless and suppressed minority, in constant danger and siege. Thus arose the romantic cult of genius and poetic license; it merged the original revolutionary temptation of freedom and an almost reflexive reaction of self-defense against the establishing triumph of the masses, against the threat of oppression, no longer class, not social, but spiritual.

The loneliness and defenselessness of a person of spirit in the prosaic world of calculation and benefit is the initial situation of romanticism. As if to compensate for this feeling of social discomfort, the early German romantics sought to stimulate their sense of participation in the mysteries of the spirit, nature and art. The romantic genius, in their opinion, initially contains the entire Universe; even setting out to understand the outside world, their hero ultimately discovers that all the secrets of this world worthy of knowledge are already resolved in his own soul and, it turns out, it was not worth traveling so far.

Romantics such as Tieck, Friedrich Schlegel, and Brentano took up arms primarily against modern philistinism. There were also those who wanted to look deeper and wider. Kleist suspected tragic breaks in the original structure of both the world and man. Doubts arose and intensified about the very extraterritorial status of the romantic genius: was there not an arrogant - and then sinful - lurking behind his sublime detachment from the world? - individualism and selfishness? One of the first to feel this was Hölderlin, who once exclaimed in contrition: “Let no one justify himself by the fact that the world destroyed him! Man destroys himself! In any case!”

These sentiments grew and very soon took shape among the romantics into a specific complex of patriarchal populism and religious renunciation. This is the other pole of early romanticism: the individual has just been raised to heaven, placed above the whole world - now he is cast into the dust, dissolved in a nameless stream of people. Romantic castles in the air were erected and collapsed, one utopia was replaced by another, sometimes the opposite, thought feverishly rushed from extreme to extreme, recipes for the rejuvenation of humanity crossed out each other.

It was into this atmosphere of ferment and confusion that Hoffmann came. He, as already mentioned, was in no hurry to build a universal philosophy capable of once and for all explaining the mystery of existence and embracing all its contradictions with a higher law. But he also dreamed of harmony, of synthesis; only he saw his path to a possible synthesis not in the fiercely utopian extremes into which romantic philosophy was cast again and again, but in something else: he could not imagine this path without a courageous immersion in the “incessant vanity” of life, in the zone of its real contradictions , which so tormented other romantics, but were only selectively and reluctantly allowed into the pages of their works and comprehended as abstractly as possible.

Therefore, Hoffmann, like Kleist before him, first of all posed questions, and did not give ready-made answers. And therefore he, who so idolized harmony in music, embodied dissonance in literature.

Every now and then fireworks of fantasy explode on the pages of Hoffmann's fairy tales, but the brilliance of amusing lights will illuminate either a remote city alley where villainy is brewing, or a dark corner of the soul where destructive passion bubbles. “Kreisleriana” - and next to it “Elixirs of the Devil”: the shadow of Medardus’s criminal passion suddenly falls on Kreisler’s sublime love. "Cavalier Gluck" - and "Mademoiselle de Scudéry": the inspired enthusiasm of the gentleman Gluck is suddenly overshadowed by the manic fanaticism of the jeweler Cardillac. Good sorcerers gift the heroes with the fulfillment of their dreams - but nearby demonic magnetizers take their souls full. Either we see cheerful performers of a comedy of masks, or creepy werewolves - the whirlwind of a carnival swirls over the abyss. All these models of artistic structure are collected, as if in focus, in Hoffmann’s final work - the novel “The Everyday Views of Murr the Cat.” It opens with a vast picture of fireworks that ends in fire and confusion; and it is no accident that in it the romantic sufferings of the brilliant bandmaster are inexorably methodically interrupted and drowned out by the prosaic revelations of the learned cat.

No one before Hoffmann embodied the instability, anxiety, and “upheaval” of the era in such impressively figurative, symbolic expression. Again: philosophers from romanticism, predecessors and contemporaries of Hoffmann, talked a lot and willingly about symbol, about myth; for them this is even the very essence of genuine - and above all romantic - art. But when they created artistic images in support of their theories, they transferred symbolism into them so much that disembodied phantoms often appeared, mouthpieces of ideas, and ideas that were very general and vague.

Hoffmann - not a philosopher, but just a fiction writer - takes on the matter from the other end; its source material is modern man in the flesh, not the “universal” but the “individual”; and in this individual, with his tenacious gaze, he suddenly snatches something that explodes the framework of singularity, expanding the image to the volume of a symbol. Blood child romantic era, by no means alien to its fantastic and mystical trends, he nevertheless firmly adhered to the principle he formulated in one of the theater reviews: “not to neglect the evidence of the senses when symbolically depicting the supersensible.” It is clear that he neglected these evidence even less when depicting the actually “sensual”, the real.

This is what allowed Hoffmann, with all his penchant for symbolism, fantasy, grotesque exaggerations and exaggerations, to impressively recreate not only the general existential situation of contemporary man, but also his mental constitution.

Hoffmann's romantic grotesque is a very significant and influential phenomenon in world literature. To a certain extent, it was a reaction to those elements of classicism and the Enlightenment that gave rise to the limitations and one-sided seriousness of these movements: to narrow rational rationalism, to state and formal-logical authoritarianism, to the desire for readiness, completeness and unambiguity, to the didacticism and utilitarianism of the Enlightenment, to naive or official optimism, etc. Rejecting all this, Hoffmann relied on the traditions of the Renaissance, especially Shakespeare and Cervantes, who were rediscovered at that time and in the light of which the medieval grotesque was interpreted. Also, Stern, who in a certain sense can even be considered its founder, had a significant influence on the romantic grotesque in general.

As for the direct influence of living (but already very impoverished) folk entertainment carnival forms, it apparently was not significant. Purely literary traditions prevailed. It should, however, be noted that there is a rather significant influence folk theater(especially puppetry) and some types of farce comedy.

In contrast to the medieval and Renaissance grotesque, which was directly related to folk culture and had a public and public character, Hoffmann’s romantic grotesque becomes chamber: it is like a carnival, experienced alone with a keen awareness of this isolation. The carnival worldview is, as it were, translated into the language of subjective idealistic philosophical thought and ceases to be that concretely experienced (one might even say physically experienced) feeling of the unity and inexhaustibility of being, as it was in the medieval and Renaissance grotesque.

The most significant transformation in the romantic grotesque was the laughter principle. Laughter, of course, remained: after all, in conditions of monolithic seriousness, no - even the most timid - grotesque is impossible. But laughter in the romantic grotesque was reduced and took the form of humor, irony, and sarcasm. It ceases to be a joyful and jubilant laughter. The positive reviving moment of the laughter principle is weakened to a minimum.

In Hoffmann's grotesque, images of material and bodily life - food, drink, excrement, copulation, childbirth - almost completely lose their regenerating meaning and turn into " low life"Images of the romantic grotesque are an expression of fear of the world and strive to instill this fear in readers (“scare”). Grotesque images of folk culture are absolutely fearless and introduce everyone to their fearlessness. This fearlessness is also characteristic of the greatest works of literature of the Renaissance. But the pinnacle in this regard is Rabelais's novel: here fear is destroyed in the very bud and everything turns into fun. This is the most fearless work of world literature.

Other features of the romantic grotesque are also associated with the weakening of the regenerating moment in laughter. The motif of madness, for example, is very characteristic of any grotesque, because it allows you to look at the world through different eyes, unclouded by “normal”, that is, generally accepted, ideas and assessments. But in the popular grotesque, madness is a cheerful parody of the official mind, of the one-sided seriousness of the official “truth.” It's holiday madness. In the romantic grotesque, madness takes on a dark, tragic shade of individual isolation.

Even more important is the mask motif. This is the most complex and meaningful motif of folk culture. The mask is associated with the joy of change and reincarnation, with cheerful relativity, with the cheerful denial of identity and uniqueness, with the denial of stupid coincidence with oneself; the mask is associated with transitions, metamorphoses, violations of natural boundaries, with ridicule, with a nickname (instead of a name); The mask embodies the playful principle of life; it is based on a very special relationship between reality and image, characteristic of the most ancient ritual and entertainment forms. It is, of course, impossible to exhaust the polysyllabic and polysemantic symbolism of the mask. It should be noted that such phenomena as parody, caricature, grimace, antics, antics, etc., are essentially derivatives of the mask. The mask very clearly reveals the very essence of the grotesque.

In the romantic grotesque, the mask, divorced from the unity of the folk-carnival worldview, becomes impoverished and receives a number of new meanings alien to its original nature: the mask hides something, conceals something, deceives, etc. Such meanings, of course, are completely impossible when the mask functions in the organic whole of folk culture. In romanticism, the mask almost completely loses its reviving and renewing moment and takes on a gloomy shade. Behind the mask there is often a terrible emptiness, “Nothing” (this motif is very strongly developed in Bonaventure’s “Night Watch”). Meanwhile, in the folk grotesque behind the mask there is always the inexhaustibility and diversity of life.

But even in the romantic grotesque, the mask retains something of its folk-carnival nature; this nature is indestructible in her. After all, even in normal conditions modern life the mask is always shrouded in some special atmosphere, perceived as a particle of some other world. A mask can never become just a thing among other things.

In Hoffmann, the motif of the puppet and doll also plays an important role. This motif is, of course, not alien to folk grotesque. But for romanticism, this motif brings to the fore the idea of ​​an alien, non-human force that controls people and turns them into puppets, an idea that is completely unusual for folk laughter culture. Only romanticism is characterized by the peculiar grotesque motif of the tragedy of the doll.

In the grotesque, from my point of view, the objective and subjective are indivisible. Objective is the redistribution within all living things of relations between human, plant and animal on the basis of the common and equal belonging of all three principles and their carriers to the personified earth. The subjective in the grotesque is, apparently, the modality of presenting the corresponding image by the author. The grotesque modality always combines laughter and horror, which is associated with the main motivation for the very creation of the grotesque image. It stems from man’s latent attraction to his pre-human unity with plant and animal elements based on the unity of his body with the earthly - maternal.

However, the attraction to this state (embodied in various orgy cults and all kinds of centaurs) over the course of socio-historical time is increasingly intertwined with horror - both about this interweaving and about one’s own attraction and the inability to resist it. At the same time, with the growth of “positive” knowledge, centauristics becomes fantasy. Therefore, the artistic simulation of “centauristics” turns out to be inseparable from: a) the horror of it and oneself striving for it; b) laughter as overcoming horror for the sake of a new “mastery” of one’s pre-human past; c) laughter as awareness of the convention of one’s return to this past. Therefore, the grotesque cannot be reduced to horror, fantasy, magic and comedy isolated from each other, but always represents their functional fusion.

Hoffmann's stories are grotesque in the sense that in them the existence of man is determined by the connections of his nature with various subhuman principles of animate nature.

Hoffmann's poetics are practically not connected with the archaic, unlike, for example, Gogol. His poetic worldview was fueled by an interest in alchemy, Rosicrucianism, cabalism, Leibnizian monadology and other religious and natural philosophical teachings, in which the world and man are equally formed by the combination and play of various spiritualized principles of nature. Moreover, the moment of the game is fundamental and determines a kind of poetic appearance of the universe, embodied in music.

In Hoffmann, the human, social world is not opposed to the magical, and is its continuation. There is Hoffmann's "evil principle" ("Boese Prinzip"). Its essence is the same unlimited distribution of plant and animal principles. It appears to be the result of some kind of failure in a person’s connection with the spiritualized, “magical” nature, a violation of the magical recipe. Hoffman usually finds the restoration of this connection in the sphere of carnival and opera, which carry the playful gene of a person’s relationship with his prototype and nature as a whole.

For the writer, the redistribution of relationships “human / plant / animal / earth” combines fear and laughter. But if the fear is of a common nature (infant and uterine, “prenatal” fear of the earth and one’s attraction to it)

The fundamental situation for the grotesque is the symbolic marriage with the personified earth that is constantly present in various mysteries. Ruling equally the entire animal and human world as its vegetable extensions, the personified earth periodically returns its subjects to its bosom in the form of marriage with them. It is this exchange that underlies the equal presence in one object or subject of human, animal and plant characteristics, which forms the basis for the “grotesque experience.”

Hoffmann highlights this logic in “The Royal Bride” (“Die Koenigsbraut”, 1821). In the story, the earthly ruler seeks to return the human “subject” (indirect relatives) under his power by marrying his “deputy” or himself. In The Royal Bride, the king of vegetables, Daucus Korota, seeking marriage with the young mistress of the vegetable garden, Anna von Zabeltau, combines the groom and his patron. At the culminating moment of marriage (or on the eve of it), an earthen abyss opens up, full of witchcraft or “natural” evil spirits. In principle, this echoes the archaic symbolism of the Egyptian Isis as a “green field” (or the Greek Demeter - “field of grain”), hiding under her cover the disgusting processes of death and birth. The humorous shell of a dream reveals fear and at the same time constantly accompanies it.

The danger of marriage with the personified earth in its masculine modality gives rise to the fundamental motif of misogyny for both writers, which is realized as infantilism. In Hoffmann, the same conflict unfolds in the fairy tale “Lord of the Fleas” (“Meister Floh”, 1821). The misogyny and reluctance to grow up of Peregrinus Tys in “The Lord of the Fleas” are associated with a guilt complex towards his abandoned and dead parents. Having been immersed in the fairy-tale and magical since childhood, he embarks on many years of wandering in search of miracles, and upon returning, he learns that the parents he left behind died in his absence. The magical becomes terrible for Peregrinus, since it is associated with irredeemable sin.

Thus, in Hoffmann, the feminine principle turns out to be not equal to the magical, and the magical to the evil. At the same time, nature - as - culture in "Lord of the Fleas", in contrast to " Royal bride", is not always equal to human as good, positive.

In Hoffmann's story "Little Zaches, nicknamed Zinnober" ("Klein Zaches, zinnober genannt", 1822), there are echoes of the motif of "disorder of nature" as a result of the disappearance of evil spirits. Such a disappearance leads to an increase in the carnal (earthly) principle in people from generation to generation and one day leads to the closure of this principle in the last representative of the race.

In "...Tsakhes..." title character- the bearer of the carnal decline of humanity as a result of the removal of magic from the world. Once upon a time, Prince Paphnutius, on the advice of his servant, expels witches and fairies not only from his principality, but also from the physical world in general, to the fairy-tale country of Dzhinnistan - and this affirms “enlightenment”. The magical principle, however, served as a catharsis for the physiological existence of people. Deprived of this catharsis, people find themselves unable to resist the growth of carnal sin in their nature from generation to generation. Each subsequent one is more and more dependent on its bodily component. The human world is weakening, becoming more and more insignificant and, as a result, “closes” its insignificance in the figure of little Tsakhes. The growing ambitions of Tsakhes reveal the action of the “evil principle”: the bodily principle invades the social and spiritual realms.

In the narrative, the birth of Tsakhes immediately follows the expulsion of the fairies; according to the plot, however, one is separated from the other by a gigantic time gap. Therefore, his birth acts as a kind of “fulfillment of deadlines.”

Tsakhes looks like a collective carnal double of the clan (a combination of the carnal growths of all those who have lived and are living). Meanwhile, Tsakhes is born powerless, personifying the bodily decline of a “demagized” world. The miraculous rise of the freak is the work of the expelled fairies themselves: in retaliation for the expulsion of their companions, the fairy Rosabelverde implants three hairs in Tsakhes. Having sent blindness to people and forcing them to attribute other people's merits to Tsakhes, the fairy makes the latter not only a universal substitute, but also a mirror: by elevating him, people deify not the defenseless and humiliated, but the bodily and sinful, trivial and predatory in themselves.

In "...Tsakhes..." the world of magic and sorcery is bifurcated. The magician Prosper Alpanus, opposing the fairy Rosabelverde and helping the hero remove the spell from Tsakhes, combines magic and science on the basis of scientific magic and esotericism. Thus, science itself (the synthesis of the human world of culture) does not frontally oppose chthonics, but helps people on behalf of the latter. Fairies not only feed humanity with natural power, but also spiritualize its culture.

One of the fundamental manifestations of the “evil principle” and the “disorder of nature” is the false humanization of animals - dogs, cats, monkeys, etc. Such is Hoffmann’s novella-feuilleton “A Report about an Educated Young Man” (“Nachricht von einem gebildeten jungen Mann” 1813 ), the novel "The Worldly Views of the Cat Murr" ("Lebensansichten des Katers Murr", 1821). (cf. W. Gauff’s story “A Monkey as a Man” (“Affe als Mensch”, 1826), as well as “Report on the latest fate of the dog Berganza” (“Nachricht von den neuesten Schicksalen des hundes Berganza”, 1813).

Hoffmann in "...Bergans" talks about the most tragic episode of his hopeless love for Julchen Mark. He witnessed how the fiancé Julchen, imposed on her by her mother, tried to take possession of her by force while drunk; Hoffman stood up for the girl and, as a result of the ensuing scandal, Mark was forever expelled from the house. Bergansa, acting as the second “I” of Hoffmann himself, in a famous scene stands up for his mistress and, having bitten the groom from the world of the “evil principle,” is expelled from the house, like Hoffmann himself. (Note that Julchen herself certainly does not belong to the world of the “evil principle.”)

Unlike Berganza, Poprishchin’s Meji appears both as the inner voice of Poprishchin and as an adept of the “evil world” opposing him (as well as the general’s daughter who owns her, whom the dog symbolically “protects” from the stranger Poprishchin). That is: Poprishchin, rejected by the St. Petersburg world, is internally similar to it, directed towards it, through the “prophetic” dog he created. She ceases to be a connecting figure when, through her “prophetic” lips, Poprishchin pronounces a verdict on himself and “learns” about the betrothal of his lady love: his consciousness bifurcates.

Bergansa, while certainly carrying the symbolism of witchcraft and primary chaos, does not at all embody the “disorder of nature,” but, on the contrary, opposes it and, being expelled, confirms, like her counterpart, Hoffmann, the meaning of “abjection,” but as a result of dog "dedication". That is, the original mythological chaos, also symbolized by the humanized dog, is by no means identical to the “evil principle” and the “disorder of nature,” but serves to overcome them.

The “life-giving”, “scientific” and “socializing” meaning of magic in Hoffmann is affirmed in his work “The Golden Pot” (“Der goldene Topf”, 1813). In the story, an outsider in the physically real but flawed social world, petty official Anselm, is absolutely not adapted to this world and constantly finds himself in funny situations, causing everyone to laugh. But thanks to magical, or “as if magical,” calligraphy, he finds himself included in the hierarchy of another, better and magical world. In addition, he enters into a magical marriage; his bride is the daughter of the wizard Salamander the snake Serpentina.

In The Golden Pot, the magical and profane worlds are not only polarized, but also brought together. The hierarch of the first, the magician Salamander, also acts as an adept ordinary world in the form of archivist Lindhorst. Therefore, for Anselm, the comprehension of magical calligraphy under the direction of Lindhorst is not only possible and introduces him to the magical world (which culminates in a meeting with the daughter of the archivist-magician Serpentina), but also contributes to social elevation in the ordinary world. He, as in “...Tsakhes...”, is associated with the magical. Anselm's "bidirectional" growth (an alternative to the Enlightenment's "sense training") serves to return the world to its magical origins and replenish its vitality. Thus, Hoffmann’s magical and profane worlds are equally valuable, understandable and passable, and the hero’s “childhood” serves not their immovable balance, but the elevation in both worlds and their interpenetration.

Hoffmann turned the archaic mother earth into a spiritualized pantheistic Nature, immersion in which does not decompose human self-identity, but nourishes it. Each principle of Nature and the corresponding part of human nature and their connections appear dialectically. This removes the grotesque fusion of laughter and horror experienced by man (the author and the hero) about the connection between human nature and nature and his own attraction to it.

Conclusion

Hoffmann's artistic talent, his sharp satire, subtle irony, his cute eccentric heroes, enthusiasts inspired by a passion for art have earned him the lasting sympathy of the modern reader.

One of the most essential components of Hoffmann's work, like that of the early romantics, was irony. Moreover, in Hoffmann’s irony as a creative technique, which is based on a certain philosophical, aesthetic, worldview position, two main functions can be clearly distinguished. In one of them he solves purely aesthetic problems. Romantic irony in these works of Hoffmann takes on a satirical sound, and this satire does not have a social, public orientation. The second function is that Hoffman imbues irony with a tragic sound; for him it contains a combination of the tragic and the comic. In my work, I tried to consider these functions of Hoffmann’s irony, and the laughter culture of his immortal works, using the example of the fairy tales “Little Tsakhes” and “The Golden Pot”, as well as several short stories and short stories. The creative path of E.T.A. Hoffmann, like a bright star, drew a dazzling mark on the horizon of literary geniuses; it was short, but unforgettable. It is difficult to overestimate Hoffmann's influence on world literature, and especially on Russian writers. Until now, his work excites minds and souls, forcing a reassessment of the inner and outer world. Hoffmann's works represent an immense field for research - every time you reread the same thing, you open up new horizons of thought and imagination of the author. And, probably, one of the most remarkable properties of the works of this romantic is that they “heal” the soul, allowing you to notice the vices in yourself and correct them. They open their eyes to the diversity of the world, showing the path to possessing the wealth of the universe.

List of used literature

1. "Romanticism as a cultural-historical type." Stepanova N.N.

2. "Gogol and Hoffmann: the grotesque and its overcoming." A.I. Ivanitsky, 2007

3. "The work of Francois Rabelais and the culture of laughter." MM. Bakhtin

4. "Romanticism in Germany" N.Ya. Berkovsky.

6. "Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann." A. Karelsky.

7. http://etagofman.narod.ru/glavnaya.html.

Composition

Hoffmann's heroes are most often people of art and by profession they are musicians or painters, singers or actors. But with the words \"musician\", \"artist\", \"artist\" Hoffmann defines not a profession, but a romantic personality, a person who is able to discern an unusual bright world behind the dull gray appearance of everyday things. His hero is certainly a dreamer and visionary; he feels stuffy and burdensome in a society where only what can be bought and sold is valued, and only the power of love and creative imagination helps him rise above an environment alien to his spirit.

We meet such a hero in the story “The Golden Pot,” which the author called “a fairy tale from modern times.”

The hero of the story, student Anselm, is the subject of universal ridicule. He annoys the townsfolk among whom he lives with his ability to daydream, his inability to calculate every step, and the ease with which he gives away his last pennies. He lives, as it were, in two worlds: in the inner. the world of your experiences and in the world of everyday reality. The conflict between dreams and reality takes on a grotesque and comic character. But the author loves his hero precisely because of this inability to live, because he is not in harmony with the world of material values.

The work embodies one of the basic principles of romanticism - dual worlds. Two worlds - real and unreal (Atlantis), good and evil, etc. Dual worlds are realized in the images of a mirror, which large quantities found in the story: a smooth metal mirror of an old fortune teller, a crystal mirror made of rays of light from the ring on the hand of the archivist Lindhorst, magic mirror Veronica, who bewitched Anselm. It is no coincidence that one of Anselm’s misadventures, accidentally knocking over a street vendor’s basket, turns out to be the beginning of miraculous events, as a result of which an extraordinary fate awaits him.

The young man is not at all indifferent to the simple blessings of life, but he truly strives only for a world of miracles, and this world readily reveals its secrets to him. In the philistine environment where Hoffmann's heroes live, calculation reigns. It leaves an imprint on both fantasy and love - on that ideal world of man that the romantics contrasted with reality.

Hoffmann understood that this reality is strong, that the ideal, under its influence, gradually fades and takes on its color.

The whole story "The Golden Pot" seems to be permeated with a soft golden light, softening the absurd, unattractive figures of the inhabitants. Reality does not yet cause Hoffmann a bitter feeling.

After all, the true “enthusiast” Anselm managed to resist her cheap lures. He managed to believe in the incredible so much that it became reality for him, he overcame the attraction of dull everyday prose and broke out of its circle. “You have proven your loyalty, be free and happy,” Hoffmann says to his hero.

The writer is sure that a miracle can happen to anyone, you just need to be worthy of it. This idea sounds in all Hoffmann's works. The fairy tale “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King”, published in 1816, was also written about this.

The writer happily immerses himself in the wonderful land of childhood - the land of intricate toys, intricate gingerbread cookies and sweets, amazing and fascinating stories. "The Nutcracker" has a lot of bright colors and movement; various products of skilled German craftsmen, dolls dressed in costumes, are carefully painted, as if on a wide canvas different nations. The author's story seems to be accompanied by music; the rhythm of the dance seems to be felt in it.

Many years later, after Hoffmann's death, a ballet was created based on "The Nutcracker", the music for which was written by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.

In this children's fairy tale, as in the writer's greatest and most significant works, a romantic personality clearly stands out against the general background. Little Marie differs from everyone else in that her inner life goes beyond the narrow boundaries of everyday life. Like Anselm, she sees a world invisible to others. Simple explanations for all the miracles lead her to despair, and the girl rejects them - otherwise all the beauty of life will disappear for her. Living without faith in the unexpected, the fantastically beautiful is uninteresting and impossible for her.

Both the modest, compliant Anselm and the affectionate, obedient Marie reveal unshakable persistence when they try to take away their dream, encroach on the ideal that attracts them. That's why they achieve their dreams.

By creating a fairy-tale world, Hoffmann seems to place a person in a special environment in which not only the contrasting faces of Good and Evil are revealed, but subtle transitions from one to the other. And in the fairy tale, Hoffmann, on the one hand, in masks and through the masks of Good and Evil, revives the polar principles in man, but on the other hand, the development of the narrative removes this polarization clearly indicated at the beginning of the fairy tale.