Gotthold Ephraim Lessing - biography, information, personal life. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

One of the most significant literary theorists of the German Enlightenment was Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781). With his literary-critical and aesthetic works, his dramatic works, he gave a new direction to the educational movement in Germany.

Lessing was born in the small Saxon town of Kamenz in the family of a Lutheran pastor. At the age of 12, he became a student at the then famous princely school in Meissen. Here Lessing achieves serious success in the study of ancient Greek, Latin and Hebrew. His passion for the works of the ancient Roman playwrights Plautus and Terence awakens in him a desire to start writing comedies himself.

In 1746, Lessing became a student at the Faculty of Theology at the University of Leipzig. However, more than theology, he is interested in the local theater, whose activities at that time were headed by Caroline Peiber. It was thanks to her support that Lessing managed to fulfill his long-time dream: in 1748, his first comedy, “The Young Scientist,” was staged. It satirically portrayed a scientist, narrow-minded and ignorant, but arrogant and arrogant. In his subsequent comedies, the playwright also sought to ridicule common human vices. Although many of the characters in these plays are traditionally presented as typical characters, Lessing gradually begins to enhance the individuality in them.

In 1748, his parents, concerned that Lessing was paying more attention to the theater than to his studies, forced him to return home. The son managed to convince his father and mother that if he were transferred from the theological to the medical faculty, he would be more diligent in his studies. Soon he was back in Leipzig. True, he did not stay here long. Frivolously guaranteeing the debts of some colleagues in the theater company, after some time he was forced to flee to Berlin to avoid ending up in debtor's prison.

In Berlin, Lessing has to engage in a wide variety of activities: he translates from French and English, writes articles for magazines, composes fables and poetry, and continues to create comedies. The time he lived in Berlin became an important stage in his formation as a critic and literary theorist. Many of the ideas fundamental to Lessing’s literary theory were already set forth in the pages of the journal “Letters on Modern Literature” (1759-1765), which he published jointly with the Berlin bookseller Nicolai and the enlightenment philosopher Mendelssohn. In his articles, the critic polemicizes with Gottsched and resolutely opposes French influence, especially in dramatic art. He declares that French classic theater is alien to the German mentality. Lessing calls on German playwrights to rely on the cultural traditions of their own country, to create works that would be close to the truth of life and understandable to German)? to the viewer. He recommended choosing the work of Shakespeare rather than Corneille as an aesthetic guide. In his opinion, the English author managed to reproduce the very spirit of the ancient tragedy, while the French one reproduced only its external form.

Lessing also addresses current problems of German literature in his treatise "Laocoon, or On the Limits of Painting and Poetry"(1766). This work was already written in Breslavl, where the critic moved at the end of 1760. To a large extent, Laocoon was a response to the ideas expressed by Johann Joachim Winckelmann in his History of Ancient Art and Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture. Lessing does not agree with his concept of beauty; for Winckelmann, its highest manifestations are possible through elevation above matter and renunciation of passions. The noble stoicism that permeates the poses and facial expressions of the sculptural group “Laocoon” conveys, from his point of view, the essence of the ancient Greek worldview. Lessing is sure that the ancient Greek was not afraid to express his feelings and was not ashamed of his weaknesses. The depiction in art of heroes devoid of passions and weaknesses deprives them of the ability to evoke an emotional response in the reader and viewer, and thereby limits the educational possibilities of literature. In a polemic with Winckelmann, the author of the treatise opposes the widespread belief among classicists that only the beautiful can be the subject of art. Lessing defends the idea that “art has now enormously expanded its boundaries. It now imitates, as is usually said, all visible nature, of which beauty is only a small part. Truth and expressiveness are his main laws, and just as nature itself often sacrifices beauty to higher goals, so the artist must subordinate it to his basic aspiration and not try to embody it to a greater extent than truth and expressiveness allow."

Expanding the sphere of art, including in its field of view those phenomena that were traditionally considered as “non-aesthetic”, strengthened its critical capabilities. And such an attitude was more consistent with the tasks that the enlighteners set for themselves. A critical attitude towards reality, according to Lessing, is, first of all, accessible to poetry, since sculpture and painting gravitate towards the beautiful.

He also defines other distinctive features between these types of art: the subject of painting and sculpture is bodies, and the subject of poetry is movement. Therefore, painting and sculpture are directed towards the physical world, and poetry - towards the spiritual world.

Lessing further developed his theory in "Hamburg Drama"(1767-1768). This book was compiled from reviews of performances at the Hamburg National Theater. One of the main theses of this collection is the educational idea that the theater should strive for the moral improvement of its audience. In order for German drama to gain sufficient strength for this, it must, according to the critic, again abandon imitation of French models and restore the principles of ancient art in true purity. Lessing believed that French classicism distorted the ancient heritage and gave it a false interpretation. For him, Aristotle’s teaching was as indisputable as for supporters of classicist aesthetics: “As for tragedy, the teaching of which time has spared almost completely, I hope to prove irrefutably that it cannot deviate a single step from the path indicated by Aristotle, and if will move away from him, then he will completely move away from his perfection.”

Following the ancient Greek thinker, he speaks of the importance of tragic catharsis for dramatic action. True, Lessing gives his own interpretation of this category. According to him, the basis of catharsis is not the horror and pity that the viewer experiences while watching the events of the tragedy, but ordinary fear and sympathy. This is possible if the audience is able to identify with the character in the play. Therefore, the main hero of the modern theater should be an ordinary, ordinary person: “The names of princes and heroes can add pomp and grandeur to the play, but do not in the least contribute to its touchingness. The misfortunes of those people whose situation is very close to ours, very naturally, have the strongest effect on our soul, and if we sympathize with kings, then simply as people, and not as kings.”

In these calls, Lessing follows the dramatic principles of Diderot, whom he highly valued and whose influence he also experienced in his own theory. Equally important to him was the requirement for the truthfulness of theatrical action. On its basis, he condemns the pomposity and unnaturalness of the dramaturgy of classicism, the implausibility of its characters, the pomp and mannerism of the language, and the slavish adherence to the “rule of three unities.” According to the critic, French theorists, by limiting the place, time and action of the play, distorted the teachings of Aristotle.

For Lessing, truthfulness does not come down to simple copying of nature, to factual or historical authenticity. The author may neglect some facts or historical truth if this does not affect the characters of the work, because artistic truth for the German theorist, first of all, has to do with character:

“In the theater we should learn not what this or that person did, but what every person with a certain character will do, under certain given conditions. The purpose of tragedy is much more philosophical than the purpose of history."

Thus, in Hamburg Drama, Lessing not only combats the influence of classicism on German theater, but also raises a wide range of issues that were relevant to his era. He insists on the active educational function of dramatic art, advocates for its democratization and strengthening of the realistic principle. Lessing also addresses the question of typical character, which was also a notable advance on Diderot.

And the first dramatic work, where some of his ideas were realized, was the play "Miss Sarah Sampson"(1755). The author himself defined its genre as “burgher tragedy.” The title of the play already indicates the aesthetic guidelines of its creator: Lessing turns to English literature, which, in his opinion, was supposed to help the German theater free itself from the constraining oppression of French classicism. The playwright's direct models were George Lillo's play The Merchant of London (1731) and Samuel Richardson's novel Clarissa (1748). The plot of "Miss Sarah Sampson" is influenced by sentimentalism. It is full of melodramatic situations. The main character Sarah runs away from home with the insidious seducer Mellefont. Mellefont's former mistress, Marwood, becomes aware of their shelter in the hotel. She reports Sarah's whereabouts to her father. Then she appears in front of Sarah under a false name and tries to turn her against her lover. Realizing the futility of these attempts, Marwood poisons her rival. Sarah dies at the feet of her father, who forgave her, and the shocked and repentant Msllefont stabs himself with a dagger.

Lessing's characters turned out to be very conventional and unconvincing. However, the audience perceived the play very emotionally. According to the author himself, at the first production “the audience listened for three and a half hours, sat frozen like statues and cried.” This is precisely the reaction Lessing was counting on. Objecting to critics, he pointed out that a tragedy should awaken in the viewer, first of all, compassion, since “the most compassionate person” is “the most disposed to all social virtues.”

Lessing's significant merit lies in the fact that in "Miss Sarah Sampson" he turned to the life of representatives of the middle class. The play opened up a new thematic layer for the German theater and the opportunity to address more modern and pressing issues.

Lessing was the first of the German playwrights to appreciate the possibilities for the stage embodiment of the legend of Doctor Faustus. In the period from 1755 to 1775, he repeatedly turned to this plot. He drew up a plan for the tragedy, but it was not implemented. Lessing managed to write only a fragment in which Faust conducts a conversation with the seven spirits of hell.

Like Goethe, Lessing focuses not on Faust's fall from grace, but on his thirst for knowledge. Such an interpretation of the image was more consistent with the spirit of the Enlightenment.

In comedy "Mina von Barnhelm"(1767) Lessing turns to German material and gives a more realistic image of reality. Events take place in the year of the end of the Seven Years' War. Major Tellheim was dismissed without pension on false charges. The major has a heightened attitude to the concept of honor: being an unusually decent person, he perceives what happened as a shameful stain on his name. And when his fiancee Minna von Barnhelm, a wealthy heiress from Saxony, arrives at the hotel where the major lives, he refuses to marry her on this basis. No reasonable arguments from Mina are successful. She has to use a trick; she announces that she is deprived of her inheritance due to her intention to marry a Prussian officer. The major immediately changes his position, but now he has to convince Mina to become his wife. At the end of the comedy, all difficulties are overcome, and the characters obviously have a happy marriage.

Tellheim's excessive scrupulousness in relationships with friends and loved ones sometimes takes on comic forms. Undoubtedly, for his play Lessing borrowed some elements from the comedy of characters, and they sometimes make themselves felt in the characters in the play. However, in general, the major’s honesty and decency set off the greed and unscrupulousness of the society in which he lives, showing how difficult it is for people with true nobility here. And the royal order restoring justice to Tellheim seems too alien and uncharacteristic of this world. The use of traditional comedy cliches did not prevent the playwright from giving his work a modern sound and touching on the issues that worried him. Showing the possibility of a happy union between a Prussian officer and a Saxon woman (Prussia and Saxony were enemies in the last war), Lessing thereby expresses hope for overcoming contradictions and uniting the German lands into a strong state.

Plot for the play "Emilia Galotti"(1772) Lessing borrowed from Titus Livy. An ancient Roman historian retold the legend about the daughter of a plebeian, Virginia, whom the influential patrician Appius Claudius wanted to make as a concubine. Unable to save his daughter from dishonor, the father killed her. This event caused an uprising in Rome. Lessing transfers the scene of action to Italy, to one of the small principalities. Despite the Italian scenery, the tragedy very accurately conveys the situation that developed in Germany in the 18th century. Despotism and arbitrariness, the corrupting effect of power not limited by law, the feeling of personal lack of freedom - all this was well known to the German audience.

The ruler of Guastalla, Prince Gonzaga, seeing the daughter of the old Colonel Galotti, Emilia, at the ball, lights up with passion for her. However, he learns that soon the girl will become the wife of Count Appiani and will leave Gvasgalla. Chamberlain Marinelli undertakes to help the prince, subject to complete freedom of action. He hires a gang of robbers, who attack the wedding procession and kill the count. Emilia herself, under the pretext of saving her, is taken to one of the Gonzaga residences, next to which the ambush was set up. Odoardo Galotti, having learned about the tragedy, rushes to help his daughter. The prince's former lover, Countess Orsino, reveals to the colonel what fate awaits Emilia. Emilia herself also understands what awaits her and begs her father to kill her and save her from shame. Odoardo stabs his daughter with a dagger and is handed over to Gonzaga for trial. This is the main content of the play.

As in the case of "Miss Sarah Sampson", Lessing's new dramatic work is also a "burgher tragedy". The writer himself, at the beginning of work on the play, often called it “burgher Virginia,” emphasizing with this definition the fact that the ancient plot is played out here in a social environment different from high tragedy, and that tragic heroes can be not only “historical figures,” but also “ private persons."

Although in Emilia Galotti Lessing comes into conflict with many of the canons of classic tragedy, he does not manage to completely abandon its experience. As in the tragedy of classicism, its main character is endowed with “tragic guilt.” Emilia wants to give up her life not so much out of fear of violence against herself, but out of fear of her own weakness in the face of vice.

“Who will not fight back against violence? What is called violence, the ego is nothing. Temptation is real violence... There is blood in my veins, father, young, hot blood. And my feelings are human feelings. I'm not responsible for anything. “I am unable to fight,” she confesses to her father.

Many critics pointed out that the denouement of Lessing's play was somewhat unnatural. However, for the playwright, the educational impact of his work was much more important. He was outraged by the humility with which the Germans accepted the tyranny of their rulers. For example, shortly before Emilia Galotti was published, Lessing learned that in his native Saxony, one of the aristocratic families was celebrating a significant event with pomp: a Saxon prince had made the daughter of this family one of his mistresses. There were many similar examples. Lessing believed that the father's murder of his own daughter in his play would have a greater impact on the audience than the murder of her powerful seducer.

Prince Gonzaga is not a natural villain, but unlimited power corrupts him. In pursuit of sensual pleasures, he ceases to take into account the desires and even the destinies of other people. When the secretary brings papers for the prince to sign, he is too distracted by thoughts of a possible meeting with Emilia to delve into the meaning of the documents in front of him.

Prince. What else is there? Anything to sign?

Camillo Rota. You need to sign a death warrant.

Prince. Very willingly!.. Let's come here! Hurry up!

Camillo Rota(looking at the prince in amazement). Death sentence, I said.

Prince. I hear it perfectly. I would have had time to do it already. I'm in hurry.

Camillo Rota(looks through his papers). Apparently I didn't take it with me! Forgive me, Your Grace. You can put this off until tomorrow.

Prince. Could be so. Collect your papers! I need to go... Tomorrow, Roga, we’ll work longer. (Leaves.)

Camillo Rota(shakes his head, collects the papers and heads for the exit). “Very willingly!” Death sentence - very willingly! At this moment I would not allow the verdict to be signed, even if it was about the murderer of my only son. Very willingly! Very willingly! This terrible “very willingly” pierces my soul!

(Translated by M. M. Bamdas)

Such a situation has a detrimental effect on the prince’s entourage. It is the willingness to serve the ruler and the feeling of his patronage that pushes Marinelli to commit a crime. He also uses this opportunity to get even with his own enemies. Many of Lessing's contemporaries grasped the anti-tyrannical pathos inherent in his work. According to Goethe, "Emilia Galotti" was "an inspiring step towards opposition to tyrannical autocracy." Goethe places this work on the table of his hero Werther when he commits suicide. And in later years, he never ceased to admire this play, considering it an expression of such a high culture, “in comparison with which we again turn into barbarians.”

Already in the 18th century. “Emilia Galotti” was translated into Russian by N. M. Karamzin and for a long time remained one of the most popular German plays on the Russian stage.

Lessing's last dramatic work was the play "Nathan the Wise"(1779). The impetus for its writing was the aggravation of the writer’s relationship with the Lutheran Church. As a result of this conflict, Lessing was prohibited from directly participating in polemics on theological issues, and he was forced to use his tried and tested weapon - drama.

The events of the play take place in Jerusalem during the era of the Crusades, during the period when the city was captured by the troops of Sultan Saladin. Representatives of the three main religions - Christians, Muslims and Jews - are forced to live here together, but continue to be at enmity with each other. In the play, this conflict found expression in the complex relationships between the Knight Templar, Sultan Saladin, the wealthy merchant Nathan and his adopted daughter Reha. The spokesman for Lessing's ideas in the play is the Jew Nathan, who preaches religious tolerance. In response to the Sultan's treacherous question about which religion is true, he tells the parable of the three rings. The German playwright borrowed it from Boccaccio’s book “The Decameron”. The story is about a ring that had magical powers: it made the person wearing it pleasing to people and God. Over several generations, the ring was passed from father to beloved son, who became the head of the clan. One day, the owner of the ring was a man who had three sons, and all three were equally dear to him. The father found himself in a difficult situation: he could not decide to whom to bequeath the ring. In the end, he asked the jeweler to make two more rings exactly the same, and as a result, each of the sons received a treasured item from their father and believed that he was the owner of the magic talisman. This caused quarrels between the brothers, and they were forced to turn to the judge for help. The judge declared all three rings to be fake, since they generated enmity, not love, between the brothers and, therefore, were devoid of magical properties. The judge advised the brothers to prove with their actions and lives which of them is the heir to the real ring:

So imitate

To the father in love and strictly incorruptible

And free from prejudice! The power of the ring.

Which one was given to whom, in front of each other, try to discover!

So that this power grows stronger, be modest, peace-loving, merciful and sincerely devoted to God!

(Translated by V. S. Likhachev)

It is this idea that is central to Lessing’s religious doctrine: religious truth is confirmed not by historical facts, but by a person’s personal life, therefore it is necessary to show tolerance in this area of ​​​​relations. Directly in the play, this quality helps the main characters find out that all of them, despite belonging to different religions, are members of the same family.

Nathan the Wise (1778) was one of the first German plays written in blank verse. Lessing defined the genre of this work as “dramatic poem.” Indeed, from the point of view of stage execution, “Nathan the Wise” has obvious weaknesses. There is not that rapid development of action and internal movement that usually characterizes the best examples of works intended for theatrical production. The chain of events is too implausible, and the denouement is reminiscent of a technique typical of ancient Greek tragedy and called “god ex machina.”

Right there. P. 56.

LESSING Gotthold Ephraim (Gotthold Ephraim Lessing; 1729, Kamenz, Saxony, - 1781, Braunschweig), German playwright, thinker and literary critic, one of the leading representatives of the Enlightenment in Germany.

Lessing was a champion of the principle of religious tolerance. Already in his early work - the one-act comedy "The Jews" (1749) - for the first time in the history of German theater, a positive image of a Jew appears. Lessing had to defend his play from reproaches of inconsistency with the truth of life coming from the Hebraist I. D. Michaelis. In 1754 Lessing met M. Mendelssohn and became his friend and enthusiastic admirer. Lessing published his first philosophical work without Mendelssohn's knowledge. Lessing and Mendelssohn's shared interest in aesthetics became the source of their fruitful collaboration, leading to their joint publication of the Pop-Metaphysician (1755) and the publication of the journal Letters on Modern Literature (1759–65). Until the end of his life, Lessing corresponded with Mendelssohn, devoted mainly to philosophical topics.

Mendelssohn largely served as the prototype for the hero of Lessing's last play, Nathan the Wise (1779), which is a fiery and eloquent appeal for religious tolerance. The play, based on the parable of the three rings borrowed from G. Boccaccio, allegorically depicts Judaism, Christianity and Islam as the three sons of a wise father who, wishing them well, gave each a ring. All three rings are of equal value, but each of the sons claims that only his ring is genuine. The Jew Nathan is presented as an exponent of the ideals of the Enlightenment: tolerance, universal equality and love for all humanity. In the book Ernst and Falk (1780), Lessing again spoke out in favor of equal rights for Jews (see Masons).

Lessing viewed the history of mankind as a process of constant improvement and ascent from lower to higher levels, and various religions as stages in the moral evolution of mankind. He considered Judaism the second, after paganism, stage of this evolution; the next step is Christianity, which, in turn, must give way to the universalism of rational philosophy. This point of view was expressed in fragments of the writings of the rationalist theologian G. S. Reimarus, published by Lessing in the book “On the History of Literature” (1774) under the title “Wolfenbüttel Fragments of the Unknown”, in which the author, from the point of view of rationalistic deism, sharply criticized both the Bible, so is Christianity in its ecclesiastical expression, as well as in Lessing’s last work, “Education of Humanity” (1780), devoted to issues of religion. The monotheistic and universalist mission of Judaism as the predecessor of Christianity is completed. Lessing's critical attitude towards Judaism was reflected in the play "Nathan the Wise", one of the characters of which accuses the Jewish religion of having laid the foundation for religious intolerance with its idea of ​​a chosen people. In the last years of his life, Lessing was inclined towards the pantheism of B. Spinoza. The posthumous publication of Lessing's conversation with the German philosopher F. G. Jacobi (1785) became the cause of the so-called Spinoza controversy, in which M. Mendelssohn, Lessing's friend, tried to refute the opinion that Lessing's views were identical to Spinoza's pantheism.

Until the end of his life, Lessing remained a champion of equal rights for Jews. In Jewish literature of the period X Ascals Lessing became a symbol of philo-Semitism and true humanism. Lessing was also highly valued by Jewish figures of German culture (for example, G. Risser, B. Auerbach and others). The play “Nathan the Wise” was repeatedly translated into Hebrew (S. Bacher, 1865, A. B. Gottlober, 1875). Many other plays of Lessing have also been translated into Hebrew. Lessing's ideological and stylistic influence on literature X Askala was enormous and comparable only to the influence of F. Schiller. In Germany 18th century. Lessing was the most outstanding fighter for religious tolerance and humanism.

Gottgold Ephraim Lessing

(Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, 1729—1781)

Leading position in the literary life of Germany in the 60s. Lessing occupies. His literary activity was versatile and fruitful. He is a talented critic, art theorist, and writer. Lessing brought literature closer to life, gave it a social orientation, and turned it into a means of socio-political and spiritual liberation of the people from feudal-serf oppression. N. G. Chernyshevsky wrote: “Lessing was the main one in the first generation of those figures whom historical necessity called upon to revive his homeland. He was the father of new German literature. He ruled over her with dictatorial power. All the most significant of the subsequent German writers, even Schiller, even Goethe himself in the best era of his activity, were his students" 1 .

Lessing was a militant, revolutionary educator. From the standpoint of reason, from the point of view of the interests of the oppressed layers of German society, he criticized the despotism of the princes, the timid German burghers who had lost faith in their strength, advocated for the national unification of the country, preached the ideas of humanism, sacrificial, heroic service to the ideals of freedom. His work was folk, national in spirit. It raised questions vital to the development of the German nation.

Lessing was born in Saxony. His father was a poor pastor, burdened with a large family. Lessing received his education at the princely school in Meissen, being on a meager princely allowance. His successes in the study of Latin and ancient Greek were especially great. Subsequently, Lessing would become a brilliant expert on antiquity, an outstanding philologist of the 18th century, who amazed his contemporaries with his extensive knowledge in the field of ancient and modern philology.

In 1746, Lessing was a student at the University of Leipzig. At the insistence of his father, he enters the theological faculty. However, the prospect of becoming a pastor does not appeal to him much. The young man has other interests. The gift of creativity awakened in him. Just at this time, a troupe of traveling actors under the direction of Caroline Neuber was touring in Leipzig. Lessing is fascinated by theatrical life. He becomes his own man in a noisy artistic environment, performs in the theater as a performer of various roles, and tries his hand as a playwright.

In 1748, Lessing moved to Berlin, the capital of Prussia. During the Berlin period of his life (1748-1760), he developed as a critic defending advanced aesthetic ideas. As a literary reviewer, Lessing collaborates with the Deutsche Privilegierte Zeitung, which received the name Voss Newspaper after its publisher. He lives by literary work, becoming the first professional critic in Germany. Lessing prefers the half-starved life of a literary day laborer, cruelly exploited by publishers, but enjoying relative freedom in defending his beliefs, to depending on the will and whim of a patron of the arts.

In the 50s Lessing is a propagandist of educational ideas and a defender of the new, burgher direction in German literature. In his reviews, he popularizes English and French educators - the novels of Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett. He is attracted to art related to real life, which truthfully reflects the inner world of middle-class people.

Lessing's authority as a critic is growing rapidly. He wins sympathy for his integrity and unparalleled scholarship for his age (review essays in the Vossovaya Gazeta, Wademekum for Mr. Pastor Lange, etc.).

A monument to Lessing's critical activity in the 50s. is the journal “Letters on Modern Literature” (Briefe, die neueste Literatur beireffend, 1759-1765), which he published jointly with the Berlin bookseller Nicolai and the enlightenment philosopher Mendelssohn. As a writer, Lessing published in the 50s. Anacreontic poems, fables, his first tragedy “Miss Sara Sampson” (Miss Sara Sampson, 1755).

In 1760, Lessig moved from Berlin to Breslau, taking up the post of secretary of General Tauentsin, the military governor of Silesia. The Breslau period of Lessing's life (1760-1765) turned out to be unusually fruitful creatively. At this time, Laokoon (Laokoon, oder über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie, 1766) was completed, where the basic principles of Enlightenment realism were theoretically substantiated. The result of Lessig's observations of the life of German society during the Seven Years' War was the realistic comedy Minna von Barnhelm (1767).

In 1765 Lessing returned to Berlin, where he lived for about two years. The days of half-starvation began to flow again. Lessing cannot find a job he likes and lives on odd jobs. Finally, happiness smiled on him. In 1765, the first permanent theater in Germany was founded in Hamburg, and Lessing was invited by its director to the position of theater critic. His responsibility was to evaluate the repertoire and analyze the actors' performances. Lessing eagerly took up the task. His numerous theater reviews compiled Hamburg Dramaturgy (Hamburgische Dramaturgic, 1767-1768), the critic’s most important theoretical work after Laocoon.

After the closure of the Hamburg Theater in 1770, Lessing moved to Wolfenbüttel (Duchy of Brunswick) to manage the Duke's rich library. Here Lessing completes Emilia Galoiti (1772), the first German social tragedy, writes a number of scholarly works, and conducts heated polemics on religious issues with the Hamburg pastor Goeze. These polemical articles made up a whole collection “Anti-Goetze” (Anti-Goetze, 1778). In 1779, Lessing published the drama Nathan the Wise (Nathan der Weise), directed against religious fanaticism. His philosophical treatise “The Education of the Human Race” (Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts, 1780) is dedicated to the defense of the ideas of humanism.

Lessing died at the age of 52.

One of Lessing's merits was that he introduced the spirit of social protest into German literature. The critical beginning is noticeable already in his youthful comedies. Thus, in “The Young Scientist” (Der junge Gelehrle, 1747), in the person of Damis, he ridicules scholastic scholarship and brings up for discussion a topic that had serious social significance; in “The Jews” (Die Juden, 1749) he opposes religious fanaticism; in “The Freethinker” (Der Freigeist, 1749), in the image of Adrast, he sneers at those who, succumbing to fashion, play at freethinking, while in reality they are afraid of freethinkers. The sketch of Lessing's tragedy “Samuel Genzi” dates back to the end of the 40s, which testifies to the freedom-loving sentiments of the author.

Lessing enters literature as a writer of a democratic way of thinking. He writes for people of his own, democratic circle. His democratic sympathies especially strengthened in the mid-50s, when he set himself the task of creating not only a comedy, but also a tragedy that was close and understandable to the people. He is not satisfied with the tragic works of French and German classicists. It seems cold and lifeless to him. Lessing sees the reason for this coldness in the fact that the playwrights of classicism, in search of material for their works, went into antiquity, into the distant historical past, ignoring living modernity and the democratic strata of society. As a rule, their role of positive heroes was government officials (kings, generals, dignitaries, etc.), whom they endowed with sublime feelings, extraordinary, strong passions, which made them unlike ordinary people and thereby reduced the power of influence on the democratic viewer. Lessing seeks to reform the tragic genre. True art, in his opinion, should excite people, and for this it is necessary to democratize the theater - introduce into it a hero from the people's environment, endow him with positive traits, force him to act in situations that are close and understandable to the people. Then the tragic character will evoke a feeling of deep compassion.

The purpose of tragedy, according to Lessing in the 50s, is to educate people in a humanistic spirit, to make them responsive to the grief of others. If the classicist theater (Gottsched and his followers) formed “citizens” for whom accepting death was as easy as drinking a glass of water, then the young Lessing sets a completely different task for the tragic genre - to educate “man”. He views art primarily as a school of humanism.

Lessing's dramatic views of this period were embodied in the tragedy "Miss Sarah Sampson". The very fact that Lessing turned to a tragic topic indicates certain shifts in his socio-political consciousness. In his first dramatic experiments, events usually unfolded within the boundaries of one social environment and were thus devoid of social urgency. In Miss Sarah, people from different social classes are drawn into the conflict. It is based on how the high-society whip Mellefont seduces the gullible burgher girl Sarah. The burgher honesty in the play is contrasted with the corruption of people in the aristocratic circle. Consequently, the opposition has a certain social character, although it affects only the sphere of moral family relations.

The tragedy takes place in a hotel where Mellefont is hiding along with the girl he abducted. Here the lovers are overtaken by Sir William, Sarah's father, who was helped to get on the trail of the fugitives by Marwood, Mellefont's lover in the recent past. Sir William forgives his daughter, he is not against her marriage to Mellefont, but events take a tragic turn thanks to the intervention of Marwood. Tormented by jealousy and burning with vengeance, she poisons Sarah. Mellefont, suffering from remorse, pierces his chest with a dagger.

In his tragedy, Lessing strives, first of all, to show the spiritual and moral greatness of a middle-class man, his superiority over an aristocrat. Sarah captivated the audience with the purity and nobility of her motives. The sensitive audience shed streams of tears during the performance of the play. Lessing's heroine concentrated all those moral virtues (humanity, kindness, compassion, etc.) that the German burghers defended, fighting against inhumane feudal morality. The tragedy contributed to the awakening of the moral self-awareness of the German bourgeoisie, and this was its considerable social significance.

At the same time, the play excluded an active struggle against inhuman forms of life. The magnanimous, humane hero of burgher literature demonstrated his moral “greatness”, humbly bearing the yoke of political and social slavery. In his further work, Lessing strives to overcome the weaknesses of burgher humanism of the 50s. - his passivity, sentimentality. He sets himself the task of introducing into the drama a strong-willed citizen who resists the unfavorable circumstances of life, but without losing simple human traits. Lessing 60-70s. struggles to combine both “human” and “civilian” qualities in one hero.

Speaking against the passive-humanistic, sentimental sentiments widespread among the burghers of the 18th century, Lessing decided on a matter of great historical importance. The social passivity of the burghers and other democratic strata of German society prevented them from launching active actions against the feudal-absolutist order for the economic and spiritual liberation of the German people. Engels, in a letter to V. Borgius, notes that “... the mortal fatigue and powerlessness of the German tradesman, caused by the pitiful economic situation of Germany in the period from 1648 to 1830 and expressed first in pietism, then in sentimentality and in slavish groveling before the princes and the Nobility , did not remain without influence on the economy. This was one of the greatest obstacles to a new rise." 2

The struggle for citizenship and the high ideological nature of art, which Lessing undertook, simultaneously raised his work in aesthetic and artistic terms. It made it possible to introduce into literature a hero who is internally contradictory, psychologically complex, and combines various traits.

Lessing's new approach to solving ideological and aesthetic issues is found in the journal Letters on Contemporary Literature. There is already a clear tendency here to bring art even closer to life. Lessing shows the fatality of imitation of foreign authors. He talks about the need to reproduce reality, criticizes those writers who, tearing themselves away from the earth, are carried into the “heavenly spheres.” Lessing considers the work of ancient playwrights to be an example of expressiveness and truthfulness. He also passionately promotes Shakespeare's theater, declaring the creator of Hamlet a creative successor to the traditions of ancient drama. Lessing sharply criticizes the classicists (Gottsched and Corneille), emphasizing that they moved away from the ancient masters, although they sought to imitate them in observing the rules of play construction (17th letter, 1759). In "Letters on Modern Literature" Lessing already fights for realism. He points out that artistic fulness is achieved by those writers who proceed in their work from reality, and do not turn the image into a means of promoting moral truths. In his 63rd letter (1759), Lessng subjected Wieland's play Lady Johanna Gray to devastating criticism, in which its author set himself the goal of "depicting in a touching manner the greatness, beauty and heroism of virtues." Such a plan, as Lessing further proves, had a detrimental effect on the heroes of the work. “Most of them,” he writes, “are good from a moral point of view, why is it sad for a poet like Mr. Wieland if they are bad from a poetic point of view.”

The review of “Lady Johanna Gray” is evidence of great progress in Lessing’s aesthetic views: after all, he built “Miss Sarah Sampson” based, like Wieland, on a moral task, turning the heroes into personifications of certain moral truths. And the result was the same as Wieland’s - schematism and one-linearity of the characters.

A significant phenomenon in the literary life of Germany was Lessing’s “Fables” (Fabeln), published in 1759. They have a pronounced democratic orientation. Approaching the solution of the issue primarily as an educator, Lessing demands from the fabulist not entertainment, but teaching.

Lessing's fables are not equal in ideological and artistic terms. In many fables, universal human vices are ridiculed - vanity, stupidity, etc., and therefore they are devoid of social originality and are distinguished by abstractness. But in some cases, Lessing exposes specific vices of German society. He mocks the passion of Gottsched and his followers for imitating foreign models (“The Monkey and the Fox” - Der Affe und der Fuchs); ridicules the boastfulness of mediocre poets who claim their ability to fly into the heavens, but cannot tear themselves away from the sinful earth (“The Ostrich” - Der Straup); denounces the arrogance of German feudal lords, which turns into cowardice in the face of a brave enemy (“The Warlike Wolf” - Der kriegerische Wolf); criticizes the boundless tyranny of princes who exterminate their subjects with impunity, both those who agree and those who do not agree with their way of government (“The Water Snake” - Die Wasserschlange). In the fable “The Donkeys” (Die Esel), the subject of ridicule is the burghers, their patience and thick skin.

Following the traditions of Aesop and Phaedrus, Lessing wrote fables in prose, striving for simplicity of expression of the concept, for maximum nakedness of the idea.

In the 60s Lessing develops the theory of realism, struggles to depict life as it is, with all its comic and tragic sides. He sees the task of a writer not to illustrate certain concepts and ideas in images, but to “imitate nature,” truthfully revealing its essence.

A profound development of the principles of realistic art was carried out by Lessing in his remarkable treatise “Laocoon, or On the Boundaries of Painting and Poetry.” The critic's approach to solving theoretical issues is noteworthy. He solves them not abstractly, but based on the requests of the democratic mass of society. There are elements of historicism in his views.

As a spokesman for the interests of the people, Lessing seeks to overthrow the aesthetic norms established in European and German literature during the period of the dominance of classicism and reflecting the tastes of the privileged classes. The classicists thought metaphysically, ahistorically. They believed that there was an absolute, time-independent ideal of beauty, which was perfectly embodied in the works of ancient artists (Homer, Phidias, Aeschylus, Sophocles, etc.). From this they concluded that it was necessary to imitate ancient models. Thus, art was divorced from the direct reproduction of modernity. He was charged with depicting, first of all, the sublime, beautiful phenomena of life. The ugly was relegated to the periphery of artistic creativity. This was precisely the nature of the aesthetic teaching of Boileau and his like-minded people, in which Moliere’s realistic comedy, everything that was aimed at debunking the ugly phenomena of feudal-monarchical society, had no place. It was necessary to smash this dogmatic theory, which was hindering the development of realistic art, and for this it was necessary to open wide the doors of the “temple of aesthetics”, sweep away the dust of metaphysical, ahistorical ideas that had accumulated in it. It was necessary to prove that aesthetic tastes and ideals are a moving phenomenon, changing depending on the changes that take place in the history of mankind. What was the norm for one era loses its normativity in another. Lessing turned out to be the theorist who had to solve this historical problem, and he solved it with great brilliance.

To substantiate his historical view of art, Lessing had to enter into polemics with Winckelmann, who defended aesthetic views in his works that were close to classicism. Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768) was a passionate promoter of the artistic achievements of antiquity, especially Ancient Greece. In his articles and in his main work, “The History of Ancient Art” (Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums, 1764), he seeks to reveal the reasons that determined the unprecedented flowering of culture in Hellas. He sees it in the free, democratic system of the ancient Greek city-states, which stimulated the development of sports games and competitions, as a result of which Hellenic sculptors were able to often observe the contours of a harmoniously built human body. From direct observations, the ideal of a physically perfect person arose in their imagination, which they sought to capture in their work. Greek sculptors did not allow anything disharmonious or imperfect into their works; they cut off everything that was individually unique. “The prototype,” writes Winckelmann, “became for them the spiritual nature created only by reason.”

The creative principle applied in ancient Greece, and only in the visual arts, Winckelmann tries, firstly, to extend to all forms of creativity and, secondly, to transplant it onto the soil of modernity without any modifications. Here he departs from the historical view of aesthetics and closes his views with the classicists.

Like Boileau and Gottsched, Winckelmann prevents the ugly from entering art, including poetry. Despite the fact that European society has undergone serious changes since antiquity, he calls for imitation of ancient artists, that is, he focuses on depicting only the beautiful phenomena of life. “The only way for us to become great and, if possible, inimitable,” he declares, “is to imitate the ancients.”

Winckelmann's aesthetics led the modern writer away from disharmonious modernity into the ideally harmonious world of antiquity. It could not serve as a theoretical basis for the art of modern times and therefore aroused Lessing’s critical attitude towards itself. The author of Laocoon proves the illegality of transferring the aesthetic laws of antiquity to the modern era. In Ancient Greece, in his opinion, poetry was ideal due to the ideal nature of life, characterized by harmony. In modern Germany, oma must be real, since reality has become replete with contradictions. The ugliness took a dominant position in it, and “beauty is only a small particle.” Therefore, the modern writer is faced with the task of depicting life as it is, and not just its beautiful phenomena. “Art in modern times,” writes Lessing, “has expanded its boundaries enormously. It now imitates all visible nature. Truth and expressiveness are his main laws.”

This remarkable position testifies to the materialistic nature of Lessing's aesthetic thinking. The critic correctly addresses the basic question of aesthetics. The main thing for an artist, in his opinion, is to truthfully reflect life - this is the only path to great artistic success. Guided by the law of truthfulness, he gains access to the most unaesthetic phenomena of reality. “... Thanks to truth and expressiveness,” writes Lessing, “the most disgusting in nature turns into the beautiful in art.” Thus, the author of Laocoon comes close to understanding the decisive role of generalization in the artistic exploration of the world.

But Lessing had to determine not only the main task of art, but also decide which of its types could most successfully fulfill it. Through comparative analysis, he comes to the conclusion that poetic creativity has the greatest potential for a broad and truthful depiction of life. Laocoon is a treatise written in defense not only of the realistic method, but also of poetry. Lessing convincingly proves that only poetry is capable of reflecting Reality in all its contradictions. The painter and sculptor, in his opinion, take only one moment from life, reproduce the object as if in a frozen state. They are unable to depict this or that phenomenon in development. In support of his thought, Lessing examines the sculptural group “Laocoon,” which depicts a Greek priest and his two sons being strangled by snakes. He asks himself the question why Laocoon does not scream, but only emits a muffled groan? Winckelmann explained this circumstance by the fact that the ancient Greeks were stoics and knew how to suppress their suffering, therefore “noble simplicity and calm grandeur” reign in the works of Greek fine art and plastic arts.

Lessing takes a completely different view. He explains Laocoön’s restraint in expressing suffering not by the insensibility or stoicism of the ancient Hellenes, but by their aesthetic views. They depicted human experiences only to the extent of their aesthetics. They took everything ugly beyond the bounds of art. “Applying what has been said to Laocoon,” writes Lessing, “we will find the explanation we are looking for: the artist strives to depict the highest beauty associated with bodily pain.” Considering that a scream can unpleasantly distort a face, the sculptor turned it into a groan.

Lessing also connects this circumstance with the limited possibilities of sculpture as a spatial art. It cannot depict the same phenomenon from different angles. The authors of the sculptural group “Laocoon” wanted to capture the courage of the priest. Therefore, they could not show him screaming, since this would contradict the idea of ​​the work and would remove the heroic features inherent in the image of Laocoon. Poetry, as Lessing proves, has incomparably greater potential than painting and sculpture. This is a temporary art that deals with actions. Poetry is able to depict a particular subject from different sides, to show a person’s feelings in development. Nothing forces the poet, Lessing points out, “to limit what is depicted in the picture to one moment. He takes, if he can, every action at its very beginning and brings it, changing it in every possible way, to the end.”

In European aesthetics, since the time of Horace, the thesis has been considered infallible: “poetry is like painting.” Lessing was the first to draw a clear line of demarcation between them. His conclusions were of not only theoretical but also practical interest. In the 18th century There were many artists who did not take into account the specific capabilities of this or that type of art and made serious creative mistakes. Thus, in German literature, for example, descriptive poetry flourished (Haller and others), although it could not successfully compete with painting in the description of nature. On the other hand, some writers were like sculptors, creating images of internally unilinear heroes, built on the principle of the dominance of one passion. Lessing discovers such shortcomings in classicist tragedy.

Lessing's fruitful ideas were highly appreciated in literary circles in Germany and throughout Europe. Goethe, in the VIII book of his autobiography, well conveys the delight with which the appearance of “Laocoon” was greeted by progressive-minded German youth, who were looking for new ways to develop literature. “You have to turn into a young man,” wrote Goethe, “to understand what an amazing impression Lessing made on us with his Laokoop, moving our mind from the area of ​​​​foggy and sad contemplations to the bright and free world of thought. What was previously misunderstood at pictura poesis (“poetry is like painting.”—N.G.) was cast aside, and the difference between visible form and audible speech was explained. The artist must stay within the boundaries of beauty, while the poet... is allowed to enter the sphere of reality. These wonderful thoughts illuminated our concepts like a ray of lightning.”

Laocoon was also a step forward in developing the problem of the positive hero. Rejecting the “insensitive”, “sculptural”, reminiscent of a “marble statue” characters of the classicist tragedy, Lessing of the 60s. Nor did he accept the “sensitive” Johanna Gray Wieland. In both cases, he is not satisfied with the monolinearity and schematism of the image. Lessing calls on contemporary playwrights to introduce into dramaturgy a hero who is psychologically complex, combining “human” and “civil” principles. As a model, he points to Philoctetes in Sophocles, in whom heroism and ordinariness are synthesized. Philoctetes suffers from an unhealed wound, filling the deserted island with cries of pain; there is nothing stoic about him, but he is ready to continue to suffer, but not to give up his convictions. Philoctetes combines the heroic spirit with feelings characteristic of ordinary people. “His groans,” writes Lessing, “belong to a man, and his actions belong to the hero. From both of these together the image of a hero is formed - a man who is neither pampered nor insensitive, but is one or the other depending on whether he yields to the demands of nature or obeys the voice of his convictions and duty. He represents the highest ideal to which wisdom can lead and which art has ever imitated.” Highly appreciating heroism from a social point of view, Lessing rejects it from an aesthetic point of view: it is not theatrical, because it is associated with the suppression of natural passions. The critic does not accept “sensitivity” either, because, while advantageous on stage, it is completely unacceptable to him on a social level. Lessing the educator is a resolute opponent of sentimental spinelessness. His civic ideal is a strong-willed person who knows how to command his feelings.

Lessing fought against sentimentality until the end of his life. He doesn't even accept Goethe's Werther. In a letter to Eschenburg dated October 26, 1774, Lessing gives a scathing assessment of the hero of the novel, highly appreciating the work from an artistic point of view. He does not forgive Werther for committing suicide, emphasizing that in ancient times his act would not have been forgiven even a girl. Lessing believes that the novel needs a different, didactic ending, warning young people against the fatal step taken by Werther. “So, dear Goethe, one more chapter in conclusion, and the more cynical the better.” Lessing even wanted to write his own “Werther,” but of the entire plan he was able to carry out only a short introduction.

The most important issues of realism are also considered by Lessing in Hamburg Drama. The collection, as already noted, consisted of reviews of the performances and repertoire of the Hamburg Theater. Lessing simultaneously raises and solves theoretical problems that were not part of his responsibility as a theater critic. He pays great attention to the specifics of the drama. Developing Aristotle's thoughts, Lessing emphasizes that the playwright reveals what is natural in the moral character of people and thus differs from the historian, who narrates the life of an individual historical figure. “In the theater,” writes Lessing, “we should learn not what this or that person has done, but what every person of a certain character will do under certain circumstances. The goal of tragedy is much more philosophical than the goal of historical science” (Art. XIX).

Lessing approaches issues of aesthetics as a typical educator, convinced that the future of humanity is prepared by the moral improvement of modern society. Therefore, the focus of his attention is on social mores, people’s behavior, their characters, again understood in moral and ethical terms. Lessing attaches exceptional importance to the power of moral example. He places the educational value of drama in direct dependence on how expressively and instructively the characters are depicted in it.

Lessing proceeds from the idea that man is the creator of his own destiny. Hence, naturally, the great attention that he pays to hardening the will, the development of strong convictions necessary for each individual in his struggle for freedom. All this testifies to Lessing's revolutionary spirit. However, the critic loses sight of another important aspect of the matter - the need to change the social structure of life. He solves all social problems only through moral means, and this is his historical limitation. In aesthetic terms, it manifests itself in the tendency to reduce socio-political conflicts to moral and ideological ones.

Lessing believes that the subject of tragedy can only be a “natural” and not a “historical” person. He has a clear antipathy to everything “historical” (court intrigues, military strife, etc.) as a phenomenon that is clearly not interesting to a democratic viewer. “I have long been of the opinion,” writes Lessing, “that the courtyard is not at all a place where a poet can study nature. If pomp and etiquette turn people into machines, then it is up to the poets to turn machines into people again” (Article LIX). Based on these aesthetic requirements, Lessing in “Hamburg Drama” launched a sharp and harsh criticism of French classicism. The object of his attacks is mainly the tragic works of Corneille and Voltaire and their German followers. He criticizes the classicists for the fact that their tragedies are based not on moral conflict, but on intrigue, “external action,” which has the most detrimental effect on the aesthetic merits of the works. They do not excite the viewer, they leave him cold. It is on such foundations that the famous analysis of “Rodoguna” rests on the pages of “Hamburg Drama”. Lessing reproaches Corneille for the fact that in the image of Cleopatra he captured the features not of an insulted woman suffering from jealousy, but of a power-hungry ruler of an eastern despotic state. Hence, according to Lessing, the untruthfulness of Cleopatra and the entire tragedy as a whole. However, it is easy to notice that the critic understands the truth in a purely educational way, reducing it only to the depiction of natural, “natural” passions and not seeing it where a person appears in his historical content. Cleopatra, so condemned by Lessing, was also truthful in her own way. Corneille showed a certain historical understanding in portraying her as a schemer.

Lessing's critical speeches against classicism are accompanied by praise for Shakespeare, whom he contrasts with Corneille and Voltaire as an example of naturalness and truthfulness. He is attracted to the work of the English playwright because it features not historical figures, but “people” who express themselves in a language “prompted” by their hearts, and not by their social status. Lessing understands Shakespeare's realism somewhat narrowly, interpreting it primarily as a truthful reproduction of human characters and feelings and not noticing something else in it - a concrete depiction of historical, social conflicts of a certain era, refracted in the personal destinies of people. Lessing strives to bring Shakespeare under the aesthetic rank of his time; he sees in him mainly an artist-moralist and tries to extract from his work, first of all, an edifying meaning. Comparing Voltaire’s “Zaire” with Shakespeare’s “Othello,” Lessing notes: “From Orosman’s words we learn that he is jealous. But as for his jealousy itself, we will ultimately learn nothing about it. On the contrary, Othello is a detailed textbook of this destructive madness. Here we can learn everything: both how to provoke this passion and how to avoid it” (v. XV). However, attention to moral issues, to everything human, a negative attitude towards “political intrigues” did not at all mean that Lessing was alien to dramaturgy of great social content. During the period of his artistic maturity, he sought to bring the German theater out of the circle of abstract family issues into the wide arena of public life. His historical merit mainly consisted in the fact that he gave German literature a social, sharply accusatory character. And for this it was necessary to reveal the anti-humanistic essence of the feudal-monarchical order. Therefore, at the center of Lessing's dramaturgy there is always a person of an enlightening way of thinking in his clash with society. This originality is clearly visible in Minna von Barnhelm, the first German realistic comedy. The events in it unfold in living modernity, snatched from national life. They take place immediately after the Seven Years' War and historically truthfully reveal the conditions in which people of progressive views and beliefs had to live and suffer.

The play is built on the principle of antithesis. On one side are humanist heroes (Tellheim, Minna, Werner, Count von Bruchsal, Just, Franziska), on the other are persons representing the real world, cruel and callous (the hotel owner, Ricco de Marliniere), the inhuman essence of Prussian statehood. Depicting the difficult fate of people with an enlightened mindset, Lessing sharply criticizes the circumstances of their lives. The main conflict of the comedy (the clash between Major Tellheim and the Prussian military authorities) is acutely social and devoid of any comic sound.

Tellheim represents a type of officer of which there were few in the Prussian army of the 18th century, which consisted of mercenaries who lived exclusively from their military craft. During the invasion of Frederick II into Saxony, when Prussian soldiers committed unheard-of robberies and violence, Tellheim gained the respect of the inhabitants of one city by paying part of the indemnity for them, taking instead of the amount paid a bill of exchange to be repaid after the declaration of peace. Such humanity seemed so strange to the ruling circles of Prussia that the major was suspected of bribery and was dismissed from the army without a livelihood.

"Minna von Barnhelm" is addressed against the nationalist sentiments that spread in Prussia during the Seven Years' War.

All the positive heroes of the comedy are opponents of Prussianism. At the first meeting with Tellheim, Count Bruchsal declares: “I don’t particularly like officers in this uniform. But you, Tellheim, are an honest man, and honest people should be loved, no matter what they wear.” Lessing is convinced that over time the crust of national and class prejudices will come off from society and the ideals of love and brotherhood will triumph in it.

The idea of ​​the play is symbolized by the marriage of the Prussian officer Tellheim and the Saxon noblewoman Minna, concluded at a time when Prussia and Saxony had just emerged from war.

Lessing's positive heroes are free not only from nationalist, but also from class prejudices. Both servants and masters in comedy are equally humane and compete in spiritual nobility. Justus remains in Tellheim's service even when the latter can no longer pay for his services. He himself characterizes himself as a servant “who will go begging and stealing for his master.” However, in Just there is no trace of lackey servility. He is proud and independent and devoted to Tellheim because he once paid for his treatment in the infirmary and gave his ruined father a pair of horses. Franziska is equally cordial towards Minna.

However, Tellheim, setting an example of kindness and generosity, rejects any participation in relation to himself. He's too proud. The major is ready to part with his rich fiancée Minna, as he considers it humiliating to be financially dependent on his wife. To punish Tellheim for his false pride, Minna decides to pretend to be a ruined, unhappy girl. Her plan is this: “The man who now refuses me and all my wealth will fight for me with the whole world as soon as he hears that I am unhappy and abandoned.” Tellheim is caught in a set of nets.

Tellheim is freed from his shortcoming - pride. Having lost his soldier's happiness, he finds Minna's love and friendship. The comedy ends with the triumph of humanistic ideas.

In 1772, Lessing completed Emilia Galotti, which had great stage success. In terms of the power of its denunciation of princely despotism, the play is the immediate predecessor of Schiller's Stürmer dramaturgy. Scourging feudal tyranny, Lessing created in it images of people of great civic courage who prefer death to the shame of a slave existence. This was the educational significance of the tragedy.

The creative history of “Emilia Galotti” begins in the mid-18th century. It was initially conceived in a sentimental anti-classicist spirit. In her, as in “Miss Sarah Sampson,” there should have been no politics, no sublime heroism. Having again turned to abandoned material during his life in Brunswick, Lessing greatly changed the plan of the work, linking family motives with socio-political issues. The conflict of the tragedy began to have a broad social character rather than a narrow one, which fundamentally distinguishes it from everyday plays.

“Emilia Galotti” is also interesting in the sense that Lessing made an attempt in it to practically apply the basic principles of poetic art, theoretically developed in “Laocoon” and in “Hamburg Drama”. First of all, in the person of Emilia and Odoardo, he sought to create a fundamentally new image of a tragic hero, combining, like Sophocles’ Philoctetes, the sentimental (natural) principle with the heroic. As a result, “Emilia Galotti” acquired the features of a tragedy of a special burgher-classicist type.

Lessing's heroine appears on stage as an ordinary girl. She is pious and superstitious. Emilia's ordinariness is of fundamental importance. It serves to ensure that the democratic public gains confidence in Emilia and sees in her a person of their environment, of their mental make-up. However, when faced with violence, Emilia reveals such heroic qualities that any hero of a classicist tragedy would envy.

Emilia, from Lessing's point of view, is an ideal tragic image because she is guilty without guilt. Her tragic fault lies in the fact that she unwittingly, due to her youth, succumbed to the charm of the splendor of court life. At the court ball, Prince Gonzago himself drew attention to her. Emilia also feels attracted to him, but she is the bride of Count Appiani and wants to remain faithful to her fiancé. Forcibly brought to the princely palace, Emilia is internally reborn. All the forces of her unspoiled, natural nature rebel against violence. However, afraid of somehow showing weakness and giving in to the prince’s advances, Emilia asks her father to help her resolve this conflict of spirit and flesh. Odoardo kills her with a blow of a dagger, completely sharing her decision. Lessing in “Emilia Galotti” sought to show that not only “historical people” exalted by classicism (kings, courtiers, dignitaries, etc.), but also “private persons”, the most ordinary ones, are capable of subordinating “feelings” to the dictates of “duty”, of being heroes . The play taught the German burgher to sacrificially serve the ideals of freedom. Objectively, it was directed against the mood of slavish obedience and doom, widespread in burgher Germany in the 18th century. Lessing fights for a person suffering from the despotism of princes to show disobedience and become the master of his destiny. In his tragedy, he debunks not only the princely arbitrariness, but also the sentimental “demagnetization” and cowardice of the burghers, which interfere with the fight against tyranny.

True, the economic backwardness and political inertia of the German people could not help but be reflected even in the work of such a writer as Lessing. The heroes of “Emilia Galotti” do not allow the all-powerful vice to stain themselves; they prefer death to the shame of a humiliating life. But this kind of rebellion only leads to the moral triumph of virtue. Emilia dies, and her seducer receives only the reproaches of a guilty conscience. In Germany of the 18th century, realistic art could not yet emerge, depicting not a moral, but an actual victory over the forces of socio-political evil.

The bearer of the heroic principle in the tragedy is also Odoardo Galotti. This is a democratic, Lessingian version of Brutus. Unlike the hero Voltaire, who has a “heart of steel”, burning only with love for the republic, Odoardo is humane. He loves Emilia dearly, but in a tragic situation, the principles of a citizen prevail in him over his fatherly feelings.

Lessing truthfully depicts the faces representing the feudal-monarchical camp. The playwright's success is the image of the prince. He doesn't have the traits of a refined villain. Gettore Gonzago is a good, enlightened person in his own way. He loves art, defends marriage according to his heart's inclination. Inflamed with passion for Emilia Galotti, he wants to evoke her reciprocal feelings with his passionate confessions. Only after learning about her upcoming wedding, the prince, having lost his head, uses the services of Chamberlain Marinelli. This interpretation of the image of the prince did not weaken, but rather strengthened the realistic sound of the play. Lessing made it clear that in a feudal system, anyone, even a naturally good person, due to the fact that he is vested with absolute power, in certain situations becomes a criminal.

At the end of his creative career, Lessing creates the drama "Nathan the Wise". It is a continuation of the polemic that he waged with the Hamburg pastor Goeze regarding Reimarus’s book “Fragments of the Unknown,” where seditious thoughts were expressed regarding the divinity of Christ and the Bible. The Brunswick government imposed a censorship ban on Lessing's religious and polemic works, seeing them as an insult to religion. It confiscated Anti-Getze, prohibiting its author from publishing. During the period of censorship persecution, Lessing came up with the idea of ​​“Nathan the Wise”. “I want to try,” he writes to Elisa Reimarus on 6/IX 1778, “whether they will allow me to speak freely, at least from my former pulpit - from the theater stage.” Lessing is in a fighting spirit. Having conceived the play, he decided to “play a crueler joke on the theologians than with the help of dozens of fragments.”

“Nathan the Wise,” unlike “Emilia Galotti,” is a drama not of characters, but of ideas. Lessing brings together different types of human consciousness in it. Promoting and defending humanistic, educational views and concepts, he strikes at religious fanaticism, nationalist and class prejudices. Lessing is looking to the future. He is fighting for social relations in which all divisions generated by the class structure of society will disappear, and the peoples of the world will merge into one family. In “Nathan the Wise,” the social ideal of the great enlightener was especially vividly embodied, and the hero of the play, Nathan, is the mouthpiece of the author’s ideas.

Lessing brought together people of different religious beliefs in his play, as a result of which it began to resemble a dispute of enormous proportions. The center of the drama is formed by the parable of the three rings, around which lies a number of other ideological layers. In this parable told to Saladin, Nathan sharply condemned the claims of the three dominant religions (Mohammedan, Christian and Jewish) to morally guide society. In his opinion, they are all “fake” because they encourage religious fanaticism.

The propaganda orientation of “Nathan the Wise” determined its artistic originality. The play is replete with large monologues in which the characters express their views. The action in it, unlike “Emilia Galotti,” develops slowly, which corresponds to its poetic form. Apparently, taking this circumstance into account, Lessing called “Nathan the Wise” a “dramatic poem.”

Lessing left a deep mark on the spiritual life of all humanity. He is a classic of aesthetic thought, ranking with Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Belinsky, Chernyshevsky. For his fighting spirit, his work was highly valued by German (Berne, Heine) and Russian democrats. Chernyshevsky in his work “Lessing, his time, his life and work” wrote about the author of “Laocoon” and “Emilia Galotti”: “He is closer to our century than Goethe himself, his view is more insightful and deeper, his concept is broader and more humane” 3 . The struggle for Lessing was led by figures of German Social Democracy. In 1893, F. Mehring wrote a sharply polemical work, “The Legend of Lessing,” in which E. Schmidt and other falsifiers of the legacy of the German enlightener, who sought to turn Lessing into a Prussian nationalist, were rebuffed.

Notes

1. Chernyshevsky I. G. Complete. collection Op. in 15 volumes, vol. 4. M., 1948, p. 9.

2. Marx K. and Engels F. Soch. Ed. 2, t. 39, p. 175.

3 Chernyshevsky N. G. Poli. collection cit., vol. 4, p. 9-10.

He became the creator of the golden age of German literature. Born on January 22, 1729 in Kamenets (Saxony) in the family of a Lutheran pastor. In 1746 he entered the theological faculty of the University of Leipzig, but his passion for ancient literature and theater left little time for theological studies. He took an active part in the theater troupe founded by the actress Caroline Neuber (1697–1760), which subsequently staged his first dramatic work, a comedy Young scientist (Der junge Gelehrte, 1748). Orthodox Lessing Sr. called his son home and allowed him to return to Leipzig only at the cost of abandoning the theater; the only concession that my father agreed to was permission to transfer to the medical faculty. Shortly after Lessing's return to Leipzig, Neuber's troupe disbanded, leaving Lessing with unpaid bills of exchange signed by him. Having paid off his debts from his scholarship, he left Leipzig.

Lessing spent the next three years in Berlin, trying to earn a living with his pen. From a financial point of view, he did not succeed, but he grew extraordinarily as a critic and writer. Together with Kr. Milius, a Leipzig relative and friend, Lessing for some time published a quarterly magazine on theater problems (1750), wrote critical articles for the Vossische Zeitung (at that time - Berliner Privilegierte Zeitung), and translated plays and created a number of original dramatic works.

At the end of 1751 he entered the University of Wittenberg, where a year later he received a master's degree. Then he returned to Berlin and worked hard for the next three years, establishing his reputation as an astute literary critic and talented writer. The impartiality and persuasiveness of his critical judgments earned him the respect of his readers. Published in six volumes Essays (Schriften, 1753–1755) included, in addition to previously anonymously published epigrams and anacreontic poems, a number of scientific, critical and dramatic works. A special place is occupied Protection (Rettungen), written with the aim of restoring justice to certain historical figures, in particular those belonging to the era of the Reformation. In addition to the early dramas, Lessing included in the book a new drama in prose - Miss Sarah Sampson (Miss Sara Sampson, 1755), the first “philistine” drama in German literature. Created primarily according to the model London merchant J. Lillo (1731), this extremely sentimental play embodied Lessing's conviction that only by imitating the more natural English theater could the Germans create a truly national drama. Miss Sarah Sampson had a profound impact on subsequent German drama, although it itself became outdated after two decades.

In 1758, together with the philosopher M. Mendelssohn and the bookseller K. F. Nikolai, Lessing founded the literary magazine “Letters on Modern Literature” (“Briefe, die neueste Literatur betreffend”, 1759–1765), and although his collaboration in the magazine did not last long, his critical assessments stirred up the stagnant literary atmosphere of the time. He vehemently attacked French pseudo-classicists and German theorists, especially I. K. Gottsched (1700–1766), who oriented the German theater towards French drama.

In 1760 Lessing moved to Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland) and became secretary to the military governor of Silesia, General Tauentzin. Secretarial duties left him enough time - here he mainly collected material for Laocoon (Laokoon), studied Spinoza and the history of early Christianity, and also began work on his best comedy Minna von Barnhelm (Minna von Barnhelm, 1767), using the impressions accumulated in Breslau to describe the characters and events that gave rise to a vivid conflict of love and honor during the era of the Seven Years' War.

In 1765 Lessing returned to Berlin and the following year published his famous treatise on aesthetic principles Laocoon, along with History of ancient art I.I. Winkelman (1764) was the highest achievement of literary and aesthetic thought of the 18th century. With this work, Lessing paved the way for the sophisticated aesthetics of subsequent generations, defining the boundaries between the visual arts (painting) and the audio arts (poetry).

In 1767 Lessing took up the post of critic and literary consultant at the German National Theater, which had just been created in Hamburg. This enterprise soon revealed its insolvency and remained in memory only thanks to Lessing’s Hamburg Drama (Hamburgische Dramaturgie, 1767–1769). Conceived as an ongoing review of theatrical productions, Hamburg dramaturgy resulted in an analysis of dramaturgical theory and the pseudo-classicist drama of Corneille and Voltaire. Aristotle's theory of drama Poetics remained Lessing's highest authority, but his creative interpretation of the theory of tragedy did away with the dictate of the unity of place, time and action, which the French interpreters of Aristotle retained as an essential prerequisite for “good” drama.

After the collapse of the National Theater and the publishing house, which the writer founded in Hamburg together with I.K. Bode, Lessing took the post of librarian in Wolfenbüttel (Brunschweig). With the exception of nine months (1775–1776), when he accompanied Prince Leopold of Brunswick on a trip to Italy, Lessing spent the rest of his life in Wolfenbüttel, where he died in 1781.

Soon after moving to Wolfenbüttel, Lessing published the most significant of his dramas - Emilia Galotti (Emilia Galotti, 1772). The drama, which is based on the Roman legend of Appia and Virginia, takes place at a certain Italian court. Lessing set himself the task of demonstrating in modern circumstances the noble structure of ancient tragedy, without limiting himself to the social protest so characteristic of bourgeois tragedy. Later, he once again returned to stage creativity, writing a “dramatic poem” Nathan the Wise (Nathan der Weise, 1779), the most popular, although not the most dramatic of all his plays. Nathan- a call by an enlightened liberal for religious tolerance, a parable showing that it is not faith, but character that determines a person’s personality. It is the first significant German drama written in blank verse, which later became typical of classical German drama.

In 1780 Lessing published an essay Education of the human race(Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts), written back in 1777. In one hundred numbered paragraphs of this essay, the enlightenment philosopher sees in the religious history of mankind a progressive movement towards universal humanism, going beyond the limits of any and all dogmas.

The flourishing of German literature in the mid-18th century is associated primarily with the name of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, the greatest German educator, writer, critic, and art theorist. He had a tremendous influence on the literary life of his time and on the development of aesthetic thought. N. G. Chernyshevsky wrote: “Lessing was the main one in the first generation of those figures whom historical necessity called upon to revive his homeland. He was the father of new German literature. He ruled over her with dictatorial power. All the most significant of the subsequent German writers, even Schiller, even Goethe himself in the best era of his activity, were his students...”

Lessing was born on January 22, 1729 in Kamenets (Saxony) in the family of a poor priest. He studied at public expense at the Meissen princely school, from which he learned an excellent knowledge of the ancient classical languages ​​(Greek and Latin). The parents wanted their son to become a pastor, but his fate turned out differently.

In 1746, Lessing entered the University of Leipzig at the Faculty of Theology. However, he soon parts with theology. He is attracted by medicine, philology, philosophy, and mainly by vibrant life. Lessing meets a troupe of traveling artists led by Caroline Neuber, attends performances, tries to perform on stage himself, and becomes his own person in a noisy artistic environment.

For the Caroline Neuber Theater, Lessing wrote his first plays: “The Young Scientist,” “The Old Maid,” “The Misogynist,” “The Freethinker,” “The Jews,” etc. The first modest successes finally determined Lessing’s life path: he decided to become a writer. In 1748, Lessing traveled to Berlin, where he lived for 12 years. Here he develops as a critic, fabulist, and playwright. Lessing lives by literary work. He gives reviews in newspapers, writes articles against ignoramuses and slanderers, revealing enormous erudition; in 1755 he finished the tragedy “Miss Sarah Sampson”, and in 1759, together with Nicolai and Mendelssohn, he began publishing the journal “Letters on Contemporary Literature”.

In 1760-1765 Leesing lives in Breslau, acting as secretary to General Tauentsin. The service allowed him to become closely acquainted with the mood and life of representatives of various social circles.

The Breslau period in Lessing's work was very fruitful. At this time, he wrote the comedy “Minna von Barnhelm, or a soldier’s happiness” and greatly advanced work on “Laocoon,” the most important theoretical treatise.

In 1765, Lessing left Breslau and again went to Berlin, where he was engaged in journalistic activities. In 1767, the first theater in Germany was founded in Hamburg. Lessing was invited by his directorate to the position of theater critic. As a result, the famous “Hamburg Drama” arose, in which Lessing outlined the theory of dramatic art. In 1769 the Hamburg Theater closed. Lessing found himself out of work and went to Wolfenbüttel to manage the library of the Duke of Brunswick. The last ten years of his life were spent here. During the Wolfenbüttel period, Lessing wrote “Emilia Galotti”, “Anti-Götze”, “Nathan the Wise”, and some philosophical works. Lessing died in February 1781.

Lessing's first performances in the literary field were still devoid of originality. His comedies of the 40s are imbued with didacticism, their heroes are deprived of full-blooded life. But at the same time, they indicate that the aspiring playwright had a well-developed sense of modernity. He raises topics that are significant in their social content. An example is his first play, “The Young Scholar” (1747), directed against scholastic knowledge.

Lessing's criticism of scholastic scholarship had serious social significance. Scholasticism was a brake on the development of not only scientific but also social thought; it hindered both the spiritual and economic revival of Germany. “If a German,” writes Marx, “looks back at his history, then he will see the main reason for his slow political development, as well as for the pitiful literature before Lessing, in “competent writers.” Professional, guild, privileged scientists, doctors, colorless university writers of the 17th and 18th centuries, with their pigtails, their noble pedantry, with their petty microscopic dissertations, stood between the people and their spirit, between life and science, between freedom and man. Incompetent writers created our literature. Gottsched and Lessing - choose between them, who is a “competent” and who is an “incompetent” author!

Some of Lessing's other plays were also significant in social terms. In "Freethinker" he ridicules the salon talkers who imagined themselves to be significant thinkers; in "The Jews" he defends the idea of ​​religious tolerance. In 1749, Lessing conceived the tragedy "Samuel Genzi", dedicated to the memory of the Swiss revolutionary who rebelled against the despotic rule of the Bernese patricians. In the person of Genzi, he wanted to glorify the selfless freedom fighter.

Young Lessing, in the fight against evil, relies entirely on the power of words and moral example. He is not yet able to understand a person’s dependence on social circumstances and is inclined to explain his vices by incorrect, unreasonable upbringing. Hence, as a consequence, his focus on moral influence, which is seen as a panacea for all social ills.

In the early fifties, a turning point occurred in Lessing's aesthetic views. He becomes disillusioned with abstract classicism and seeks ways to get closer to life. He begins to be attracted to English family novels (Richardson, Fielding, Smollett), touching plays designed for the mass reader and viewer. He is now inclined to consider the main advantage of literature to be “sensitivity”, its ability to influence not the mind, but the feeling.

In 1756, Lessing wrote a preface to the German translation of the works of the English sentimentalist poet James Thomson, in which he expressed his aesthetic views with extreme clarity. Lessing appreciates Thomson primarily because he has the gift of showing “the origin, development and collapse of passion.” He declares touching and expressiveness to be the fundamental law of art. Lessing accuses the classicists of their inability to create an image of a living, suffering person. Their heroes seem to him like lifeless marble statues. Lessing speaks about his aesthetic sympathies in these words: “Since I would rather create ugly people with crooked legs and humps on both sides than make beautiful statues of Praxiteles, I would also incomparably want to be the author of The Merchant of London than “ Dying Cato." Why exactly? At one performance of the first play, even the insensitive would shed more tears than would be shed by the most sensitive at all performances of the second. Only these tears of compassion and humane humanity are the purpose of tragedy, or it cannot have any purpose at all.”

The turn from classicist “insensitivity” to burgher sensitivity is associated with major shifts in Lessing’s aesthetic consciousness. It is caused primarily by the desire to democratize the theater, to find a stronger means of influencing the people than cold rationalistic teaching.

In the 50s, Lessing created the theory of emotionally expressive art. It requires tragedy to arouse compassion, to influence, first of all, feelings, and not the mind. And for this, in his opinion, it is necessary that the hero be an ordinary simple person and act in circumstances that are close and understandable to people of the “middle class”. This is how Lessing substantiates the need for democratization of drama and the principle of realistic depiction of life.

However, the realism for which the young Lessing fights lacks scale; the features of naturalistic limitations clearly appear in it. It is not yet brightened by a high educational ideal, but involves the reproduction of reality as it is. Speaking against the sublime heroism of the classicists, Lessing goes to the other extreme; he, in essence, expels heroism from tragedy altogether. He is attracted not by the heroic, but by the human. He advocates the introduction of an ordinary burgher into the drama, who would be close to his environment not only in the cut of his dress, the peculiarities of his speech, but also in the whole structure of his thoughts and feelings.

Thus, Lessing’s desire to bring literature closer to life leads at first to great losses, to a departure from the interpretation of serious socio-political problems, which was the great strength of Enlightenment classicism.

"Miss Sarah Sampson"

Lessing's aesthetic views of the 50s were most fully embodied in Miss Sarah Sampson. It represents the first example of the so-called “burgher tragedy.” Its success was significant. When she was presented on stage, sensitive spectators, according to contemporaries, shed streams of tears. Such an active reaction of the bourgeois public is explained by the anti-feudal orientation of the play, its touching plot, which makes it possible to favorably highlight the moral “greatness” of a person of the “middle class”.

The plot outline of the tragedy is very simple. Sarah Sampson, a meek and trusting girl from a burgher family, is dishonored by the high-society whip and spendthrift Mellefont. She runs away from home with her seducer, checks into a hotel, but here the fugitives are overtaken by Sarah's father, warned by Marwood, Mellefont's former mistress. Sir William Sampson forgives his daughter and gives his consent to the marriage. Then Marwood, burning with jealousy, poisons his rival. Mellefont, shocked by the tragic events, commits suicide.

The main idea of ​​the tragedy is to emphasize the moral superiority of the new man. Sarah's gullibility and moral purity are contrasted with Mellefont's treachery and debauchery. The heroine of the play is the bearer of all those virtues that the German burghers of the 40s and 50s raised like a banner in their struggle against feudal morality.

Sarah is a typical representative of the bourgeois environment. She is devoid of any activity. This is a passive, contemplative nature. She essentially dies without resistance, generously forgiving both Mellefont and Marwood before her death. The heroine's powerless generosity especially touched the bourgeois public. She found in him a special moral greatness, characteristic of people of the “middle class”.

Lessing in “Miss Sarah Sampson” failed to overcome the schematism in depicting the characters. His characters are one-line no less than in classicist tragedy. They, just like those of Gotshed, are built on the principle of the dominance of one passion. Only the insensitive “citizen” was replaced by Lessing with a sensitive “man”.

At the end of the 50s, Lessing began to realize the limitations of his ideological positions and his aesthetic program. He comes to the conviction that the poeticization of sensitivity does not meet the challenges of the time, it does not contribute to the rise of public self-awareness of the burghers and, therefore, cannot serve as the basis for the creation of national art.

In the 60-70s, Lessing waged the struggle in aesthetics along two main lines. Continuing his attacks on classicism, on the “unfeeling” one-line hero of Corneille, Gottsched and Voltaire, he simultaneously opposes the “sensitive” passive and also one-line characters of “touching comedy” and “burgher tragedy”. Lessing seeks to synthesize the achievements of classicist and sentimental literature. His ideal becomes a hero who combines the traits of the “sensitivity” of a real living person with “insensibility,” that is, with the civic fortitude and integrity of Voltaire’s Brutus or Gottsched’s Cato. He is looking for ways to unite the “human” and the “civil” in one image.

Lessing's speech against sentimentalism was of enormous historical significance. The sentimental spinelessness and passivity of the German burgher did not allow them to launch a fight against absolutism for the economic and cultural revival of Germany. Engels, in a letter to Starkenburg, directly states that “...the mortal fatigue and powerlessness of the German petty bourgeoisie, which arose from the economically pitiful situation of Germany in the period from 1648 to 1830 and expressed first in pietism, then in sentimentality and slavish groveling before princes and nobility were not left without influence on the economy. This was one of the greatest obstacles to a new rise."

Lessing seeks to break the sentimental sentiments that have become the source of political slavery. He wants to increase the social activity of the burghers and cultivate civic qualities in them. True, he was not able to completely solve the problem, but with his creativity he contributed to the awakening of the social consciousness of the German people.

"Letters on Contemporary Literature"

A new period in Lessing's ideological and aesthetic development opens with the journal Letters on Contemporary German Literature. In it, the German educator strikes at learned pedants, at dreamy “seraphic” poetry detached from life, at writers imitating foreign models, and fights for national German art.

To characterize Lessing's aesthetic positions, the seventeenth letter dated February 16, 1759, which denies the fruitfulness of Gottsched's transformations in the field of drama, is especially indicative. Rejecting the classicist tragedy of Corneille and Gottsched, Lessing contrasts it with the dramatic work of Shakespeare, which attracts him with truthful, emotionally expressive images. The author of Othello, King Lear, and Hamlet is perceived by Lessing as a continuator of the traditions of Sophocles and Euripides. Shakespeare is truthful and expressive, although in the external structure of his dramas he differs significantly from ancient writers. “Even if we judge by ancient examples,” writes Lessing, “Shakespeare is a much greater tragic poet than Corneille, although the latter knew the ancients very well, and the former knew them almost nothing. Corneille is closer to the ancients in external techniques, and Shakespeare in essence. The English poet almost always achieves the goal of tragedy, no matter what unusual and peculiar paths he chooses, but the French poet almost never achieves it, although he follows the path laid out by the ancients.”

Lessing in this case raises a very important question. He declares that the true successor of ancient playwrights is not the one who copies the external forms of their drama, but the one who is close to them in his artistic method, in his ability to truthfully and expressively depict life. And he includes Shakespeare among these, and not the French classicists. In the seventeenth letter, Lessing, anticipating the ideas of his “Laocoon,” considers the main thing in art to be a truthful reproduction of man and reality, and its main law is truthfulness and expressiveness.

"Fables" by Lessing

Certain shifts in Les Sing’s worldview are also evidenced by his “Fables” (1759), published simultaneously with “Letters on Modern Literature.” Lessing developed the basic principles of the fable genre in a special treatise. He demands from the fabulist, first of all, clear didactic teaching. Unlike La Fontaine and Gellert, Lessing is not a supporter of a fable with an entertaining plot. For him, the main thing is not entertainment, but instructiveness, a satirical orientation. Lessing, following Aesop and Phaedrus, writes many of his fables in prose. They are, as a rule, very small in volume; the main load in them is borne by the moral and satirical ending. Not all of Lessing's fables are equal in content. Some of them are devoted to exposing “universal” vices, but many are filled with significant social meaning. He ridicules the ape-like behavior of Gottschedian imitators (“The Monkey and the Fox”), and sneers at Klopstock’s followers, who in their lofty odes want to tear themselves away from the earth and yet remain faithful to its “mortal dust” (“Ostrich”).

Some of Lessing's fables are satirically directed against the rulers of modern Germany; against the warlike arrogance of princes, which cools down when a real enemy is present (“Warlike Wolf”); against the “royal eagles” chasing the “midges”, humiliating themselves by interfering in small matters; against the despotism and bloodthirstiness of kings who devour their subjects, both those who agree and those who do not agree with their rule (“Water Snake”). Lessing angrily mocks the donkey patience of the burghers, depicting them in the form of donkeys thanking God for giving them a skin that makes the driver's blows insensitive.

Lessing's attention to social issues was sharpened by the Seven Years' War. She strengthened his critical attitude towards nationalism, towards the aggressive policy of the Prussian king Frederick II, and further strengthened his educational views.

In the 60s, Lessing created a theory of realistic art, which best suited the character of the era with its complex social contradictions. But on the way to its creation he had to meet and enter into controversy with Winckelmann.

Aesthetic views of I.I. Winkelmann

Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768) was an outstanding expert on ancient culture. In his works one can already feel the beginnings of historical thinking. He tries to connect the history of art not with the development of abstract “reason,” as the Enlightenment did, but with the state of society. In particular, Winkelmann explains the achievements of ancient Greek sculptors and architects by historical circumstances. He looks for the reason that determined the flourishing of artistic creativity among the ancient Hellenes in the free structure of social life of the ancient city-polises. This situation had a revolutionary effect on German writers, who were under the vigilant supervision of the German princes.

Winckelmann expressed his aesthetic views most fully in his main work, “The History of Ancient Art” (1764), which was preceded by a number of articles in which Winckelmann sought to unravel the secret of the creative successes of ancient masters. He is inclined to explain the perfection of the creations of Phidias, Praxiteles and their followers by two factors: 1) ancient sculptors had perfect human “nature” as a model; 2) they were guided in their work by a special artistic method, which did not allow anything ugly and disharmonious into art.

Thanks to the widespread development in Greece of all kinds of sports competitions, Greek sculptors, according to Winckelmann, had the opportunity to see many harmoniously developed people. Based on direct observations, they formed an idea of ​​the ideal physical beauty of a person. In their work they sought to reproduce the ideal of physical perfection. “The prototype,” writes Winckelmann, “became for them the spiritual nature created only by reason” 1.

Winckelmann contrasts the method of ancient sculptors with the creative principles of the artists of the “Flemish school”, who create an artistic image, “starting” from a specific life phenomenon, preserving in the image not only the typical, but also the individual features of the original. Winckelmann reproaches the Flemish painters for “portraitism,” that is, for being naturalistic. He is more attracted to the ancient method of typification, which retains only those human properties that correspond to the ideal of beauty.

Winckelmann does not allow the “prose of life” into art. He wants to transfer the aesthetic law developed in antiquity, and then in relation to sculpture, to the contemporary era and extend it to all types of artistic creativity. And here Winckelmann leaves the historical point of view. Regardless of the changed living conditions, he calls on modern writers to imitate the ancient masters, that is, to reproduce only the beautiful phenomena of reality. “The only way for us to become great and, if possible, inimitable,” he notes, “is by imitating the ancients.”

"Laocoon". Lessing's polemic with Winckelmann

Winckelmann's aesthetic program

all its democratic orientation is not

could serve as the basis for the creation of national realistic art. She was contemplative; did not take into account either the dialectics of historical development or the aesthetic demands of the advanced strata of the German burghers. The time demanded not the depiction of an ideal, but criticism of the feudal-monarchical system, the disclosure of its ugly, inhuman essence. A new, combative aesthetic was needed, and Lessing took charge of its development. In 1766, Laocoon was published, in which the starting points of the theory were formulated

educational realism.

Lessing objects to Winckelmann, who sought to transfer the aesthetic laws of antiquity into the modern era. Life, in his opinion, has changed a lot since the times of ancient Greece. It has lost its harmony and has become replete with contradictions. That's why

a modern writer does not have the right to depict only the beautiful; he is obliged to pay attention to the ugly. “Art in modern times,” writes Lessing, “has enormously expanded its boundaries. It now imitates all visible nature. Truth and expressiveness are his main laws.”

This remarkable, essentially materialistic position is the cornerstone of Lessing's aesthetic system. It gives the writer access to reality, gives him the opportunity, by depicting the ugly, to achieve the necessary artistic effect. The main thing in creativity is to be truthful, because what is truthful is artistically beautiful.

Lessing also differs from Winckelmann in understanding the essence of ancient man. According to Winckelmann, the ancient Greeks were calm and never actively expressed their experiences. He explains the uniqueness of the works of fine art of ancient Greece by the peculiarities of their mental makeup - “noble simplicity and calm grandeur.” “Just as,” writes Winckelmann, “just as the depths of the sea are eternally calm, no matter how raging the surface, so the expression in Greek figures reveals, despite all passions, a great and balanced soul.” To support his thought, Winckelmann refers to a sculptural image Laocoon. The priest, strangled by snakes, does not raise a terrible cry. He stoically endures his suffering, emitting only a strangled groan. The concept of ancient art, proposed by Winckelmann, caused a number of objections to Lessing. He is inclined to explain the “calm greatness” of Laocoon not by “insensibility” and “balance.” "of the ancient Greeks, but by the specificity of sculpture as a special type of artistic creativity. Here everything is subject to the law of beauty. Greek sculptors depicted human feeling only to the extent that it was characterized by attractiveness. “Applying what was said to Laocoon. Lessing, “we will find the explanation we are looking for: the artist strives to depict the highest beauty associated with bodily pain.” Due to the fact that a scream unpleasantly distorts the face, the sculptor turned it into a groan.

In addition, Lessing explains the simplicity and grandeur of Laocoon by the visual possibilities of sculpture, which are limited. Being spatial art, it, in his opinion, can take only one moment from the ever-changing reality. The choice must correspond to the idea of ​​the work. In the Laocoon sculptural group, the sculptors sought to capture human courage. Therefore, they could not imagine their hero screaming. If Laocoon had screamed, he would have lost his heroism and would have begun to cause dissatisfaction with his “feminine weakness” and “childish impatience.”

Consequently, Lessing, unlike Winckelmann, explains the “noble simplicity and calm grandeur” of Laocoon not by the fact that the ancient Greeks were Stoics by nature, but by the fact that the possibilities of sculpture and the laws of ancient fine art did not allow the expression of violent human experiences. The man of the ancient world, as Lessing believes, in life was not the same as he emerged from under the sculptor’s chisel. There was nothing stoic about his behavior. He was sensitive, knew fear, openly expressed his suffering, but when his honor was affected, he knew how to rise above his natural feelings and be a hero. However, the artist is not able to reveal all the complexity and inconsistency of human nature. He is forced to stop at just one point. The individual traits of the human personality usually elude him. In his work, man appears one-sided, mainly in his ideal, positive content.

On the difference between painting and poetry

Lessing in Laocoon seeks to establish the boundary between painting and poetry. This question was of great not only theoretical but also practical significance. Solving it made it possible to find out the possibilities of one and another type of art and use them with the most effective effect in creative work.

Since the time of the Greek poet Simonides, who lived in the 5th century BC. e., right up to Lessing, aesthetics held the opinion that poetry was nothing more than speaking painting, that is, the difference between them was not grasped. Lessing was the first in the history of aesthetic thought to draw a clear distinction between the spheres of the port and the painter. The first, in his opinion, deals “with actions”, the second - “with bodies and their visible properties.”

"Laocoon" is a treatise in defense of poetry, in support of its enormous possibilities. Poetic creativity, according to Lessing, is most consistent with the character of the modern era, imbued with the spirit of criticism of feudal society, demanding a truthful depiction of life. The advantage of a poet over a painter is that he can show reality, the feelings of people in development. Nothing forces him, Lessing notes, “to limit what is depicted in the picture to one moment. He takes, if he wants, every action at its very beginning and brings it, changing it in every possible way, to the end.”

The uniqueness of poetry as a temporary art allows it to reflect not only ideal, typical, but also individual traits of a person, penetrate deeply into his inner world, and reveal complex human experiences. Poetry can reproduce not only the beautiful, but also the ugly. All human life is its subject.

So, poetic art is richer than fine art in its ability to depict mental phenomena, but it is inferior to painting where it is necessary to convey the properties of material objects. With the help of words it is impossible to create such a vivid picture of nature as an artist creates with paints. Therefore, Lessing opposes descriptive poetry, which was widespread in Germany (Haller, Kleist, etc.), believing that the ports in this case illegally invaded the sphere of painters.

Lessing protests even more decisively against the transfer of the laws of fine art to poetic creativity. In “Laocoon” he argues with the classicist Count Krylyus, who was a supporter of the use of the “plastic” method in literature.

Krylyus essentially called on writers to imitate sculptors, that is, to avoid reproducing the ugly, and to depict only the beautiful.

The transfer of the “plastic” principle into dramaturgy leads to the most disastrous consequences. It becomes the source of the emergence of all kinds of one-line, “sculptural” heroes, devoid of internal drama. It was along this path, according to Lessing, that Corneille, Voltaire and other playwrights of classicism followed. In their tragedies they depicted “gladiators on buskins,” emotionless stoics, rather than living people. Their characters are not human individuals, but ideal, cold “marble statues”.

Lessing repeatedly emphasizes that the law of truth and expressiveness operates in poetry. The “noble simplicity and calm grandeur” of Laocoon were justified, for fine art requires ideal characters. But characters in a drama cannot behave this way. They are obliged not to hide, but, on the contrary, to reveal their experiences in every possible way, otherwise the play will leave the viewer cold. “Heroes on stage,” writes Lessing, “must reveal their feelings, openly express their suffering.”

Good Hero Theory

Having rejected the “sculptural” characters of the classicists, Lessing in Laocoon creates a new theory of the positive hero. He fights for the introduction into drama of a simple, natural person, who at the same time possesses heroic qualities. His ideal is Philoctetes of Sophocles, who combines the heroic principle with the human. He, tormented by pain, fills the island with screams, but no amount of torment can make him change his views. “His groans,” writes Lessing, “belong to a man, and his actions belong to a hero. From both of these together the image of a human hero is formed, who is neither delicate nor insensitive, but is either one or the other, depending on whether he yields to the demands of nature or obeys the voice of his convictions and duty. He represents the highest ideal to which wisdom can lead and which art has ever imitated.”

Philoctetes combines “sensitivity” and “insensitiveness,” ordinaryness and extraordinaryness. In a certain sense, Philoctetes seems to “synthesize” the characteristic features of the heroes of classicist and burgher tragedy. With the first (Cato, Brutus, etc.) he is united by heroism, citizenship, with the second (Sarah Sampson, her father) - naturalness, humanity. But overall, Philoctetes is a qualitatively new phenomenon.

Lessing fights precisely for a “synthetic”, internally contradictory hero. He does not fully accept each of its components; they are acceptable to him only in their fused form. Lessing justifies sensitivity and ordinariness from an aesthetic point of view and condemns it from a social point of view, and, conversely, he rejects insensibility and pure heroism from an aesthetic point of view and welcomes it from a social point of view. In short, Lessing advocates that heroes be sensitive on stage and insensitive in life.

In the 60-70s, Lessing opposed sentimentalism as a type of social behavior. His sympathies are with people who know how to overcome their feelings in the name of fulfilling their civic duty. In "Hamburg Drama" Lessing criticized Rousseau's "New Heloise" and especially Saint-Preux, who could not win victory over his passions. Lessing also did not accept The Sorrows of Young Werther. In a letter to Eschenburg dated October 26, 1774, he notes that Goethe should have added another chapter to his work, condemning Wertherism, warning young men against suicide, because they, mistaking “poetic beauties for moral ones,” could easily follow Werther’s path. Lessing highly appreciates the poetry of the novel, but does not accept its sentimental mood.

The denial of insensibility in drama resulted in Lessing's struggle with classicism, where positive heroes appeared only in the guise of ideal citizens, devoid of simple human traits. Lessing is not at all against heroism. As an educator, he advocates that there should be more freedom fighters in Germany, but as a theorist of realism, he objects to a man with a “heart of steel,” an insensitive stoic, playing the main role in the tragedy, because this led to schematism and reduced the power of the theater’s influence on mass audience.

Hamburg dramaturgy

Lessing's largest theoretical work after Laocoon is Hamburg Drama. It consists of one hundred and four articles, which are reviews of the performances of the Hamburg Theater. Lessing evaluates the actors' performances in them and considers serious issues of drama theory. Criticism of classicism occupies a large place in Hamburg Drama. Lessing accuses Corneille and Voltaire of unnaturalness, coldness, and lack of truthfulness. He sees the reason for this shortcoming in the fact that the classicists portray in their tragedies “citizens” who are in the grip of political passions, and not ordinary “people”. This can be seen, for example, from the famous analysis of “Rodogyune”. Lessing reproaches Corneille for the fact that in the image of Cleopatra he showed not a jealous woman, but a queen, a political intriguer. Cleopatra's behavior seems completely unnatural to Lessing. Hence the general conclusion: “Corneille should be called gigantic, gigantic, and not great. That which is not true cannot be great” (v. XXX).

Lessing fights to humanize the hero, without which the tragedy cannot achieve its goal - to evoke a feeling of fear and compassion. Kings, princes, generals, depicted only from the aspect of their social content, are not able, as he believes, to give the play touchingness. And in general, according to Lessing, it is not in the court environment with its cult of secular conventions and decency that one should look for the ideal hero. “I have long been of the opinion,” he writes, “that the courtyard is not at all a place where the port can study nature. If pomp and etiquette turn people into machines, then it is up to the port to turn machines into people again” (Article LIX).

However, Lessing understands truthfulness somewhat narrowly. He sees it only where “natural” feelings are depicted. Lessing does not notice that Cleopatra is truthful in her own way, as the ruler of an eastern despotic state, where the entire court life is built on intrigue, and Corneille was close to the historical truth, portraying his heroine as a vengeful bloodthirsty fury.

Lessing contrasts the rational creativity of the classicists with the dramaturgy of Shakespeare, which he considers as an example of dramatic art. Lessing highlights in Shakespeare, first of all, the ability to truthfully reveal human experiences. His heroes are not cold “citizens”, but living people. Criticizing Voltaire's "Zaire", Lessing gives a very high assessment of "Romeo and Juliet", where, in his opinion, love is expressed in true language.

At the same time, Lessing, being an educator, looks at Shakespeare through the eyes of a moralist. He sometimes seeks to reduce the meaning of his tragedies to a certain moral teaching. Thus, “Othello” is perceived by him as a “detailed textbook” of such “pernicious madness” as jealousy. “Here,” writes Lessing, “we can learn everything: how to evoke passion in our mouths and how to avoid it” (v. XV).

Lessing in “Hamburg Drama” pays great attention to the specifics of art. He cannot imagine artistic creativity without generalizations. The playwright, in his opinion, reveals the natural behavior of people and this is his difference from the historian, who describes the entire life of historical figures. “In the theater,” writes Lessing, “we should learn not what this or that person has done, but what every person of a certain character will do under certain circumstances. The purpose of tragedy is much more philosophical than the purpose of history” (v. XIX). Consequently, art, according to Lessing, is abstracted from the reproduction of the individual, it reproduces the universal, instructive for everyone. The playwright, depicting certain events, always establishes the reasons that caused them, finding them in the character of the characters, which they may have in common with a number of people.

Lessing makes the instructiveness of the drama, its educational impact, dependent on how accurately the human characters are depicted in it. He says almost nothing about the need to penetrate into the typical phenomena of social life. Lessing in this case acts as a typical educator who is convinced that the development of history is determined by ideas and the moral improvement of society.

Art, as Lessing believes, generalizes not the social, but the moral qualities of people. But this method of generalization inevitably leads to schematism. By concentrating, for example, in one image of a miser the traits of many misers, the playwright will end up with stinginess in a refined form, but the type he creates will be devoid of the properties of a real living person, he will turn into a simple personification of vice.

Lessing himself clearly saw the disadvantage of such typification. He emphasized that “a dense character is a personified idea rather than a characterized personality,” but was not able to resolve the question of how the same image-character can be both “condensed” and “ordinary.” “That’s the difficulty!” - exclaims Lessing.

“Condensation” and “ordinariness” are combined when not the moral, but the specific historical traits of people of a certain social circle are generalized, but Lessing, as a moralist, was not able to fully understand the problem.

"Minna von Barnhelm"

In 17G7, Lessing published Minna von Barnhelm, or a soldier's happiness. This is the first German national comedy. Her heroes do not act within the confines of one family, isolated from public life, they are drawn into events of national significance. Events unfold immediately after the Seven Years' War, when Prussian military officials threw out of the army those officers who served “for the sake of their honor” and not out of favor with the Prussian monarchy.

Lessing had a sharply negative attitude towards Prussianism and all kinds of manifestations of “local patriotism”. At the height of Frederick II’s campaigns of conquest, when a wave of nationalistic frenzy swept across large sections of German society, he criticized the “endless patriotic speeches” that “one has to listen to every day.” Characterizing Gleim’s “Songs of the Prussian Grenadier,” which is not free from chauvinistic sentiments, Lessing, in a letter to the author dated December 16, 1759, admits that he is least envious of the glory of a patriot, “who teaches me to forget that I must be a citizen of the world.”

“Minna von Barnhelm” is directed with its critical edge against the military-bureaucratic order of Frederick II, against nationalism. It glorifies people of a humanistic way of thinking, alien to nationalistic prejudices. The idea of ​​the work is symbolized by the marriage of the Prussian officer Telheim and the Saxon noblewoman Minna. Lessing fights for new social relations based on the principles of humanism.

In its construction, the comedy is two-plane. It is based on two conflicts. One is narrow, purely family (comic misunderstandings between Minna and Telheim), the second is broad, socio-political (Telheim’s clash with the Prussian military-bureaucratic regime). Lessing, unlike Gellert, does not remain in the sphere of family issues; he imbues his play with great socio-political content, which gives it a national flavor and national characteristics.

Telheim represents a type of humane officer that the Prussian army, which consisted of mercenaries engaged in robbery and violence, almost never knew. During the invasion of Frederick II into Saxony, Telheim paid part of the indemnity for the inhabitants of one city, taking instead of the amount paid a bill of exchange to be repaid after the conclusion of peace. Such humanity seemed so unusual to the ruling circles of the Prussian military that the major was simply accused of bribery and asked to resign.

Telheim did not put on the uniform of a Prussian officer out of love for Frederick II. He went to war to “familiarize himself with danger and to train himself to be calm and decisive.” The whole spirit of the mercenary Prussian army, personally devoted to the king, but alien to the homeland and people, causes deep disgust in him. In his opinion, “to serve... without a goal, here today, there tomorrow, means nothing more and nothing less than being a butcher.”

Telheim's soldier's happiness turns out to be fragile. Dishonored, he huddles in a hotel, seeking rehabilitation. Using his example, Lessing showed the tragedy of a humane individual under the conditions of Prussian statehood. But, being kind and generous himself, he rejects all participation in relation to himself, even the help of friends. Telheim is ready to part with his rich fiancée Minna von Barnhelm, as he considers it humiliating to be financially dependent on his wife.

Minna decided to teach Telheim a lesson. She pretends to be a rejected, disinherited girl. Her plan is this: “The man who now refuses me and all my wealth will fight for me with the whole world as soon as he hears that I am unhappy and abandoned.” This psychological trap succeeds. Telgeim understands the wrongness of his behavior. The veil of fog that prevented him from seeing the true foundations of normal human relationships falls from his eyes. The letter that arrived from Frederick II about the complete acquittal of Telheim does not change anything. Having lost his happiness as a soldier, the major finds the love and friendship of a loved one.

Telheim and Minna are nobles by origin, but they think and act extremely democratically. Lessing endowed them with an enlightening consciousness. Beneath the outfits of a Saxon noblewoman and the uniform of a Prussian officer beats the heart of an ideal hero of the Enlightenment, free from class and nationalist prejudices. Minna and Telheim, unlike real people in their social circle, are absolutely selfless and devoid of aristocratic arrogance. They are bearers of a new morality, the basis of which is the assessment of a person by his moral and spiritual qualities, and not by his titles and social status.

Servants are also exponents of educational views in the comedy. Justus selflessly serves Telheim, he is ready to “beg and steal for his master.” There is not a trace of servile zeal in the whole mouth. Just respects Telheim as the man who paid for his treatment in the infirmary and provided assistance to his ruined father. Cordial relations also developed between Minna and Franziska.

The positive heroes of “Minna Von Barnhelm” are opposed by “historical” people - Ricco, the innkeeper, as well as invisible but active representatives of the Prussian military in the comedy. Ricco is a typical mercenary, such as the Prussian army was swarming with. He has no convictions. He views military service as a craft and serves with those who pay the most. In historical and literary terms, Ricco is one of the variants of the “boastful warrior”. Lies and cowardice are his inseparable companions. Ricco is snatched from real life by Lessing. The innkeeper is just as real. This is a greedy, self-interested bourgeois. Behind his ostentatious politeness he hides a wolfish nature.

Emilia Galotti

In 1772, Lessing completed his best work, the burgher tragedy Emilia Galotti. It combines sharp criticism of feudal despotism with glorification of the moral courage of representatives of the “middle class”. In the images of Emilia and Odoardo, Lessing strives to embody the traits of the human hero for whom he fought in Laocoon.

The idea of ​​the tragedy dates back to the middle of the century, when Lessing was influenced by sentimental moods. “Emilia Galotti” was conceived as a typically everyday, touching play, devoid of heroism, not related to the socio-political issues of our time. This is what Lessing wrote, speaking about himself in the third person, F. Nicolai: “His current subject is burgher Virginia, to which he gave the name Emilia Galotti. It was he who separated the history of Roman Virginia from everything that made it interesting for the whole state. He believes that the fate of a daughter killed by her father, to whom her virtue is more valuable than her life, is in itself quite tragic and capable of shaking the whole soul, if this is not followed by the overthrow of the entire social order.”

Returning to work on the tragedy in the late 60s, Lessing made fundamental changes to its original version. He refuses to interpret the theme in everyday terms, introduces socio-political motives into the play, saturates it with accusatory pathos, directing the edge of criticism not only against feudal tyranny, but also against the passivity and sentimentality of the burghers.

The main character of the tragedy, Emilia Galotti, appears in the first acts as an ordinary sensitive girl from a burgher environment. Once she attended a court ball. Prince Gettore Gonzaga drew attention to her. Emilia is also secretly attracted to him, but she is engaged to Count Appiani and wants to remain faithful to him. Convinced of Emilia's moral fortitude, Gonzaga resorts to violence. With the help of his minister Marinelli, he kills Appiani and brings his bride to his palace. Having learned about the crime, Emilia seems to wake up. Offended pride has awakened in her, but she is afraid to ever give in to the prince’s claims and asks her father to save her from shame. Odoardo stabs his daughter with a dagger, approving her decision.

Thus, Emilia is shown by Lessing in development. If at first she behaves like a sensitive burgher girl, then at the end of the play a heroine awakens in her, able to subordinate her feelings to moral duty. Emilia seems to combine the features of a hero of burgher and classicist tragedy. She is united with Miss Sarah Sampson by her sensitivity and ordinariness, and with the Cato and Brutus by her insensibility and capacity for heroic self-denial.

In the course of the dramatic action, Emilia grows from a “man” into a “citizen”. Lessing attached exceptionally great importance to this moment of outgrowing. It allowed him to combine the ordinary with the heroic in one person and thereby strengthen the educational impact of the theater on the democratic viewer. Lessing, using the example of Emilia and Odoardo, wanted to show the burghers that not only the “historical figures” poeticized by classicism (kings, generals, etc.), but also the most ordinary people of the “middle class” are capable of heroic deeds.

In addition, the combination of the human and the heroic in one person gave Lessing the opportunity to create an internally contradictory dramatic character. In Emilia there is no one-linearity of Miss Sarah Sampson and Brutus. Her inner world is complex. Depending on the circumstances, she reveals herself in different ways, acting as a whole as a real human personality. Lessing fights not only for the high ideological content of drama, but also for a realistic depiction of man, and he derives the educational function of dramatic art from its realism. The more real the hero is, the more vital the dramatic conflicts, the higher the educational influence of the drama.

The heroic pathos of the tragedy was also vividly embodied in the image of Emilia’s father. Odoardo Galotti is the type of selfless citizen. But unlike Voltaire's Brutus, he is simple, ordinary, humane. Civil integrity did not supplant the person in him. Odoardo is touchingly attached to Emilia, but he kills her, defending the honor of not only his family, but also the entire “middle class”. ‘

By creating the characters of Emilia and Odoardo, Lessing sought to glorify the burghers, to emphasize the idea that not only in ancient Rome, but also in the modern burgher masses there can be people of heroic action. The idea of ​​the play is most clearly expressed in the words of Odoardo before the murder of Emilia:

“Emilia: Once upon a time there was a father who, in order to save his daughter from shame, plunged steel into her heart, giving her life a second time. But all these feats belong to the past. There are no such fathers anymore.

Odoardo: No, there is more, my daughter, there is more (stabs her to death).”

“Emilia Galotti” is addressed against the obedience of the burghers, against their submission to unjust power. Exposing the servility and servility widespread among the burghers, Lessing creates images of heroes who prefer death to dishonor. This motive of the tragedy had a revolutionary impact on German society.

However, the social passivity of the German people could not help but influence Lessing. The protest against feudal violence in his work is only moral in nature. Emilia and Odoardo do not allow the prince to violate their human dignity, but they do not go further. Their heroism does not go beyond the limits of moral rebellion, which leads to the death not of the rapist, but of his victim. Such a resolution of the tragic conflict was characteristic of Germany in the 18th century, where the anti-feudal movement took place mainly in an ideological form.

Replacing active protests against feudal oppression with moral resistance to the oppressors, Lessing sees the main task of drama not in the development of class consciousness of the burghers, but in the moral education of the human personality. Therefore positive. Lessing's hero directs all his energy as a “citizen” not against circumstances hostile to him, but against himself as a “man.” This is Emilia. At the end of the tragedy, she thinks not about fighting the prince, but about overcoming her human weaknesses: “Violence, violence... Who will not give up violence. What is called violence is nothing. Temptation is real violence.”

The Odoardo Galotti family is opposed by the princely court, where affairs are run by the vile villain Marinelli, a typical product of feudal society. Lessing's great achievement is also the image of the prince. Gettore Gonzaga does not look like a narrow-minded, stupid tyrant. He is kind by nature, patronizes art, and recognizes the legality of marriage by inclination. He wants to conquer Emilia Galotti not with his rank, but with passionate declarations of love. Only an unexpected difficulty (Emilia's upcoming marriage) forces him to remember (at Marinelli's prompting) about his power and resort to violence.

Gettore Gonzaga becomes a criminal not because of the depravity of his nature, but because he is a nobleman whose wishes are considered law. Such an interpretation of events was fraught with revolutionary meaning. She led the audience to the conclusion that the causes of evil should be sought not in man, but in the system of the absolutist system, which, without placing any restrictions on the princes, pushes them onto the path of atrocities.

In terms of the power of social exposure, Emilia Galotti is the immediate predecessor of the dramaturgy of the young Schiller. This is the first German tragedy that combines criticism of feudal oppression and the obedience of the burghers with the depiction of a human hero, however, whose actions do not yet go beyond the bounds of moral consciousness.