Hoffmann's aesthetic ideas. The theme of art and the image of the artist in Hoffmann's work

Fantastic short stories and novels by Hoffmann are the most significant achievement of German romanticism. He intricately combined elements of reality with the fantastic play of the author's imagination.

He assimilates the traditions of his predecessors, synthesizes these achievements and creates his own unique romantic world.

He perceived reality as an objective reality.

Two worlds are clearly represented in his work. The world of reality is opposed to the unreal world. They collide. Hoffman not only recites them, he depicts them (this was the first time they were depicted figuratively). He showed that these two worlds are interconnected, they are difficult to separate, they are interpenetrated.

I did not try to ignore reality, replacing it with artistic imagination. While creating fantastic pictures, he was aware of their illusory nature. Science fiction served him as a means of understanding the conditions of life.

In Hoffmann's works, there is often a split between characters. The appearance of doubles is associated with the peculiarities of the romantic worldview. The double in the author's fantasy arises because the writer notices with surprise the lack of integrity of the individual - a person's consciousness is torn, striving for good, he, obeying a mysterious impulse, commits villainy.

Like all his predecessors in the romantic school, Hoffman seeks ideals in art. Hoffmann's ideal hero is a musician, artist, poet who, with a burst of imagination and the power of his talent, creates a new world, more perfect than the one where he is doomed to exist every day. Music seemed to him the most romantic art, because it is not directly connected with the surrounding sensory world, but expresses a person’s attraction to the unknown, the beautiful, the infinite.
Hoffmann divided the heroes into 2 unequal parts: true musicians and simply good people, but bad musicians. An enthusiast, a romantic is a creative person. Philistines (identified as good people) are ordinary people, people with a narrow outlook. They are not born, they are made. In his work they are subject to constant satire. They preferred not to develop, but to live for the sake of “wallet and stomach.” This is an irreversible process.

The other half of humanity is musicians - creative people (the writer himself belongs to them - some works have elements of autobiography). These are unusually gifted people, capable of turning on all their senses; their world is much more complex and subtle. They find it difficult to connect with reality. But the world of musicians also has shortcomings (1 reason - the world of philistines does not understand them, 2 - they often become prisoners of their own illusions, they begin to fear reality = the result is tragic). It is true musicians who are very often unhappy because they themselves cannot find a charitable connection with reality. The artificially created world is not an outlet for the soul.

Plan

Introduction

The creative path of E.T.A. Hoffman

Hoffmann's "Double Worlds"

Conclusion

Introduction

Hoffmann belongs to those writers whose posthumous fame is not limited to numerous editions of collected works.

His glory, rather, is light and winged, it is diffused in the spiritual atmosphere that surrounds us. Those who have not read “Hoffmann’s tales” will sooner or later hear them or see them, but will not pass them by! Let us at least remember “The Nutcracker”... in the theater with ballets by Tchaikovsky or Delibes, and if not in the theater, then at least on a theater poster or on a television screen. The invisible shadow of Hoffmann constantly and beneficially overshadowed Russian culture in the 19th, 20th, and in the current, 21st century...

This work examines the life and creative path of the writer, analyzes the main motives of Hoffman’s work, his place in contemporary literature for him and us. . Issues related to Hoffmann's dual worlds are also considered.

The creative path of E.T.A. Hoffman

Hoffmann took up literature late - at the age of thirty-three. Contemporaries greeted the new writer with caution, his fantasies were immediately recognized as romantic, in the spirit of the then popular mood, and yet Romanticism was associated primarily with the generation of young people infected with the French revolutionary virus.

Having entered literature at a time when the Jena and Heidelberg romantics had already formulated and developed the basic principles of German romanticism, Hoffmann was a romantic artist. The nature of the conflicts underlying his works, their problematics and system of images, the artistic vision of the world itself remain within the framework of romanticism. Just like the Jena people, at the heart of most of Hoffmann's works is the conflict between the artist and society. The original romantic antithesis of the artist and society is the basis of the writer’s worldview. Following the Jenes, Hoffmann considers the highest embodiment of the human “I” to be a creative personality - an artist, an “enthusiast”, in his terminology, to whom the world of art, the world of fairy-tale fantasy, are accessible, those are the only spheres where he can fully realize himself and find refuge from real philistine everyday life.

But the embodiment and resolution of the romantic conflict in Hoffmann are different from those of the early romantics. Through the denial of reality, through the artist’s conflict with it, the Jenes rose to the highest level of their worldview - aesthetic monism, when the whole world became for them the sphere of poetic utopia, fairy tales, the sphere of harmony in which the artist comprehends himself and the Universe. Hoffmann's romantic hero lives in the real world (starting with Gluck's gentleman and ending with Kreisler). Despite all his attempts to break out of its boundaries into the world of art, into the fantastic fairy-tale kingdom of Dzhinnistan, he remains surrounded by real, concrete historical reality. Neither a fairy tale nor art can bring him harmony into this real world, which ultimately subjugates them. Hence the constant tragic contradiction between the hero and his ideals, on the one hand, and reality, on the other. Hence the dualism from which Hoffmann’s heroes suffer, the dual worlds in his works, the insoluble conflict between the hero and the outside world in most of them, the characteristic two-dimensionality of the writer’s creative manner.

Hoffmann’s creative individuality is defined in many characteristic features already in his first book, “Fantasies in the Manner of Callot,” which included works written from 1808 to 1814. The short story “Cavalier Gluck” (1808), the first of Hoffmann’s published works, outlines and most essential aspects of his worldview and creative style. The novella develops one of the main, if not the main idea of the writer's work - the insoluble conflict between the artist and society. This idea is revealed through that artistic technique that will become dominant in all subsequent work of the writer - the two-dimensionality of the narrative.

The most significant are the collections of stories “Fantasies in the manner of Callot” (1814-1815), “Night stories in the manner of Callot” (1816-1817) and The Serapion Brothers (1819-1821); dialogue about the problems of theatrical business “The Extraordinary Sufferings of a Theater Director” (1818); a story in the spirit of a fairy tale “Little Tsakhes, nicknamed Zinnober” (1819); and two novels - "The Devil's Elixir" - about the irrationality of the everyday (1816), a brilliant study of the problem of duality, and "The Everyday Views of Murr the Cat" - a satire on German philistinism (1819 - 1821), partly an autobiographical work, full of wit and wisdom. Among the most famous stories of Hoffmann, included in the mentioned collections, are the fairy tale “The Golden Pot”, the Gothic story “Majorat”, a realistically reliable psychological story about a jeweler who is unable to part with his creations, “Mademoiselle de Scudéry”, and some other.

Eight years after the release of Fantasies, Hoffmann passed away. He died as a writer, not exactly a famous one, but a very popular one. During these eight years, he managed to write a surprising amount, as evidenced by the above list of just a few of the most significant works.

Brilliant imagination combined with a strict and transparent style provided Hoffmann with a special place in German literature. Germany appreciated this much later, already in the 20th century...

Hoffmann's "Double Worlds"

In the 20th century, and today, the reader associated and associates the name of Hoffmann, first of all, with the famous principle of “two worlds” - a romantically sharpened expression of the eternal problem of art, the contradiction between ideal and reality, “essentiality,” as Russian romantics used to say. “Significance” is prosaic, that is, petty and wretched, it is an inauthentic, inappropriate life; the ideal is beautiful and poetic, it is true life, but it lives only in the chest of the artist, the “enthusiast,” but in reality it is persecuted and unattainable. The artist is doomed to live in the world of his own fantasies, fenced off from the outside world with a protective wall of contempt or bristling against it with the prickly armor of irony, mockery, and satire. And indeed, Hoffmann is like that in “The Cavalier Gluck”, and in “The Golden Pot”, and in “The Dog Berganze”, and in “Little Tsakhes”, and in “The Lord of the Fleas”, and in “Murr the Cat”.

These two images, shimmering and flickering, are the main ones in Hoffmann’s work, but there are also others: a cheerful and kind storyteller - the author of the famous “Nutcracker”; singer of ancient crafts and patriarchal foundations - author of “Master Martin the Cooper” and “Master Johannes Wacht”; selfless priest of Music - author of “Kreisleriana”; secret admirer of Life - author of "Corner Window".

In the striking etude “Counselor Crespel” from “The Serapion Brothers”, perhaps the most masterly development of psychological - and, indeed, social - issues is given. About the title character it says: “There are people whom nature or an merciless fate have deprived of the cover, under the cover of which we, the rest of mortals, go unnoticed to the eyes of others in our follies... Everything that remains a thought in our minds is immediately transformed in Krespel into action. The bitter mockery that, one must assume, the spirit languishing within us, squeezed in the grip of insignificant earthly vanity, constantly conceals on its lips, Krespel reveals to us with our own eyes in his extravagant antics and antics. But this is his lightning rod. He returns everything that rises in us from the earth to the earth - but he sacredly preserves the divine spark; so his inner consciousness, I believe, is quite sane, despite all the seeming - even glaring - extravagance.”

This is a significantly different turn. As is easy to see, we are talking here not about a romantic individual only, but about human nature in general. Krespel is characterized by one of the “other mortals” and always says “we”, “in us”. In the depths of our souls, we all “go forth in our follies,” and the dividing line, the notorious “two worlds” begins not at the level of the internal, mental structure, but at the level of only its external expression. What the “other mortals” reliably hide under a protective cover (everything “earthly”) is not pushed into the depths in Krespel. On the contrary, it is released outward, “returned to the earth” (psychologists of the Freudian circle would call this “catharsis” - by analogy with the Aristotelian “purification of the soul”).

But Krespel - and here he again returns to the romantic circle - sacredly preserves the “divine spark”. And it is possible - and quite often - it is also when neither morality nor consciousness is able to overcome “everything that rises up in us from the earth.” Hoffmann fearlessly enters this area. His novel “Elixirs of the Devil,” at a superficial glance, may now seem like just a picky mixture of a horror novel and a detective story; in fact, the story of the unrestrained moral sacrilege and criminal offenses of the monk Medardus is a parable and a warning. What, in relation to Crespel, is softly and philosophically abstractly designated as “everything that rises in us from the earth,” here is called much sharper and harsher - we are talking about “a blind beast raging in a person.” And here not only is the uncontrolled power of the subconscious, the “repressed”, rampant - here the dark power of blood and bad heredity also presses in.

According to Hoffmann, man is thus oppressed not only from the outside, but also from the inside. His “extravagant antics and antics,” it turns out, are not only a sign of dissimilarity and individuality; they are also Cain’s seal of the family. The “cleansing” of the soul from the “earthly”, its outburst outward, can give rise to the innocent eccentricities of Krespel and Kreisler, and perhaps the criminal unbridledness of Medardus. Pressed on both sides, torn by two impulses, a person balances on the verge of rupture, splitting - and then true madness.

This time Hoffmann embodied the phantom of duality, which had haunted his soul and occupied his mind all his life, in an incredibly daring artistic form, not only by placing two different life stories under one cover, but also by demonstratively mixing them up. We are talking about the novel “The Everyday Worldviews of Murr the Cat.” It is interesting that both biographies reflect the same epochal issues, the history of Hoffmann’s time and generation, that is, one subject is given in two different light and interpretations. Goffman sums it up here; the result is ambiguous.

The confessional nature of the novel is emphasized primarily by the fact that the same Kreisler appears in it. Hoffmann began with the image of this literary double of his - “Kreisleriana” in the cycle of the first “Fantasies” - and ends with it.

At the same time, Kreisler in this novel is by no means a hero. As the publisher (fictitious, of course) immediately warns, the proposed book is precisely the confession of the learned cat Murr; he is both the author and the hero. But when preparing the book for printing, it is sadly explained further, there was an embarrassment: when the publisher began to receive proof sheets, he was horrified to discover that the notes of the cat Murr were constantly interrupted by scraps of some completely different text! As it turned out, the author (that is, the cat), while expressing his worldly views, tore into pieces the first book he came across from the owner’s library in order to use the torn pages “partly for padding, partly for drying.” The book, cut up in such a barbaric manner, turned out to be a biography of Kreisler; Due to the negligence of the typesetters, these pages were also printed.

The biography of a brilliant composer is like scrap paper in a cat's biography! One had to have a truly Hoffmannian imagination to give such a form to bitter self-irony. Who needs Kreisler's life, his joys and sorrows, what are they good for? Perhaps to dry out the graphomaniacal exercises of the learned cat!

However, with graphomaniac exercises everything is not so simple. As we read Murr's autobiography itself, we become convinced that the cat is also not so simple, and not without reason claims to play the main role in the novel - the role of the romantic “son of the century.” Here he is, now wise both by everyday experience and by literary and philosophical studies, reasoning at the beginning of his biography: “How rarely, however, is true kinship of souls found in our wretched, inert, selfish age!.. My writings will undoubtedly ignite in the chest more than one young cat, gifted with the mind and heart of the high flame of poetry... and another noble young cat will be completely imbued with the sublime ideals of the book that I now hold in my paws, and will exclaim in an enthusiastic outburst: O Murr, divine Murr, the greatest genius of our illustrious feline race! Only to you I owe everything, only your example made me great! “Remove the specifically feline realities in this passage - and you will have a completely romantic style, vocabulary, and pathos.

Portraying a romantic genius in the image of an imposingly effeminate cat is in itself a very funny idea, and Hoffmann takes full advantage of its comic possibilities. Of course, the reader quickly becomes convinced that by nature Murr simply learned the fashionable romantic slang. However, it is not so indifferent that he “works” with romance with success, with an extraordinary sense of style! Hoffmann could not help but know that such a masquerade risks compromising romanticism itself; This is a calculated risk.

Here are the “waste paper sheets” - with all the “Hoffmannian” reigning here, the sad story of the life of Kapellmeister Kreisler, a lonely, little-understood genius; inspired, sometimes romantic, sometimes ironic tirades explode, fiery exclamations sound, fiery gazes blaze - and suddenly the narrative ends, sometimes literally mid-sentence (the torn page ends), and the same romantic tirades are rapturously muttered by the learned cat: “... I know for sure : my homeland is the attic! The climate of the motherland, its morals, customs - how inextinguishable these impressions are... Where do I get such a sublime way of thinking, such an irresistible desire for higher spheres? Where does such a rare gift of soaring upward in an instant come from, such envy-worthy, courageous, most brilliant leaps? Oh, sweet languor fills my chest! The longing for my home attic rises in me in a powerful wave! I dedicate these tears to you, oh beautiful homeland..."

The demonstrative, almost literal fragmentation of the novel, its external narrative confusion (again: either a fireworks extravaganza, or the whirlwind of a carnival) are compositionally welded tightly together, with a brilliant calculation, and it must be realized.

At first glance, it may seem that the parallel biographies of Kreisler and Murr are a new version of the traditional Hoffmannian dual world: the sphere of “enthusiasts” (Kreisler) and the sphere of “philistines” (Murr). But the second glance complicates this arithmetic: after all, in each of these biographies, in turn, the world is also divided in half, and each has its own sphere of enthusiasts (Kreisler and Murr) and philistines (Kreisler and Murr’s entourage). The world is no longer doubling, but quadrupling - the count here is “twice two”!

And this changes the whole picture very significantly. If we isolate the experiment for the sake of Kreisler’s line, we will have before us another “classical” Hoffmann story with all its characteristic attributes; If we isolate Murr’s line, we will have a “Hoffmannized” version of the very common genre of satirical allegory, “animal epic” or fable with a self-revealing meaning in world literature. But Hoffman mixes them up, collides them, and they must certainly be perceived only in mutual relation.

These are not just parallel lines - they are parallel mirrors. One of them - Murrov's - is placed in front of the previous Hoffmannian romantic structure, again and again reflecting and repeating it. Thus, it, this mirror, inevitably removes absoluteness from history and the figure of Kreisler, giving it a flickering ambiguity. The mirror turns out to be a parody, “the worldly views of the cat Murr” - an ironic paraphrase of “the musical suffering of Kapellmeister Kreisler.”

One of the most essential components of Hoffmann's poetics, like that of the early romantics, is irony. Moreover, in Hoffmann’s irony as a creative technique, which is based on a certain philosophical, aesthetic, worldview position, we can clearly distinguish two main functions. In one of them he appears as a direct follower of the Jenes. We are talking about those of his works in which purely aesthetic problems are solved and where the role of romantic irony is close to that which it plays among the Jena romantics. Romantic irony in these works of Hoffmann takes on a satirical sound, but this satire does not have a social, public orientation. An example of the manifestation of such a function of irony is the short story “Princess Brambilla” - brilliant in its artistic execution and typically Hoffmannian in demonstrating the duality of his creative method. Following the Jenes, the author of the short story “Princess Brambilla” believes that irony should express a “philosophical view of life,” that is, be the basis of a person’s attitude towards life. In accordance with this, like the Jena people, irony is a means of resolving all conflicts and contradictions, a means of overcoming that “chronic dualism” from which the main character of this short story, actor Giglio Fava, suffers.

In line with this basic tendency, another and more significant function of his irony is revealed. If among the Jenes, irony as an expression of a universal attitude towards the world simultaneously became an expression of skepticism and refusal to resolve the contradictions of reality, then Hoffmann imbues irony with a tragic sound; for him it contains a combination of the tragic and the comic. The main bearer of Hoffmann's ironic attitude to life is Kreisler, whose “chronic dualism” is tragic, in contrast to the comical “chronic dualism” of Giglio Fava. The satirical beginning of Hoffman’s irony in this function has a specific social address, significant social content, and therefore this function of romantic irony allows him, a romantic writer, to reflect some typical phenomena of reality (“The Golden Pot”, “Little Tsakhes”, “The Worldly Views of the Cat” Murra" are works that most characteristically reflect this function of Hoffmann's irony).

For Hoffmann, the superiority of the poetic world over the world of real everyday life is undeniable. And he glorifies this world of fairy-tale dreams, giving it preference over the real, prosaic world.

But Hoffmann would not have been an artist with such a contradictory and in many ways tragic worldview if this kind of fairy tale had determined the general direction of his work, and had not demonstrated only one of its sides. At its core, the writer’s artistic perception of the world does not at all proclaim the complete victory of the poetic world over the real. Only madmen like Serapion or philistines believe in the existence of only one of these worlds. This principle of dual worlds is reflected in a number of works by Hoffmann, perhaps the most striking in their artistic quality and the most fully embodying the contradictions of his worldview. This is, first of all, the fairy-tale short story “The Golden Pot” (1814), the title of which is accompanied by the eloquent subtitle “A Tale from Modern Times.” The meaning of this subtitle is that the characters in this tale are contemporaries of Hoffmann, and the action takes place in real Dresden at the beginning of the 19th century. This is how Hoffmann reconsiders the Jena tradition of the fairy tale genre - the writer includes the plan of real everyday life into its ideological and artistic structure. The hero of the novel, student Anselm, is an eccentric loser, endowed with a “naive poetic soul,” and this makes the world of the fabulous and wonderful accessible to him. Faced with him, Anselm begins to lead a dual existence, falling from his prosaic existence into the realm of a fairy tale, adjacent to ordinary real life. In accordance with this, the short story is compositionally built on the interweaving and interpenetration of the fairy-tale-fantastic plan with the real. Romantic fairy-tale fiction in its subtle poetry and grace finds here in Hoffmann one of its best exponents. At the same time, the story clearly outlines the real plan. Not without reason, some Hoffmann researchers believed that using this novella it was possible to successfully reconstruct the topography of the streets of Dresden at the beginning of the last century. Realistic detail plays a significant role in characterizing the characters.

In the happy ending of the story, which ends with two weddings, its ideological plan receives a full interpretation. Registrar Geerbrand becomes the court councilor, to whom Veronica gives her hand without hesitation, having abandoned her passion for Anselm. Her dream is coming true - “she lives in a beautiful house on the New Market”, she has “a hat of the latest style, a new Turkish shawl”, and, having breakfast in an elegant negligee by the window, she gives orders to the servants. Anselm marries Serpentine and, becoming a poet, settles with her in the fabulous Atlantis. At the same time, he receives as a dowry a “nice estate” and a gold pot, which he saw in the archivist’s house. The golden pot - this peculiar ironic transformation of Novalis's "blue flower" - retains the original function of this romantic symbol. It can hardly be considered that the completion of the Anselm-Serpentine storyline is a parallel to the philistine ideal embodied in the union of Veronica and Heerbrand, and the golden pot is a symbol of bourgeois happiness. After all, Anselm does not abandon his poetic dream, he only finds its fulfillment.

The philosophical idea of the short story about embodiment, the realm of poetic fantasy in the world of art, in the world of poetry is affirmed in the last paragraph of the short story. Its author, suffering from the thought that he has to leave the fabulous Atlantis and return to the miserable squalor of his attic, hears the encouraging words of Lindhorst: “Have you not just been in Atlantis and don’t you at least own a decent manor there as a poetic property?” your mind? Is Anselm’s bliss nothing other than life in poetry, through which the sacred harmony of all things is revealed as the deepest of nature’s secrets!”

V. G. Belinsky highly valued Hoffmann’s satirical talent, noting that he knew how to “depict reality in all its truth and execute the philistinism of his compatriots with poisonous sarcasm.”

These observations of the remarkable Russian critic can be fully attributed to the fairy-tale short story “Little Tsakhes”. In the new fairy tale, Hoffmann’s two-worldness in the perception of reality is completely preserved, which is again reflected in the two-dimensionality of the composition of the short story, in the characters’ characters and in their arrangement. Many of the main characters of the fairy tale novella.

“Little Tsakhes” have their literary prototypes in the short story “The Golden Pot”: student Balthazar - Anselm, Prosper Alpanus - Lindhorst, Candida - Veronica.

The two-dimensionality of the novella is revealed in the contrast between the world of a poetic dream, the fabulous country of Dzhinnistan, and the world of real everyday life, the principality of Prince Barsanuf, in which the novella takes place. Some characters and things lead a dual existence here, as they combine their fabulous magical existence with existence in the real world. Fairy Rosabelverde, who is also the canoness of the Rosenschen shelter for noble maidens, patronizes the disgusting little Tsakhes, rewarding him with three magical golden hairs.

In the same dual capacity as the fairy Rosabelverde, who is also Canoness Rosenschen, appears the good wizard Alpanus, who surrounds himself with various fairy-tale wonders, which the poet and dreamer student Balthazar clearly sees. In his everyday incarnation, only accessible to philistines and sober-minded rationalists, Alpanus is just a doctor, prone, however, to very intricate quirks.

The artistic plans of the compared short stories are compatible, if not completely, then very close. In ideological terms, for all their similarity, the short stories are quite different. If in the fairy tale “The Golden Pot,” which ridicules the worldview of the philistinism, the satire has a moral and ethical character, then in “Little Tsakhes” it becomes more acute and takes on a social resonance. It is no coincidence that Belinsky noted that this short story was prohibited by tsarist censorship for the reason that it contains “a lot of ridicule of stars and officials.”

It is in connection with the expansion of the address of satire, with its intensification in the short story, that one significant moment in its artistic structure changes - the main character becomes not a positive hero, a characteristic Hoffmannian eccentric, a poet-dreamer (Anselm in the short story “The Golden Pot”), but a negative hero - the vile freak Tsakhes, a character who, in a deeply symbolic combination of his external features and internal content, first appears on the pages of Hoffmann’s works. “Little Tsakhes” is even more a “tale from modern times” than “The Golden Pot”. Tsakhes - a complete nonentity, devoid of even the gift of intelligible articulate speech, but with an excessively inflated arrogant pride, disgustingly ugly in appearance - due to the magical gift of the fairy, Rosabelverde looks in the eyes of others not only as a stately handsome man, but also as a person endowed with outstanding talents, bright and clear mind. In a short time, he makes a brilliant administrative career: without completing a course in legal sciences at the university, he becomes an important official and, finally, the all-powerful first minister in the principality. Such a career is possible only because Tsakhes appropriates the works and talents of others - the mysterious power of the three golden hairs forces blinded people to attribute to him everything significant and talented accomplished by others.

Thus, within the framework of the romantic worldview and the artistic means of the romantic method, one of the great evils of the modern social system is depicted. However, the unfair distribution of spiritual and material wealth seemed fatal to the writer, arising under the influence of irrational fantastic forces in this society, where power and wealth are endowed on insignificant people, and their insignificance, in turn, is transformed by the power of power and gold into the imaginary brilliance of intelligence and talents. The debunking and overthrow of these false idols, in accordance with the nature of the writer’s worldview, comes from the outside, thanks to the intervention of the same irrational fairy-tale-magical forces (the sorcerer Prosper Alpanus, in his confrontation with the fairy Rosabelverde, patronizing Balthazar), which, according to Hoffmann, gave rise to this ugly social phenomenon. The scene of the indignation of the crowd breaking into the house of the all-powerful minister Zinnober after he had lost his magical charm, of course, should not be perceived as an attempt by the author to look for a radical means of eliminating the social evil that is symbolized in the fantastic fairy-tale image of the freak Tsakhes. This is just one of the minor details of the plot, not at all programmatic in nature. The people are not rebelling against the evil temporary minister, but are only mocking the disgusting monster, whose appearance has finally appeared before them in its true form. The death of Tsakhes, who, fleeing from the raging crowd, drowns in a silver chamber pot, is grotesque within the framework of the fairy-tale plan of the novella, and not socially symbolic.

Hoffmann creativity writer dual worlds

Conclusion

It was Hoffmann who most poignantly embodied “two worlds” in the art of words; it is his identification mark. But Hoffmann is not a fanatic or a dogmatist of dual worlds; he is its analyst and dialectician...

...Since then, many wonderful masters have come into the world, somewhat similar and completely different from Hoffmann. And the world itself has changed beyond recognition. But Hoffmann continues to live in world art. Much was revealed for the first time to the close and kind gaze of this artist, and therefore his name often sounds like a symbol of humanity and spirituality. For the great romantics, among whom Hoffmann occupies one of the most honorable places, the contradictions of life that painfully wounded them remained a mystery. But they were the first to talk about these contradictions, that the fight against them - the fight for the ideal - is the happiest destiny of a person...

List of used literature

Belinsky V.G. Full composition of writings. T. 4. - L., 1954. - P. 98
Berkovsky N.Ya. Romanticism in Germany. St. Petersburg, 2002. P.463-537.
Braudo E.M. THIS. Hoffman. - Pgd., 1922. - P. 20
Herzen A.I. Collected works in 30 volumes. T. 1. Hoffmann. - M., 1954. - P. 54-56.
Zhirmunsky V.M. German romanticism and modern mysticism. M., 1997.
Foreign literature of the 19th century. Romanticism. Reader of historical and literary materials. Comp. A.S.Dmitriev et al. M., 1990.
Selected prose of German romantics. M., 1979. T. 1-2.
History of foreign literature of the 19th century. Ed. A.S. Dmitrieva. M., 1971. 4.1.
History of foreign literature of the 19th century. Ed. Ya.N.Zasursky, S.V.Turaev. M., 1982.
History of foreign literature of the 19th century. Ed. N.P.Michalskaya. M., 1991. 4.1.

Among the writers of late German romanticism, one of the most prominent figures was Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann (1776-1822). Hoffmann is a writer of European scale, whose work outside his homeland received a particularly wide response in Russia.

He was born into the family of a Prussian royal lawyer. Already from his youth, Hoffmann's rich creative talent awakened. He reveals considerable talent as a painter. But his main passion, to which he remains faithful throughout his life, is music. Playing many instruments, he thoroughly studied the theory of composition and became not only a talented performer and conductor, but also the author of a number of musical works.

Despite his varied interests in the field of art, at the university Hoffmann was forced, for practical reasons, to study law and choose a profession traditional in his family. He diligently and with great success studies law. Having become an official in the legal department, he demonstrates extraordinary professional training, earning a reputation as an efficient and capable lawyer.

After graduating from the university in 1798, the agonizing years of service as an official of the judicial department in various cities of Prussia began, years filled with a passionate dream of devoting oneself to art and the painful awareness of the impossibility of realizing this dream.

In 1806, after the defeat of Prussia, Hoffmann was deprived of his official position, and with it his means of livelihood. After Berlin, Bamberg, Leipzig, Dresden - these are the milestones of the thorny path along which, accompanied by various everyday misfortunes and rare glimpses of success, Hoffmann walked, working as a theater conductor, decorator, and teacher of singing and playing the piano.

And only in 1814, when Napoleon was expelled from Germany, did the years of joyless wandering end for Hoffmann. His hopes of obtaining a well-paid position in Berlin, where he could apply his knowledge and talent in the field of music or painting, did not materialize. A hopeless financial situation forces him to accept a position in the Ministry of Justice in the Prussian capital, secured by his close friend Hippel, which for Hoffmann was tantamount, as he himself wrote about it, to “returning to prison.” However, he fulfills his official duties impeccably and in 1818 he is appointed to a responsible post. But it is not career success, but the lively artistic and literary life of Berlin that primarily interests Hoffmann. In literary and musical Berlin, Hoffmann is a recognized figure.

At this time, changes were also taking place in his social positions. In connection with the revival of the opposition movement, mainly among students, Hoffmann in 1820 was appointed a member of the commission for the investigation of political crimes. Very skeptical and mocking of nationalist student unions, Hoffmann, however, as a lawyer and as a citizen, is imbued with the spirit of those new advanced norms of bourgeois law and political ideas brought to Prussia from across the Rhine, which, overcoming the stubborn resistance of the old social and legal institutions, gradually crowded out police brutality and limited personal royal interference in judicial procedures and court decisions. Being extremely dissatisfied with his new appointment, with which he associated “disgusting arbitrariness, cynical disrespect for all laws,” the writer demonstrated considerable civic courage, openly protesting in his appeals to the Minister of Justice against the lawlessness committed by the commission. And his persistent demarches were not unsuccessful. But when it became known that in his fantastic novella “The Lord of the Fleas”, under the name of a certain crook Knarrpanti, Hoffman ridiculed the chairman of the commission, Kamptz, a prosecution was initiated against him, under the clearly far-fetched pretext of divulging judicial secrets, threatening the defendant with grave punishment. And only excited public opinion and the active efforts of friends helped to stop the case against the writer, provided he removed the criminal part from the novel. Meanwhile, a rapidly developing serious illness - progressive paralysis - deprived him of the ability to move independently. Hoffmann died on January 25, 1822.

The subtitle of the novella, “Memories of 1809,” has a very clear purpose in this regard. He reminds the reader that the image of the famous composer Gluck, the main and, in essence, the only hero of the story, is fantastic, unreal, for Gluck died long before the date indicated in the subtitle, in 1787. And at the same time, this strange and mysterious old man is placed in the setting real Berlin, in the description of which one can catch concrete historical signs of the continental blockade: ordinary people's disputes about the war, carrot coffee steaming on cafe tables.

For Hoffmann, all people are divided into two groups: artists in the broadest sense, people who are poetically gifted, and people who are absolutely devoid of a poetic perception of the world. “I, as the highest judge,” says the author’s alter ego Kreisler, “divided the entire human race into two unequal parts: one consists only of good people, but bad people or non-musicians at all, the other - of true musicians.” Hoffmann sees the worst representatives of the category of “non-musicians” in philistines.

And this opposition of the artist to the philistines is especially widely revealed in the example of the image of the musician and composer Johann Kreisler. The mythical unreal Gluck is replaced by the very real Kreisler, a contemporary of Hoffmann, an artist who, unlike most of the same type of heroes of the early romantics, lives not in the world of poetic dreams, but in real provincial philistine Germany and wanders from city to city, from one princely court to another, persecuted not by any means a romantic longing for the infinite, not in search of a “blue flower,” but in search of the most prosaic daily bread.

As a romantic artist, Hoffmann considers music the highest, most romantic form of art, “since it has as its subject only the infinite; mysterious, expressed in sounds by the primordial language of nature, filling the human soul with endless longing; Only thanks to her... does man comprehend the song of the songs of trees, flowers, animals, stones and waters.” Therefore, Hoffmann makes the musician Kreisler his main positive hero.

Hoffmann sees the highest embodiment of art in music primarily because music may be least connected with life, with reality. As a true romantic, revising the aesthetics of the Enlightenment, he abandons one of its main provisions - about the civil, social purpose of art: “... art allows a person to feel his highest purpose and from the vulgar vanity of everyday life leads him to the temple of Isis, where nature speaks to him with sublime, never heard, but nevertheless understandable sounds.”

The widely and vividly developed fairy-tale plan with many bizarre episodes, so unexpectedly and seemingly randomly intruding into the story of real everyday life, is subject to a clear, logical ideological and artistic structure of the short story, in contrast to the deliberate fragmentation and inconsistency in the narrative manner of most early romantics. The two-dimensionality of Hoffman's creative method and the two-worldness in his worldview were reflected in the opposition of the real and fantastic worlds and in the corresponding division of characters into two groups. Conrector Paulmann, his daughter Veronica, registrar Geerbrand are prosaically thinking Dresden inhabitants, who can precisely be classified, according to the author’s own terminology, as good people, devoid of any poetic flair. They are contrasted with the archivist Lindhorst with his daughter Serpentina, who came to this philistine world from a fantastic fairy tale, and the sweet eccentric Anselm, to whose poetic soul the fairy-tale world of the archivist was revealed.

Not always, however, Hoffmann’s fiction has such a bright and joyful flavor as in the short story discussed or in the fairy tales “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King” (1816), “Alien Child” (1817), “Lord of the Fleas” (1820), “Princess Brambilla” "(1821). The writer created works that were very different in their worldview and in the artistic means used in them. Gloomy nightmare fiction, reflecting one of the sides of the writer’s worldview, dominates in the novel “The Devil’s Elixir” (1815-1816) and in “Night Stories.” Most of the “Night Stories”, such as “The Sandman”, “Majorat”, “Mademoiselle de Scudery”, which, unlike the novel “The Devil’s Elixir”, are not burdened with religious and moral issues, are superior in comparison with it in artistic terms, perhaps. , primarily because they do not have such a deliberate build-up of complex plot intrigue.

The collection of stories "Serapion's Brothers", four volumes of which appeared in print in 1819-1821, contains works of unequal artistic level. There are stories here that are purely entertaining, plot-based (“Signor Formica”, “Interdependence of Events”, “Visions”, “Doge and Dogaressa”, etc.), banal and edifying (“The Happiness of the Gambler”). But still, the value of this collection is determined by such stories as “The Royal Bride”, “The Nutcracker”, “Artus Hall”, “Falun Mines”, “Mademoiselle de Scudéry”, which testified to the progressive development of the writer’s talent and contained high artistic perfection forms significant philosophical ideas.

The name of the hermit Serapion, a Catholic saint, is given to a small circle of interlocutors who periodically organize literary evenings, where they read to each other their stories, from which the collection is compiled. Sharing subjective positions on the issue of the relationship between the artist and reality, Hoffmann, however, through the mouth of one of the members of the Serapion Brotherhood, declares the absolute denial of reality unlawful, arguing that our earthly existence is determined by both the internal and external world. Without at all rejecting the need for the artist to turn to what he himself saw in reality, the author resolutely insists that the fictional world be depicted as clearly and clearly as if it appeared before the artist’s gaze as the real world. This principle of the verisimilitude of the imaginary and fantastic is consistently implemented by Hoffmann in those stories in the collection, the plots of which were drawn by the author not from his own observations, but from works of art.

The “Serapion principle” is also interpreted in the sense that the artist must isolate himself from the social life of our time and serve only art. The latter, in turn, represents a self-sufficient world, rising above life, standing aloof from political struggle. Given the undoubted fruitfulness of this aesthetic thesis for many of Hoffmann’s works, one cannot help but emphasize that his work itself, in certain strong aspects, did not always fully correspond to these aesthetic principles, as evidenced by a number of his works of the last years of his life, in particular the fairy tale “Little Tsakhes nicknamed Zinnober" (1819), noted by the attention of K. Marx. By the end of the 10s, new significant trends emerged in the writer’s work, expressed in the strengthening of social satire in his works, an appeal to the phenomena of modern socio-political life (“Little Tsakhes.” “Everyday views of Kota Murra”), from which he continues in principle to isolate themselves in their aesthetic declarations, as we saw in the example of the Serapion Brothers. At the same time, one can state more definite approaches to realism in the writer’s creative method (“Master Martin the Cooper and His Apprentices,” 1817; “Master Johann Wacht,” 1822; “Corner Window,” 1822). At the same time, it would hardly be correct to raise the question of a new period in Hoffmann’s work, because simultaneously with social satirical works, in accordance with his previous aesthetic positions, he writes a whole series of short stories and fairy tales that are far from social trends (“Princess Brambilla”, 1821 ; “Marquise de La Pivardiere”, 1822; “Errors”, 1822). If we talk about the writer’s creative method, it should be noted that, despite the significant inclination in the above-mentioned works towards a realistic manner, Hoffmann, in the last years of his work, continues to create in a characteristically romantic way (“Little Tsakhes”, “Princess Brambilla”, “Royal bride" from the Serapion cycle; the romantic plan clearly predominates in the novel about Murr the Cat).

THIS. Hoffmann "Little Tsakhes" Romantic dual worlds and the functions of fantasy in the story. Criticism of the mercantile attitude to life, the power of money (the image of a philistine and an “artist”). Romantic irony.

Hoffmann knew how to “depict reality in all its truth and execute the philistinism... of his compatriots with poisonous sarcasm” (Belinsky).

“Little Tsakhes” have their literary prototypes in the short story “The Golden Pot”: student Balthazar - Anselm, Prosper Alpanus - Lindhorst, Candida - Veronica.

Hoffmann's positive program is completely different, traditional for him - the triumph of the poetic world of Balthasar and Prosper Alpanus not only over evil in the person of Tsakhes, but also over the ordinary, prosaic world in general. Like the fairy tale "The Golden Pot", "Little Tsakhes" ends with a happy ending - the combination of a loving couple, Balthazar and Candida. But now this plot ending and the embodiment of Hoffman’s positive program in it reflect the deepening of the writer’s contradictions, his growing conviction in the illusory nature of the aesthetic ideal that he opposes to reality. In this regard, the ironic intonation intensifies and deepens in the novella.

A great social generalization in the image of Tsakhes, an insignificant temporary worker who rules the entire country, a poisonous disrespectful mockery of crowned and high-ranking persons, “mockery of the stars and ranks”, of the limitations of the German philistine form in this fantastic tale a bright satirical picture of the phenomena of the socio-political structure of modern Hoffmann of Germany.

If the short story “Little Tsakhes” is already marked by a clear shift in emphasis from the fantasy world to the real world,

Related information.

Brief description of Hoffmann's work.
Poetics of romanticism in the fairy tale “The Golden Pot”.
Satire and grotesque in the fairy tale “Little Tsakhes”.

1. Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann(1776-1822) – romantic writer, musician, artist.

Raised by an uncle, a lawyer, prone to fantasy and mysticism. He was a comprehensively gifted person. Was interested in music (played the piano, organ, violin, sang, conducted an orchestra. He knew music theory very well, was engaged in music criticism, was a fairly famous composer and a brilliant connoisseur of musical creations), drew ( was a graphic artist, painter and theater decorator), at the age of 33 he became a writer. Often he didn’t know what the idea could turn into: “... On weekdays I am a lawyer and, at most, a little musician, on Sunday afternoons I draw, and in the evenings until late at night I am a very witty writer,” he tells a friend. He was forced to earn a living by practicing law, often living from hand to mouth.

The inability to earn money doing what I love led to a double life and dual personality. This existence in two worlds is originally expressed in the works of Hoffmann. Duality arises 1) due to the awareness of the gap between the ideal and the real, dream and life; 2) due to the awareness of the incompleteness of the individual in the modern world, which allows society to impose on her its roles and masks that do not correspond to her essence.

Thus, in Hoffman’s artistic consciousness, two worlds are interconnected and opposed to each other - the real, everyday and the fantastic. The inhabitants of these worlds are philistines and enthusiasts (musicians).

Philistines: live in the real world, are happy with everything, do not know about the “higher worlds”, because they do not feel the need for them. There are more of them, they make up a society where everyday prose and lack of spirituality reign.

Enthusiasts: Reality disgusts them; they live by spiritual interests and art. Almost everyone is an artist. They have a different value system than the philistines.

The tragedy is that philistines are gradually crowding out enthusiasts from real life, leaving them with the realm of fantasy.

Hoffmann's work can be divided into 3 periods:

1) 1808-1816 – the first collection of “Fantasies in the manner of Callot” (1808 - 1814) ( Jacques Callot, Baroque artist known for his strange, grotesque paintings). The central image of the collection is the bandmaster Chrysler, a musician and enthusiast, doomed to loneliness and suffering in the real world. The central theme is art and the artist in his relationship with society.

2) 1816-1818 – the novel “Elixirs of Satan” (1815), the collection “Night Tales” (1817), which includes the famous fairy tale “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King”. Science fiction takes on a different character: ironic play and humor disappear, a gothic flavor and an atmosphere of horror appear. The location of the action (forest, castles), characters (members of feudal families, criminals, doubles, ghosts) change. The dominant motive is the dominion of the demonic fate over the human soul, the omnipotence of evil, the night side of the human soul.

3) 1818-1822 – the fairy tale “Little Tsakhes” (1819), the collection “Serapion’s Brothers” (1819-1821), the novel “The Worldly Views of Murr the Cat” (1819-1821), other short stories. Hoffmann's creative style is finally determined - grotesque-fantastic romanticism. Interest in the socio-philosophical and socio-psychological aspects of human life, exposing the process of human alienation and mechanism. Images of dolls and puppets appear, reflecting the “theater of life.”

(In The Sandman, a mechanical doll became a trendsetter in a “well-meaning society.” Olympia is an automatic doll, which, for the sake of fun, in order to laugh at people and amuse himself, a famous professor passed off as his daughter. And it goes well. He organizes receptions at her home. Young people look after Olympia. She knows how to dance, she knows how to listen very carefully when they tell her something.

And so a certain student Nathanael falls in love with Olympia to death, without any doubt that this is a living creature. He believes that there is no one smarter than Olympia. She is a very sensitive creature. He has no better companion than Olympia. These are all his illusions, egoistic illusions. Since she is taught to listen and does not interrupt him and he speaks alone all the time, he gets the impression that Olympia shares all his feelings. And he has no closer soul than Olympia.

All this ends when he once came to visit the professor at the wrong time and saw a strange picture: a fight over a doll. One held her legs, the other held her head. Everyone pulled in their own direction. This is where this secret was revealed.

After the discovery of the deception, a strange atmosphere was established in the society of the “highly revered gentlemen”: “The story about the machine gun sank deeply into their souls, and a disgusting distrust of human faces was instilled in them. Many lovers, in order to completely make sure that they were not captivated by a wooden doll, demanded that their lovers, so that they sing slightly out of tune and dance out of tune... and most of all, so that they not only listen, but sometimes speak themselves, so that their speech really expresses thoughts and feelings. and became more sincere, others, on the contrary, calmly dispersed.")

The most popular artistic means are grotesque, irony, satirical fiction, hyperbole, and caricature. Grotesque, according to Hoffman, is a bizarre combination of various images and motifs, free play with them, ignoring rationality and external plausibility.

The novel “The Everyday Views of Murr the Cat” is the pinnacle of Hoffmann’s creativity, the embodiment of the peculiarities of his poetics. The main characters are Hoffmann’s real-life cat and Hoffmann’s alter ego, the bandmaster Johann Chrysler (the hero of the first collection “Fantasies in the Manner of Callot”).

Two storylines: the autobiography of Murr the cat and the biography of Johann Chrysler. The cat, expressing his worldly views, tore into pieces the biography of Johannes Kreisler, which fell into his paws, and used the torn pages “partly for padding, partly for drying.” Due to the negligence of the typesetters, these pages were also printed. The composition is two-dimensional: Chryslerian (tragic pathos) and Murriana (comedy-parody pathos). Moreover, in relation to the owner, the cat represents the world of philistines, and in the cat-dog world, it appears to be an enthusiast.

The cat claims the main role in the novel - the role of the romantic “son of the century”. Here he is, wise both by everyday experience and by literary and philosophical studies, reasoning at the beginning of his biography: “How rarely, however, is true kinship of souls found in our wretched, inert, selfish age!.. My writings will undoubtedly ignite in the chest not one young cat, gifted with mind and heart, has a high flame of poetry... and another noble young cat will be completely imbued with the sublime ideals of the book that I now hold in my paws, and will exclaim in an enthusiastic outburst: “Oh Murr, divine Murr, the greatest genius of our of the illustrious cat race! Only to you I owe everything, only your example made me great! "Remove the specifically feline realities in this passage - and you will have a completely romantic style, vocabulary, and pathos.

Or, for example: We read the sad story of the life of Kapellmeister Kreisler, a lonely, little-understood genius; inspired, sometimes romantic, sometimes ironic tirades explode, fiery exclamations sound, fiery gazes blaze - and suddenly the narrative ends, sometimes literally mid-sentence (the torn page ends), and the same romantic tirades are muttered by the learned cat: “... I know for sure: my homeland is an attic! The climate of the fatherland, its morals, customs - how inextinguishable these impressions are... Where do I have such a sublime way of thinking, such an irresistible desire for higher spheres? Where does such a rare gift of soaring upward in an instant come from, such envy-worthy courageous, most brilliant jumping? Oh, sweet languor fills my chest! Longing for my native attic rises in me with a powerful wave! I dedicate these tears to you, oh beautiful homeland..."

Murriana is a satire on German society, its mechanicalness. Chrysler is not a rebel, loyalty to art elevates him above society, irony and sarcasm are a way of defense in the world of philistines.

Hoffmann's work had a huge influence on E. Poe, C. Baudelaire, O. Balzac, C. Dickens, N. Gogol, F. Dostoevsky, O. Wilde, F. Kafka, M. Bulgakov.

2. "The Golden Pot: A Tale from New Times" (1814)

Hoffmann's dual worlds manifest themselves at different levels of the text. Already the genre definition combines two temporal poles: a fairy tale (immediately sending back to the past) and modern times. In addition, the subtitle can be interpreted as a combination of the fantastic (fairy tale) and the real (Modern Time).

Structurally, the fairy tale consists of 12 vigils (originally the night guard), 12 is a mystical number.

At the chronotope level, the fairy tale is also dual: the action takes place in a very real Dresden, in a mystical Dresden, revealed to the main character Anselm, and in the mysterious country of poets and enthusiasts, Atlantis. The time is also significant: the events of the tale take place on the day of the Ascension of the Lord, which partly hints at Anselm’s future fate.

The image system includes representatives of the fantastic and real worlds, Good and Evil. Anselm is a young man who has all the traits of an enthusiast (“a naive poetic soul”), but is still at a crossroads between two worlds (student Anselm - poet Anselm (in the last chapter)). There is a struggle for his soul between the world of philistines, which is represented by Veronica, who hopes for his future brilliant career and dreams of becoming his wife, and Serpentina, a golden-green snake, the daughter of the archivist Lindgorst and also the powerful wizard Salamander. Anselm feels awkward in the real world, but in moments of special mental states (caused by “healthy tobacco”, “gastric liquor”) he is able to see another, magical world.

Duality is also realized in the images of a mirror and mirrored objects (a fortune teller’s mirror, a mirror made of rays of light from the archivist’s ring), a color scheme that is represented by shades of flowers (golden-green snake, pike-gray tailcoat), dynamic and fluid sound images, and playing with time and space (the archivist’s office, like the Tardis in the modern Doctor Who series, is larger inside than outside))).

Gold, jewelry and money have a mystical power that is destructive for enthusiasts (it was after being flattered by money that Anselm ended up in a bottle under glass). The image of the Golden Pot is ambiguous. On the one hand, it is a symbol of creativity, from which the Fire Lily of poetry grows (analogous to the “blue flower” of romanticism in Novalis), on the other, it was originally conceived as an image of a chamber pot. The irony of the image allows us to reveal Anselm's real fate: he lives with Serpentina in Atlantis, but actually lives somewhere in a cold attic here in Dresden. Instead of becoming a successful court councilor, he became a poet. The ending of the tale is ironic - the reader himself decides whether he is happy.

The romantic essence of the heroes is manifested in their professions, appearance, everyday habits, behavior (Anselm is mistaken for a madman). Hoffmann's romantic style is in the use of grotesque images (the transformation of a door knocker, an old woman), fantasy, irony, which is realized in portraits, author's digressions, setting a certain tone in the perception of the text.

3. “Little Tsakhes, nicknamed Zinnober” (1819)

The tale-tale also realizes the duality of Hoffmann's character. But, unlike The Golden Pot, it demonstrates the style of the late Hoffmann and is a satire on German reality, complemented by the motif of man’s alienation from what he has created. The content of the fairy tale is updated: it is transferred to recognizable life circumstances and concerns issues of the socio-political existence of the era.

The two-dimensionality of the novella is revealed in the contrast between the world of a poetic dream, the fabulous country of Dzhinnistan, and the world of real everyday life, the principality of Prince Barsanuf, in which the novella takes place. Some characters and things lead a dual existence here, as they combine their fabulous magical existence with existence in the real world (fairy Rosabelverde, Prosper Alpanus). Science fiction is often combined with everyday details, which gives it an ironic character.

Irony and satire in “The Golden Pot” are aimed at the philistine and have a moral and ethical character, but here it is more acute and takes on a social resonance. The image of the dwarf principality of Barsanuf in a grotesque form reproduces the order of many German states with their despotic rulers, incompetent ministers, forcibly introduced “enlightenment”, false science (Professor Moshe Terpin, who studies nature and for this purpose receives “from the princely forests the rarest game and unique animals, which he devours fried in order to explore their nature.” In addition, he writes a treatise on why wine is different from water and “already studied half a barrel of old Rhine and several dozen bottles of champagne and now started on a barrel of Alicante").

The writer paints an abnormal world, devoid of logic. The symbolic expression of this abnormality is the title character of the fairy tale Little Tsakhes, who is not accidentally portrayed negatively. Tsakhes is a grotesque image of an ugly dwarf whom the good fairy bewitched so that people would stop noticing his ugliness. The magical power of three golden hairs, symbolizing the power of gold, leads to the fact that all the virtues of others are attributed to Tsakhes, and all the mistakes are attributed to those around him, which allows him to become the first minister. Tsakhes is both scary and funny. Tsakhes is terrible because he has obvious power in the state. The crowd's attitude towards him is also scary. Mass psychology, irrationally blinded by appearances, exalts the insignificance, listens to it and worships it.

The antagonist of Tsakhes, who with the help of the sorcerer Alpanus reveals the true essence of the freak, is the student Balthazar. This is partly Anselm's double, capable of seeing not only the real, but also the magical world. At the same time, his desires are entirely in the real world - he dreams of marrying a sweet girl Candida, and the wealth they acquired represents a philistine paradise: “a rural house”, on the plot of which “excellent cabbage and all sorts of other good vegetables” grow; in the magical kitchen of the house “the pots never boil over”, in the dining room the china does not break, in the living room the carpets and chair covers do not get dirty...” It is no coincidence that the “12th Vigil,” which speaks of the incompleteness of Anselm’s fate and his continuing life in Atlantis, is replaced here by the “last chapter,” which indicates the finale of Balthasar’s poetic quest and his absorption in everyday life.

Hoffmann's romantic irony is bidirectional. Its object is both pitiful reality and the position of an enthusiastic dreamer, which indicates the weakening position of romanticism in Germany.

3. Hoffmann's work

Hoffmann Ernst Theodor Amadeus (January 24, 1776, Königsberg - June 25, 1822, Berlin), German romantic writer, composer, music critic, conductor, decorative artist. Subtle philosophical irony and whimsical fantasy, reaching the point of mystical grotesque (the novel “The Devil’s Elixir”, 1815-1816), were combined with a critical perception of reality (the story “The Golden Pot”, 1814; fairy tales “Little Tsakhes”, 1819, “The Lord of the Fleas”, 1822), a satire on German philistinism and feudal absolutism (the novel “The Everyday Views of Cat Murr”, 1820-1822). One of the founders of romantic musical aesthetics and criticism, author of one of the first romantic operas, Ondine (1814). Hoffmann’s poetic images were translated into their works by R. Schumann (“Kreisleriana”), J. Offenbach (“The Tales of Hoffmann”), P. I. Tchaikovsky (“The Nutcracker”), and in the 20th century. - P. Hindemith (“Cardillac”).

The son of an official. He studied legal sciences at the University of Königsberg. In Berlin from 1816 he was in the civil service as an adviser to justice. Hoffmann's short stories “Cavalier Gluck” (1809), “The Musical Sufferings of Johann Kreisler, Kapellmeister” (1810), “Don Juan” (1813) were later included in the collection “Fantasies in the Spirit of Callot” (vol. 1-4, 1814-1815) . In the story “The Golden Pot” (1814), the world is presented as if in two planes: real and fantastic. In the novel “The Devil's Elixir” (1815-1816), reality appears as an element of dark, supernatural forces. The Amazing Sufferings of a Theater Director (1819) depicts theatrical morals. His symbolic-fantastic tale “Little Tsakhes, nicknamed Zinnober” (1819) is brightly satirical. In “Night Stories” (parts 1-2, 1817), in the collection “Serapion’s Brothers” (vols. 1-4, 1819-1821, Russian translation 1836), in “The Last Stories” (ed. 1825) by Hoffmann sometimes in a satirical, sometimes in a tragic sense, he depicts the conflicts of life, romantically interpreting them as an eternal struggle between light and dark forces. The unfinished novel “The Everyday Views of Murr the Cat” (1820-1822) is a satire on German philistinism and feudal-absolutist orders. The novel The Lord of the Fleas (1822) contains bold attacks against the police regime in Prussia.

A clear expression of Hoffmann’s aesthetic views are his short stories “Cavalier Gluck”, “Don Juan”, the dialogue “Poet and Composer” (1813), and the cycle “Kreisleriana” (1814). In the short stories, as well as in “Fragments of the biography of Johannes Kreisler”, introduced into the novel “The Everyday Views of Murr the Cat,” Hoffmann created a tragic image of the inspired musician Kreisler, rebelling against philistinism and doomed to suffering.

Acquaintance with Hoffmann in Russia began in the 20s. 19th century V. G. Belinsky, arguing that Hoffman's fantasy is opposed to "... vulgar rational clarity and certainty ...", at the same time condemned Hoffman for breaking away from "... living and complete reality."

Hoffmann studied music from his uncle, then from the organist Chr. Podbelsky (1740-1792), later took composition lessons from I. F. Reichardt. Hoffmann organized a philharmonic society and a symphony orchestra in Warsaw, where he served as state councilor (1804-1807). In 1807-1813 he worked as a conductor, composer and decorator in theaters in Berlin, Bamberg, Leipzig and Dresden. He published many of his articles on music in the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung, Leipzig.

One of the founders of romantic musical aesthetics and criticism, Hoffmann, already at an early stage of the development of romanticism in music, formulated its essential tendencies and showed the tragic position of the romantic musician in society. He imagined music as a special world (“an unknown kingdom”), capable of revealing to a person the meaning of his feelings and passions, the nature of the mysterious and inexpressible. Hoffmann wrote about the essence of music, about musical compositions, composers, and performers. Hoffmann is the author of the first German. the romantic opera “Ondine” (Op. 1813), the opera “Aurora” (Op. 1812), symphonies, choirs, chamber works.

Hoffmann's works influenced K. M. Weber, R. Schumann, R. Wagner. Hoffmann's poetic images were embodied in the works of R. Schumann ("Kreisleriana"), R. Wagner ("The Flying Dutchman"), P. I. Tchaikovsky ("The Nutcracker"), A. S. Adam ("Giselle"), L. Delibes (“Coppelia”), F. Busoni (“Choice of the Bride”), P. Hindemith (“Cardillac”) and others. The plots for the operas were the works of Hoffmann - “Master Martin and His Apprentices”, “Little Zaches, nicknamed Zinnober” , “Princess Brambilla”, etc. Hoffmann is the hero of the operas by J. Offenbach (The Tales of Hoffmann, 1881) and G. Lacchetti (Hoffmann, 1912).

golden pot

The Golden Pot (Der goldene Topf) - A fairy tale (1814)

On the Feast of the Ascension, at three o'clock in the afternoon, at the Black Gate in Dresden, student Anselm, due to his eternal bad luck, overturns a huge basket of apples - and hears terrible curses and threats from an old woman merchant: “You will fall under glass, under glass!” Having paid for his mistake with a thin wallet, Anselm, instead of drinking beer and coffee with liqueur, like other good townspeople, goes to the banks of the Elbe to mourn his evil fate - all his youth, all his dashed hopes, all the sandwiches that fell butter side down... From the branches From the elderberry tree under which he sits, wonderful sounds are heard, like the ringing of crystal bells. Raising his head, Anselm sees three lovely golden-green snakes entwined in the branches, and the cutest of the three looks at him tenderly with large blue eyes. And these eyes, and the rustling of the leaves, and the setting sun - everything tells Anselm about eternal love. The vision dissipates as suddenly as it appeared. Anselm, in anguish, hugs the trunk of an elder tree, frightening both his appearance and his wild speeches of the townspeople walking in the park. Fortunately, his good friends are nearby: registrar Geerbrand and rector Paulman and their daughters, inviting Anselm to take a boat ride with them on the river and end the festive evening with dinner at Paulman’s house.

The young man, according to the general opinion, is clearly not himself, and his poverty and bad luck are to blame. Geerbrand offers him a job as a scribe for the archivist Lindgorst for decent money: Anselm has the talent of a calligrapher and draftsman - just the kind of person the archivist is looking for to copy manuscripts from his library.

Alas: the unusual situation in the archivist’s house, and his strange garden, where flowers look like birds and insects - like flowers, and finally, the archivist himself, who appears to Anselm either in the form of a thin old man in a gray cloak, or in the guise of a majestic gray-bearded king - all this plunges Anselm even deeper into the world of his dreams. The door knocker pretends to be the old woman whose apples he scattered at the Black Gate, again uttering the ominous words: “You will be in glass, in crystal!..”; the bell cord turns into a snake, wrapping itself around the poor fellow until his bones crunch. Every evening he goes to the elderberry bush, hugs it and cries: “Ah! I love you, snake, and I will die of sadness if you don’t come back!”

Day after day passes, and Anselm still does not start work. The archivist to whom he reveals his secret is not at all surprised. These snakes, the archivist tells Anselm, are my daughters, and I myself am not a mortal man, but the spirit of the Salamanders, cast down for disobedience by my master Phosphorus, the prince of the country of Atlantis. Anyone who marries one of the daughters of Salamander-Lindhorst will receive a Golden Pot as a dowry. At the moment of betrothal, a fiery lily sprouts from the pot, the young man will understand its language, comprehend everything that is open to disembodied spirits, and begin to live with his beloved in Atlantis. The Salamanders, who have finally received forgiveness, will return there.

Get to work! The payment for it will be not only chervonets, but also the opportunity to see the blue-eyed snake Serpentina every day!

Veronica, the daughter of director Paulman, who has not seen Anselm for a long time, with whom they previously played music almost every night, is tormented by doubts: has he forgotten her? Have you lost interest in her at all? But she was already dreaming of a happy marriage! Anselm, you see, will get rich, become a court councilor, and she will become a court councilor!

Having heard from her friends that an old fortune teller, Frau Rauerin, lives in Dresden, Veronica turns to her for advice. “Leave Anselm,” the girl hears from the witch. - He's a bad person. He trampled my children, my plump apples. He contacted my enemy, the evil old man. He is in love with his daughter, the green snake. He will never be a court councilor.” Veronica listens to the fortune teller in tears - and suddenly recognizes her as her nanny Lisa. The kind nanny consoles the pupil: “I will try to help you, heal Anselm from the enemy’s spell, and for you to become a court advisor.”

On a cold, stormy night, the fortune teller leads Veronica into the field, where she lights a fire under a cauldron, into which flowers, metals, herbs and little animals fly from the old woman’s bag, followed by a lock of hair from Veronica’s head and her ring. The girl continuously looks into the boiling brew - and from there Anselm’s face appears to her. At that same moment a thunderous sound is heard above her head: “Hey, you bastards! Get away, quickly!” The old woman falls to the ground screaming and Veronica faints. Coming to her senses at home, on her couch, she discovers in the pocket of her soaked raincoat a silver mirror - the one that was cast by the fortune teller last night. From the mirror, like earlier from a boiling cauldron, her lover looks at the girl. “Oh,” he laments, “why do you sometimes want to wriggle like a snake!..”

Meanwhile, Anselm’s work in the archivist’s house, which did not go well at first, is becoming increasingly difficult. He easily manages not only to copy the most intricate manuscripts, but also to comprehend their meaning. As a reward, the archivist arranges a date for the student with Serpentina. “You have, as they say now, a “naive poetic soul,” Anselm hears from the sorcerer’s daughter. “You are worthy of both my love and eternal bliss in Atlantis!” The kiss burns Anselm's lips. But it’s strange: in all the following days he thinks about Veronica. Serpentina is his dream, a fairy tale, and Veronica is the most living, real thing that has ever appeared before his eyes! Instead of going to the archivist, he goes to visit Paulman, where he spends the whole day. Veronica is gaiety itself, her whole appearance expresses love for him. An innocent kiss completely sobers up Anselm. As luck would have it, Geerbrand appears with everything needed to prepare the punch. With the first breath, the strangeness and wonder of the last weeks rise again before Anselm. He dreams aloud about the Serpentine. Following him, unexpectedly, both the owner and Geerbrand began to exclaim: “Long live Salamander! Let the old woman perish!” Veronica convinces them that old Lisa will certainly defeat the sorcerer, and her sister runs out of the room in tears. A madhouse - and that's all!..

The next morning, Paulman and Geerbrand are surprised for a long time by their violence. As for Anselm, when he came to the archivist, he was severely punished for his cowardly renunciation of love. The sorcerer imprisoned the student in one of those glass jars that are on the table in his office. Next door, in other banks, there were three more schoolchildren and two scribes, who also worked for the archivist. They revile Anselm (“A madman imagines that he is sitting in a bottle, while he himself stands on a bridge and looks at his reflection in the river!”) and at the same time a crazy old man who showers them with gold because they draw doodles for him.

Anselm is distracted from their ridicule by a vision of a mortal battle between a sorcerer and an old woman, from which Salamander emerges victorious. In a moment of triumph, Serpentina appears before Anselm, announcing to him the forgiveness granted. The glass breaks - he falls into the arms of the blue-eyed snake...

On Veronica's name day, the newly appointed court councilor Geerbrand comes to Paulman's house, offering his hand and heart to the girl. Without thinking twice, she agrees: at least in part, the old fortune teller’s prediction came true! Anselm - judging by the fact that he disappeared from Dresden without a trace - found eternal bliss in Atlantis. This suspicion is confirmed by the letter the author received from archivist Lindhorst with permission to make public the secret of his miraculous existence in the world of spirits and with an invitation to complete the story of the Golden Pot in the very blue palm room of his house where the illustrious student Anselm worked.

Little Tsakhes, nicknamed Zinnober

Little Zaches, nicknamed Zinnober (Klein Zaches genaimt Zinnober) - Story (1819)

In the small state where Prince Demetrius ruled, every resident was given complete freedom in his endeavors. And fairies and magicians value warmth and freedom above all else, so under Demetrius many fairies from the magical land of Dzhinnistan moved to the blessed little principality. However, after the death of Demetrius, his heir Paphnutius decided to introduce enlightenment in his fatherland. His ideas about enlightenment were the most radical: any magic should be abolished, fairies are busy with dangerous witchcraft, and the ruler’s primary concern is to grow potatoes, plant acacias, cut down forests and inoculate smallpox. Such enlightenment dried out the flourishing land in a matter of days, the fairies were sent to Dzhinnistan (they did not resist too much), and only the fairy Rosabelverde managed to stay in the principality, who persuaded Paphnutius to give her a place as a canoness in a shelter for noble maidens.

This good fairy, the mistress of flowers, once saw on a dusty road the peasant woman Lisa, asleep on the side of the road. Lisa was returning from the forest with a basket of brushwood, carrying in the same basket her freak of a son, nicknamed little Tsakhes. The dwarf has a disgusting old face, twig-like legs and spider-like arms. Taking pity on the evil freak, the fairy combed his tangled hair for a long time... and, smiling mysteriously, disappeared. As soon as Lisa woke up and set off on the road again, she met a local pastor. For some reason he was captivated by the ugly little one and, repeating that the boy was miraculously handsome, decided to take him in as an upbringer. Lisa was glad to get rid of the burden, not really understanding why her freak began to look to people.

Meanwhile, the young poet Balthazar, a melancholy student, is studying at Kerepes University, a melancholy student in love with the daughter of his professor Mosch Terpin, the cheerful and lovely Candida. Mosch Terpin is possessed by the ancient Germanic spirit, as he understands it: heaviness combined with vulgarity, even more intolerable than the mystical romanticism of Balthasar. Balthasar indulges in all the romantic eccentricities so characteristic of poets: he sighs, wanders alone, avoids student revels; Candida, on the other hand, is the embodiment of life and gaiety, and she, with her youthful coquetry and healthy appetite, finds her student admirer very pleasant and amusing.

Meanwhile, a new face invades the touching university reserve, where typical boors, typical educators, typical romantics and typical patriots personify the diseases of the German spirit: little Zaches, endowed with a magical gift of attracting people to himself. Having wormed his way into Mosch Terpin's house, he completely charms both him and Candida. Now his name is Zinnober. As soon as someone reads poetry or expresses himself wittily in his presence, everyone present is convinced that this is Zinnober’s merit; If he meows disgustingly or stumbles, one of the other guests will certainly be guilty. Everyone admires Zinnober's grace and dexterity, and only two students - Balthasar and his friend Fabian - see all the ugliness and malice of the dwarf. Meanwhile, he manages to take the place of a freight forwarder in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and then a Privy Councilor for Special Affairs - and all this is by deception, for Zinnober managed to appropriate to himself the merits of the most worthy.

It so happened that in his crystal carriage with a pheasant on the goats and a golden beetle on the heels, Kerpes was visited by Dr. Prosper Alpanus, a magician traveling incognito. Balthasar immediately recognized him as a magician, but Fabian, spoiled by enlightenment, at first doubted; however, Alpanus proved his power by showing Zinnober to his friends in a magic mirror. It turned out that the dwarf is not a wizard or a gnome, but an ordinary freak who is helped by some secret force. Alpanus discovered this secret power without difficulty, and the fairy Rosabelverde hastened to pay him a visit. The magician informed the fairy that he had drawn up a horoscope for the dwarf and that Tsakhes-Zinnober could soon destroy not only Balthazar and Candida, but also the entire principality, where he had become his man at court. The fairy is forced to agree and deny Tsakhes her protection - especially since the magic comb with which she combed his curls was cunningly broken by Alpanus.

The fact of the matter is that after these combings, three fiery hairs appeared in the dwarf’s head. They endowed him with witchcraft power: all other people's merits were attributed to him, all his vices were attributed to others, and only a few saw the truth. The hairs had to be pulled out and immediately burned - and Balthasar and his friends managed to do this when Mosch Terpin was already arranging Zinnober’s engagement to Candida. Thunder struck; everyone saw the dwarf as he was. They played with him like a ball, they kicked him, he was thrown out of the house - in wild anger and horror he fled to his luxurious palace, which the prince gave him, but the confusion among the people grew unstoppably. Everyone heard about the transformation of the minister. The unfortunate dwarf died, stuck in a jug, where he tried to hide, and as a final benefit, the fairy returned him the appearance of a handsome man after death. She also did not forget the unfortunate man’s mother, the old peasant woman Lisa: such wonderful and sweet onions grew in Lisa’s garden that she was made the personal supplier of the enlightened court.

And Balthasar and Candida lived happily, as a poet and a beauty should live, who were blessed by the magician Prosper Alpanus at the very beginning of their lives.