German literature of the second half of the 19th century. Poetic realism

In the 2nd half of the XIX - early XX century. the development of realism continued. Realism does not dissociate itself from aesthetic quests, strives - often in obvious interaction with other artistic phenomena - to analyticity, three-dimensional view of reality, to its adequate artistic depiction. New forms of artistic embodiment of reality appear, the range of topics and problems expands. So, if in the realistic works of the XIX century. predominantly social and everyday beginning, then at the turn of the XIX-XX centuries. it begins to be replaced by philosophical-intellectual, spiritual-personal problems.

A special place among the artistic phenomena of the 2nd half of the 19th - early 20th centuries. takes neo-romanticism. Rejection of reality; a strong personality, often lonely, guided in his activities by altruistic ideals; the acuteness of ethical issues; maximalism and romanticization of feelings, passion; tension of plot situations; priority of the expressive beginning over the descriptive, emotional - over the rational; active appeal to the events of the past, legends and traditions, fantasy, grotesque, exoticism, the cultivation of adventure-adventure and detective stories are the characteristic features of neo-romanticism, which reached its culmination in the 90s of the 19th century.

Second half of the 19th - early 20th century - a rather small period in comparison with some previous historical and cultural eras, sometimes covering more than one century. Nevertheless, it is quite comparable with these and other stages of the cultural development of mankind, for it contains a number of events of world significance and was marked by outstanding achievements in the art of different countries.

The reasons, meaning and scale of the crisis experienced by human consciousness during that period were substantiated by many philosophers. The works of the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer were widely spread. Under the influence of A. Schopenhauer, the philosophical views of Friedrich Nietzsche were formed, who had a tremendous influence on the art of word at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. The impact on the literary and artistic world, especially already at the beginning of the 20th century, was also very significant, of the French philosopher Henri Bergson, the creator of intuitionism - the doctrine of intuition as the main way of knowing the essence of life, and the Austrian psychiatrist, author of the theory and method of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud. Bergson's views served as one of the starting points for the Symbolists, and later for representatives of various avant-garde movements. Freud's psychoanalytic theory stimulated a deeply innovative approach not only to many specific sciences, but also to mythology, religion, painting, literature, aesthetics, and ethnography.

It was at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, when spiritual and aesthetic values ​​were being rethought and previous beliefs were crumbling. This entire period was characterized by the broadest experimentation, when many writers fell prey to this or that literary hobby. German naturalism had its predecessors in France and Scandinavia. According to the then philosophical and natural-scientific theories, personality was determined by heredity and environment. The humanist writer was now primarily interested in the ugly reality of industrial society, with its unsolved social problems. The most typical naturalist poet was A. Holz (1863–1929); in the field of the novel there were no bright discoveries. However, the clashes of heterogeneous characters, whose lack of freedom was aggravated by determinism, contributed to the emergence of a number of dramatic works that have not lost their significance. than he is quite comparable with Goethe. The diversity inherent in Hauptmann's dramas is also found in his narrative prose. With the advent of Freud's pioneering works, the center of gravity in literature has shifted from social conflict to a more subjective study of the individual's reactions to the environment and to oneself. In 1901, A. Schnitzler (1862–1931) published the story Lieutenant Gustl, written in the form of an internal monologue, and a series of impressionistic theatrical sketches, where subtle psychological observations and pictures of the degradation of the capital's society were fused (Anatol, 1893; Khorovod, 1900). The pinnacle of poetic achievements is the work of D. Lilienkron (1844-1909) and R. Demel (1863-1920), who created a new poetic language capable of expressing lyrical experience. Hoffmannsthal, combining the style of impressionism with the Austrian and European literary tradition, created unusually deep poems and several poetic plays (Fool and Death, 1893). No less significant achievements took place in prose. T. Mann is the most prominent representative of the galaxy of writers, among whom was his elder brother G. Mann (1871-1950), known for his satirical and political novels.

1814-1815 years. Vienna, capital of Austria. First chapters European states came together to work out new conditions for the existence of the redesigned great and small powers of this part of the continent. "Black Angel" (Napoleon I) was defeated, " White angel"(Alexander I) was triumphant.

Vienna was jubilant. In the evening - high society balls. Luxurious ladies' toilets and the then-fashionable waltz. The brightest of the dancers was, of course, the Russian tsar. At one time he was admired by Napoleon ("Look how Alexander I dances").

Mocking people christened this collection of the most significant political figures of that time "dancing congress" (Alexander I, King of Prussia Frederick William III, Austrian Emperor Franz I).

But that was only the front side of it. During the day, there were important negotiations, disputes between diplomats, and behind the scenes intrigues, secret agreements, deals.

The hardened schemer Talleyrand fussed about feverishly. As always, faithfully serving France, he did not forget his personal interests, the latter caused outbursts of anger in Napoleon: "Dirt in silk stockings!" To which, as you know, the minister replied: “It's a pity that such great person badly brought up. "

Now Talleyrand's task was to prevent the dismemberment of France. And he succeeded in this, playing a behind-the-scenes game and playing on the contradictions of the victorious countries.

Frightening England and Austria with the strengthening of Russia, he managed to organize behind Alexander's back a secret military alliance of these states and France against Russia. Castlereagh (England) and Metternich (Austria), lavishing smiles on the Russian tsar, gave him a fair share. We will not consider here the map of Western Europe, then tailored by the Congress of Vienna. We only note that the "German Confederation" was created from 35 monarchies and 4 free cities. Before that, there were countless monarchies.

In the political history of Germany in the second half of the century, the "iron chancellor" Bismarck played a huge role. The policy of Prussia, and under its rule there was a struggle for the unification of Germany, was shaped by this unyielding man. He considered Austria and France to be the main opponents of the unification of Germany and managed to organize two wars: the Austro-Prussian in 1866 and the Franco-Prussian in 1870-1871.

France was then defeated, the Germans entered Paris, Napoleon III was deposed. Then the events of the Paris Commune took place. The same Bismarck helped to suppress the Communards.

Such is the concise history of Germany over the past century. From her literary history, we take only two names: Hoffmann and Heinrich Heine.

Heinrich Heine (1797-1856)

A summer night's dream! Aimless
This song is fantastic -
Like love, like life is aimless
As a creator and creation.
Obeying only a whim
Now at a gallop, now on the wings
Rushes to the fairy kingdom
My beloved pegasus ...
My white horse, winged horse,
Forged with pure gold,
The strands of pearls are the reins
Race wherever you want, horse!
G. Heine

Before us is the creative program of the German poet, who after Goethe took first place on the poetic Olympus of Germany. Complete freedom of artistic creation. The poet is a creator, his song is whimsical, his fantasy is capricious, like the outline of a cloud floating across a clear sky. However, she can also look into the most nightmarish abysses where monsters live. In a word, no one has power over the poet, no one is given the right to prescribe to the poet the form and content of his dreams. The program of all the poets of the world of the first half of the XIX century. "You are the king, live alone, go along the path of the free wherever the free mind draws you!" (A.S. Pushkin).

So, first of all - the personality of the poet and his freedom, and, of course, the freedom of any personality in general. Such ideas in the political sphere became possible after the Great French Revolution. The enlighteners who were preparing this revolution wrote the word "Freedom!" On their banners, but they demanded civic consciousness from the artist, the poet and painter had to give themselves to the idea, in their opinion. Let me remind you of Diderot's categorical demand: "We are paid by society, we must give an account of our talents." The era that came after the revolution, the era of romantics
rejected this commitment.

The above poem by Heine also contains his philosophical views. Perhaps they are sad: life is aimless, love is aimless, song is aimless (poetry, art).

The son of a wealthy bourgeois ("My father was a merchant, and quite rich"), from childhood listening to conversations about finances, profits, income, etc., he turned out to be the most incapable in the world of righteous and unrighteous earners of money ("... it seems that thalers start to fall from heaven, I would only have holes in my head, and the children of Israel would cheerfully pick up this silver coin ”).

His first and perhaps most significant book is a collection of lyric poems (The Book of Songs). Love, delight, suffering, and all this in a romantic haze of dreams, ghosts and the very mistress of all nightmares - Death.

I had a sinister dream ...
And he was loving and terrible to me;
And takes the heart with a song:
And long images of sleep
The soul, embarrassed, was full ...
Dressed with greenery all around
There was a light pool in the garden,
The girl leaned over him
And some soap. Unearthly
Everything was in it: both the camp and the look,
And growth, and gait, and attire.
She seemed to me
And unfamiliar and dear.

She washes and sings -
“You splash, wave, splash!
Rinse my white canvas! "
I went up to her and said:
"Tell me, my beauty,
Tell me where you are from and who
And why here, and wash what? "
She answered me: “Be ready!
I am your mortal veil. "
And she just said - like smoke
Everything disappeared ... I am motionless ...

The poem was written in 1816, when the poet was 19 years old. The motives are typical of romantic poetry. But Heinrich Heine, true to his mocking nature, soon begins to laugh at himself and, in general, at the romantic craving for cemetery motives.

Heine is not only a great poet, but also a wonderful prose writer. True, his prose is not fictional, he did not write any short stories, no stories, or novels, but only composed brilliant lyric-satirical essays, where the play of a free ironic mind, emotional impulses and broad education were mixed.

His book Travel Pictures amazes with his youthful, and I would say, maximalist hatred of the common man and tremulous, also youthful (the book was written in 1826), enthusiastic love for nature. He described his journey to the Harz. The Germans formed legends about this land of mountains and forests inhabited by ghosts and witches. In the spirit of these legends, the poet leads his story: "The mists disappeared like ghosts", "The night was racing on its black horse, and its long mane fluttered in the wind", "An icy chill penetrated me to the bone, I trembled like an aspen leaf, and barely dared to look at the ghost. "

Irony, however, does not want to leave the poet: it turns out that the ghost has a "transcendental gray coat" (the German philosophers of that time used the word "transcendental" in great use), "abstract legs" and "mathematical face".

And then a wonderful page about the beauty of nature: the night passed, the ghosts melted, and the morning with all the colors of spring blossomed mountains, meadows, forests. “I again walked from mountain to mountain, and a beautiful sun soared in front of me, illuminating all new beauties. The mountain spirit was clearly benevolent to me. After all, he knew that such a being as a poet could retell a lot of miraculous things, and he showed me this morning his Harz in such a way that not everyone can see him. But Harz also saw me as few saw me, pearls trembling on my eyelashes, just as precious as those that hung on the blades of grass. "

Pilgrimage to Goethe

In 1824 the young Heine met with the aged Goethe. “I ask your Excellency to make me happy to stand in front of you for a few minutes. I don't want to burden you with my presence, I just want to kiss your hand and then leave. My name is Heinrich Heine, I am a native of Rhine, recently settled in Göttingen, and before that I lived for several years in Berlin, where I knew many of your old acquaintances and admirers and learned to love you more and more every day. I am also a poet and had the courage three years ago to send you my "Poems", and a year and a half ago - "Tragedies" with the addition of "Lyric intermezzo". In addition, I am sick, to improve my health, I traveled to the Harz, and there, on Brocken, a desire seized me - to go to Weimar to worship Goethe. I came here as a pilgrim, in the full sense of the word - on foot and in worn-out clothes, and I await the fulfillment of my request. I remain with ardent sympathy and devotion - Heinrich Heine. "

Goethe adopted the young poet, whose name soon became known to the whole world. Eight years later, when the creator of Faust was no longer alive, Heine recalled this meeting in Weimar: “His appearance was as significant as the word that lives in his works, and his figure was just as harmonious, bright, joyful , noble, proportional, and on it, as on an antique statue, one could study Greek art. His eyes were calm, like the eyes of a deity ... True, time covered his head with snow, but it could not bow it. He continued to wear it proudly and high, and when he spoke, it seemed that he was given the opportunity to point his finger to the stars in the sky the way they should follow. "

Later, when the name of Heinrich Heine became widely known, Goethe told his secretary about him: “It cannot be denied that Heine has many brilliant qualities, but he lacks love. He loves his readers just as little as his sopoets, and loves himself more, thus the words of the Apostle can be applied to him: "And if I spoke in human and angelic language and did not have their love, then I would be a ringing metal."
Even these days I read his poems - and his rich talent is undoubtedly, but, I repeat, he lacks love and therefore he will never influence as he should. They will be afraid of him, and he will be the God of those who would willingly be such deniers, but do not have the gifts to do so. "

When the gods get bored in the sky, they open the window and look at the Parisian boulevards.
Heinrich Heine

In 1831 the poet left Germany, and forever. Until the end of his days he lives in France. He said so many bad things about the German provinces that it was no longer possible to stay in the country. He was even banned from entering Germany. "This Prussia, this prim, hypocritical, hypocritical Prussia, this Tartuffe between states was disgusting, deeply disgusting to me."

The Germans did not forgive him for this and, it seems, still does. Several times in German society the question of creating a monument to the great poet arose, and each time a powerful protest arose against this.

In France, Heine became interested in socialist ideas, met with the then young Marx, got acquainted with the ideas of Saint-Simon. This latter, the creator of social utopias, was already in the grave, but his followers were active. The person who decided to turn the whole way of life of mankind was the most naive, kindest and completely helpless creature in everyday life. In his youth, he ordered his valet to wake him up with the words: "Get up, count, humanity is waiting for your deeds!"

How many troubles such Don Quixotes could bring to people if they had power!

Heine soon became disillusioned with the then new socialist ideas. The ideas of democracy and universal equality seemed to him dangerous in their consequences. With dark sarcasm, he wrote about this in the poem "Atta Troll" (Atta Troll - cave dweller, bear and preacher):

Unity! Unity!
Let's overthrow the power of the monopolist,
Establish a kingdom in the world
Animal justice.
Its main law
There will be equality and brotherhood
God's creatures, no distinction
Faith, smell and skins.
Equality in everything! Minister
Any donkey can be.
Lion at the mill with bags
Modestly trotting in the harness.
As for the dog -
What caused servility in it?
The fact that people have been with her for centuries
They were treated like a dog.
But she's in a free kingdom
Where all the old ones will be returned to her,
All legal rights,
Become noble again.
"Dried Image of Sorrow"

Heine was dying in terrible agony. For eight years he did not leave his bed, he called it "a mattress grave." And at the same time he was full of spiritual strength, with a clear mind and creative will. “I endure such torments that I could not even imagine Spanish Inquisition". One of his friends who visited him wrote about his appearance: "... it was the head of infinite beauty, the real head of Christ, with the smile of Mephistopheles, which at times ran over his pale, dried lips." Even in his youth, in a letter to a friend, he dropped a phrase, then, perhaps, not without a romantic pose: “When everything is lost and no more hope Then life becomes a shame and death becomes a duty. "

Now he said something different: "Life is forever lost for me, and I love life so ardently, so passionately."

One cold damp morning he was buried in the Montmartre cemetery by a few Parisian friends - Théophile Gaultier, Dumas, historian Mignet, writer Paul Saint-Victor. It was February 17, 1856.

Hoffmann (1776-1822)

His writings are nothing more than a terrible cry of longing in twenty volumes.
Heinrich Heine

Have French poet Baudelaire has one wonderful poem - "Albatross". A proud and beautiful bird, when, spreading its wings, soars in the sky, once on earth, becomes clumsy, ponderous. Such is the poet, artist, every artistic nature.

Baudelaire wrote about himself, but poetic allegory approaches many very, very intellectually and artistically
gifted people who often face a tragic fate due to the unsettled life, etc.

The theme of opposition between the idealist artist and the pragmatic philistine became the main theme in the work of Hoffmann. The fate of him is tragic.

Since childhood, he discovered a talent for both a musician and a painter, but they prepared him for a career as a lawyer. After graduating from the university, he got a job as an official in Poznan, but the authorities, dissatisfied with the cartoons that he wrote brilliantly on them, sent him away, to the provincial town of Plock. Soon, however, he managed to move to live in Warsaw. Here he founded a musical society, painted the concert hall himself, and was himself a conductor. The time was stormy ( Napoleonic Wars, but the writer does not want to see them, he is out of politics, he lives in the world of his romantic dreams). Hoffmann, as Herzen wrote about him, “does not at all notice that all of Europe is in blood and fire. Meanwhile, the war, seeing his inattention, decided to visit him in Warsaw itself; he wouldn't have noticed her here either, but the concerts had to be stopped for a while. "

Napoleon, having sent troops to Poland, ordered the dismissal of all Prussian officials. Hoffmann also received resignation. He is terribly poor. In 1812 he wrote in his diary: "I sold my coat to dine."

Only after getting a job as an official in Berlin does he gain some material well-being and writes his crazy phantasmagoric works. As he wrote them, Herzen says (Telescope, vol. XXXIII): “Every single day a man appeared late in the evening in a wine cellar in Berlin, drank one bottle after another and sat until dawn ... , dark, funny, terrible shadows filled Hoffmann, and in a state of extreme irritation he grabbed the pen and wrote his convulsive, crazy stories. "

Sometimes he himself was scared of his fantastic heroes. Then he woke his wife, and she dutifully sat down next to him, knitted a stocking, keeping him calm.

So he wrote 12 volumes ("The Serapion Brothers", "Fantastic Stories in the Spirit of Callot", "Notes of the Cat Murr", "Little Tsakhes", "Princess Brambilla", the adorable "Nutcracker", which Tchaikovsky brilliantly brought to life in ballet, etc. ).

Hoffmann dies quite early, struck down by a serious illness - the tabes of the spinal cord, like his fellow pen Heinrich Heine.

Two worlds

The real world is cruel and harsh and difficult
In it we fight a mortal battle every day
And often, moving away from difficult everyday life,
In our imagination we create another for ourselves.
Intangible, weightless, transparent,
It is woven all from dream pearls,
And often he means much more to us,
Than all the affairs of everyday life.

Hoffmann did not accept the interests of the philistine, a little down-to-earth philistine, timid, unassuming, contented with himself, never raising his gaze to heaven, where the highest ideals of human existence soar. Oh, how pitiful they are, these little mundane people, how pathetic this real world itself is!

One must renounce everything earthly, one must learn not to notice the ugliness of material life and "dream with open eyes," he reasoned. If you manage to indulge in a dream like that, then you are a truly happy person. You are poor, ugly, you have a frock coat with ripped elbows. But be above that. Love your dream, and it will bring you everything: wealth, beauty, and joy. Love poetry, for it contains the highest knowledge.

In everyday life, in poverty and the scarcity of life's blessings, he, perhaps, did not differ much from our dear and unforgettable Akaki Akakievich Bashmachkin, but titanic powers of mind and talent lived in him.

“One of the greatest German poets, a painter of the invisible inner world, a clairvoyant of the mysterious forces of nature and spirit, an educator of youth, the highest ideal of a writer for children,” Belinsky wrote about him.

Reading Hoffmann, we constantly feel a kind of coexistence of two worlds: and (an amazing paradox!) According to all criteria of realism, the described real world and another world - invisible, surreal, created by almost insane human imagination, a wonderful world of a beautiful dream.

The novel "Notes of Murr the Cat" is devoted to the description of these two worlds. Murr the cat writes on the back of the papers of the genius violinist Kreisler a diary about his adventures, about his love for the kitty Mismis. Having read on one page enthusiastic praises to the beautiful world of dreams, we, turning it over, find ourselves in the tiny happiness of Murr the cat, purring with joy of gluttony and the caresses of his darling.

Hoffmann's novel "The Serapion Brothers" is very interesting in this topic of juxtaposition of the two worlds. This, in essence, is not a novel, but a series of short stories, stories presented in the form of dialogues, conversations of friends, about various stories they have heard or known.

Several friends formed the Brotherhood of Saint Serapion, a kind of club in which these curious Serapion talks took place.

The Brotherhood was founded on the following story.

In southern Germany, not far from a small provincial town, in a small forest, the narrator met a strange man “in a brown desert cassock, with a straw hat on his head and a black disheveled beard. He sat on a piece of rock overhanging over the ravine and gazed thoughtfully into the distance, his arms folded on his chest.

In front of me, it seemed, sat an anchorite of the first centuries of Christianity. He was once a very educated and intelligent man from a wealthy family. Upon completion of his education, he received a high diplomatic position, and he was promised a brilliant career. And then one day he disappeared. The search did not lead to anything, and only a few years later the rumor spread that a strange monk appeared in the mountains of Tyrol, living in all alone who called himself the hermit Serapion. A certain Count P. once saw him and recognized him as his disappeared nephew. He was returned home by force, but no matter how hard they fought, he was unable to regain his sanity. He ran away again and was left alone.

Serapion built himself a dwelling in the forest and lived alone, imagining himself Serapion, who in 251 in Egypt was martyred by the emperor Decius. "

The person who told this story spoke with Serapion. He discovered a wonderful gift of speech, the power of logical thinking. He was calm and happy in his blinding. “I confess, the frost hit me on the skin! And there was, to tell the truth, why. Before me stood a madman, who considered his condition the most precious gift of heaven, who found peace and happiness in it alone, and with all his heart wished me a similar fate.

I wanted to leave, but Serapion spoke again, changing his tone.

You must not think that the solitude of this wild desert is not interrupted for me by anyone. Every day I am visited wonderful people in all kinds of branches of science and arts. Yesterday I had Ariosto, and after him Dante and Petrarch. Tonight I am expecting the famous teacher of the church, Evagrius, and I am thinking of talking to him about church affairs, as I did yesterday about poetry. Sometimes I climb to the top of that mountain, from which, in good weather, you can see the towers of Alexandria, and then wonderful deeds and events flash before my eyes ... "

So, the fantastic world of dreams, detachment from material life. High dream soaring! Higher spirituality!

The harsh God drove people out of paradise,
Having sentenced to labor and poverty,
And the evil devil, playing revenge,
He returned them to paradise, but in a strange void:
Deceiving, hazy and unearthly,
With incomprehensible subtle beauty,
An unprecedented land, distant and sinless,
All illuminated by a bright dream.

The ways of the Lord are inscrutable, and a hundred years after the death of Hoffmann his "Serapion brothers" appeared in the restless post-October Russia. In the days of fierce class battles (and they, alas, exist, and the French historians of the 19th century, who discovered this phenomenon of public life, were not mistaken), several young writers, talented and arrogant (among them the future famous writers M. Zoshchenko, N. Tikhonov, K. Fedin, V. Kaverin and others. The inspiration was, perhaps, V. Shklovsky, and the most zealous L. Lunts, who died at the age of twenty-four in Berlin), created the so-called literary group"The Serapion brothers", taking advantage of the idea of ​​Hoffmann. They were looking for new literary forms, and then all young people were fascinated by the overthrow of the "old", and, most importantly, they demanded the artist's freedom from tendentiousness ("Any tendency" The Serapion brothers "reject in principle," - said in their manifesto).

Having published the collective collection "The Serapion Brothers" in 1922, the writers dispersed, but the memory of them remained, they were remembered in 1946.

We recalled Lev Lunts' harsh and cocky lines: “We have gathered in the days of revolutionary, in the days of powerful political tension.

"He who is not with us is against us!" - they told us from the right and from the left, - with whom are you, the Serapion brothers, - with the communists or against the communists, for the revolution or against the revolution? " “Who are we, the Serapion brothers with? We are with the hermit Serapion "..." For too long and painfully the public ruled Russian literature ... We do not want utilitarianism. We didn’t come for propaganda. Art is real, like life itself, and like life itself, it is without purpose and without meaning, exists because it cannot but exist. "

One of the leaders of the ruling Communist Party, A. A. Zhdanov, summed up in 1946: this is the role that “the Serapion brothers assign to art, depriving it of ideology, social significance, proclaiming the lack of ideology of art, art without a goal, art for the sake of art, art without purpose and without meaning. This is the preaching of rotten apolitism, philistinism and vulgarity. "

AA Zhdanov exaggerated the colors, "Serapions" did not threaten the state either in the early 1920s, much less after the victorious war of the Great Patriotic War. “Serapion” Mikhail Zoshchenko wrote in 1922: “… the Bolsheviks are closest to me. And I agree with them to speak bolny ... I love peasant Russia, and in this I am with the Bolsheviks on the way. "

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After the revolution of 1848, the unification of Germany, which had long been demanded by the common sense of history - both of Europe and Germany itself - again failed. took place. The adoption of a democratic constitution remained an elusive demand of the day. At the very first bursts of social activity of the proletarians, the national bourgeoisie preferred conservative loyalty to its local monarchies and easily abandoned the revolutionary ideals that it had nurtured even on the eve of 1830. The split in the camp of the liberal bourgeoisie into the national-conservative and republican wing, weakness, lack of will to take real action and, not least of all, the manifest dissatisfaction of the lower classes contributed to the fact that the revolution did not realize the goals set by the liberal bourgeoisie - through freedom to the unity of Germany. History has taken a different path. And society after the revolution embraces the mood of defeat and ever greater hopelessness, which will determine the "spirit of the times" for many years.

At the same time, Germany received a noticeable impetus to a more rapid industrial-capitalist development. There has been a clear change in the political interests of the bourgeoisie by economic ones. The place of idealistically colored, democratic projects of social development, still connected with the ideas of the Enlightenment, is now occupied in her mind by the realistic and practical goal of her own economic enrichment. Nationalist interests and the idea of ​​national superiority are gaining momentum rather quickly. Germany, like other European countries, is becoming a colonial and imperialist state.

In the second half of the 19th century, Prussia stood out among other German states due to the vigorous development of industry and economy. The era of the so-called "real" policy of the "iron chancellor" O. von Bismarck (1815 - 1898) begins, who in 1871 managed to unite Germany "with iron and blood", that is, by the most brutal methods. The unification was preceded by wars with Denmark (1864), Austria (1866), France (1871).

All these events lead to a crisis of bourgeois consciousness, to a kind of loss of spiritual support. The consequence of this is confusion and a rapid change in hobbies and mindsets.

The expanding influence of materialist thought is closely related to the economic upsurge of the bourgeoisie, and the general spread of positivism in science foreshadows and promises a new orientation of human consciousness that is looking for justification in facts in comparison with the period before 1848. However, neither accelerated economic development, nor materialization of consciousness, nor positivist pragmatism not only did not stimulate spiritual life, but, on the contrary, impoverished it and testified to the spiritual depletion of social life, only deepening its crisis. It is no coincidence that materialistic and positivist ideas coexist in this era with various forms of irrationalism, with the cult of "vitality" and simply with superstition and mysticism.

The socio-political depression in society in the 1950s found its ideological reflection in the general enthusiasm for Schopenhauer's pessimistic philosophy.

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 - 1860), after the revolution of 1848, did not bring the expected fruits of the year, legitimized pessimism and depression in the best possible way, explaining them as inherent properties inherent in life itself and proving the doom of a person in a collision with life. Schopenhauer's main work "The World as Will and Representation", written in 1819, received its true recognition in the second half of the 19th century and had a great influence on the spiritual life not only in Germany, but throughout Europe, giving impetus to a reappraisal of the values ​​of the entire century and outlining the line scrapping of his humanistic ideas.

According to Schopenhauer, the world does not develop, but moves in a circle, bringing endless repetition of the same. The principle governing being is a blind, aimless, irrational will that plunges humanity into the eternal struggle of individuals - the struggle of all against all. Pessimism, rejection of confronting the world, rejection of life itself is the spiritual result of Schopenhauer's searches. Schopenhauer believed that the only answer to the questions of existence was the position of a contemplative artist or an ascetic who departed from the world, and in the long term - death.

Since the 60s, pessimism has had an increasing impact on the cultural and political consciousness of society. F. Nietzsche, R. Wagner, W. Raabe feel the influence of Schopenhauer, although Raabe himself insisted on the independence of his critical position, independent of Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer's ideas were especially widespread in Austria-Hungary; they also had a response in France and Russia.

Significant changes that have taken place in public consciousness have left their mark on German literature. The most remarkable phenomenon in the literature of the second half of the century is the so-called "poetic realism".

The era of poetic realism lasts approximately from the middle to the end of the 19th century.

The term "poetic realism" belongs to the German writer and art theorist Otto Ludwig (1813 - 1865). Poetic realism in his view is a synthesis of real and ideal principles, natural and accidental, individual and typical, objective content of life and the author's subjective experience.

Literary critic J. Schmidt assigns a leading role in the new literature to a democratic hero - a representative of the middle stratum of society; believing that realistic literature should be relevant, but free from political predilections, he emphasizes the harmony of composition, clarity and simplicity of style. As literary sample he reveres the English realist Charles Dickens.

Social novel by G. Freytag "Coming and Consumption" (1855), the first edition of "Green Henry" (1854) by G. Keller and the first volume of his short stories "People from Zeldwila" (1858), "Chronicle of Sparrow Street" (1857) by V. Raabe became the first works of poetic realism. Somewhat later, in the 1870s and 1880s, K. F Meyer and T. Fontane, a novelist whose work became the pinnacle of German-speaking realism, entered the literary scene.

In practice, poetic realism turned out to be a much broader and deeper phenomenon than the literary-critical theories of Ludwig and Schmidt assumed. The key principle of poetic realism coincides with the main tasks of the realistic movement in French, Russian, and English literature. The main object of the image is modern reality in its causal relationships. Of particular importance is the social, national, historical determinism of characters and destinies, attention to detail.

Modern German science, in contrast to the established tradition, considers poetic realism as a natural phenomenon of the era, the dominant of which was the defeat of the 1848 revolution, the resulting disappointment and deep distrust of new forms of life determined by the growth of technology and industry, capital, economic development, pragmatic, aggressive, chauvinistic spirit of official policy, energetically and successfully supplanting old ideas, ideals and their carriers. New forms of life did not bring freedom with them; rather, they enslaved man in a new way, dehumanizing society and life itself.

Unlike English or French realism, German poetic realism is characterized by a personal perspective and an inside view, which means the subjectivization of the narrative. Therefore, poetic realism most clearly manifests itself not in a novel about society and an era, but rather in a novel of education or, and this is even more often, in a short story, story, story.

However, poetic realism does not absolutize the subjective, and very often removes the pathos of the subjective with humor. Humor turns out to be an essential element of the worldview of poetic realists. Humor is the knowledge that the crack that split the consciousness and the world of the classical idealistic-romantic era also destroyed the world of old values. Humor is, as it were, a sensation of this split, while sadness, melancholy, "world sorrow" are his emotional experiences. Sentimentality, elegiac tonality in the prose of poetic realism is, like humor, one of the forms of a negative attitude towards reality, expressed in internal reconciliation, refusal to counteract and confront life. All these are different forms of "enlightenment of reality" in realistic literature.

Naturally, this era's interest in German classics and romanticism and its partial revival not only in neo-romanticism, but also in poetic realism.

In German reality of the second half of the 19th century, they continue to find a nutrient medium and literary traditions the era of the Restoration, especially the Biedermeier tradition with its ideal of private family life and quiet joys in harmony with nature. They are still looking for and find a way out of the social and civic life that is not amenable to the influence of the human personality.

The method of recollection also contributes to the "enlightenment of reality". "Invented" and "remembered" reality have much in common and are similar in structure. Therefore, recollection is a favorite technique of German realists.

It is important to note that some of the principles of German realism, in particular the principle of recollection, which is close to fantasy, and therefore to creativity in general, anticipate the search for literature of the “end of the century”, literature of decadence and even modernism of the beginning of the XX century (“In Search of Lost Time” M . Proust).

German realism has absorbed the pessimistic spirit of its time, the feeling of the irreversible loss of the past, which, from the distance of the past, acquires more and more enlightened features, has absorbed the romantic rejection of new "rude", cynical forms of life and its new masters. The tragic hopelessness in Storm's novellas and in Raabe's novels brings their works closer to the literature of symbolism, to the art of the late 19th - early 20th centuries, throwing a bridge from the romanticism of the early 19th century to its end, and prompts them to see their work in the broad context of the artistic searches of the era.

The most important place in German realistic literature belongs to the prose writer and poet Theodor Storm (1817 - 1888), who said that his novelism grew out of his poetry and is closely related to it. The difficult life of Storm, a lawyer, an exile, then a landvogt and a judge in his native Husum, is inseparable from Schleswig-Holstein and its tangled fate under the rule of Denmark and then Prussia. Delicate, subtle, graceful prose of the Storm, not shaken by political and religious conflicts, absorbs the troubles and grief of a modern person, his feelings and experiences. Storm's immersion in the world of human feelings, a kind of sentimental enlightenment of the surrounding wretched bourgeois life fully reflected the mood and spiritual state of society in the era after the defeat of the 1848 revolution, in the era unfulfilled hopes and disappointment, when the horizon of universal interests narrows to the interest of an individual, and the general rise is replaced by decline and loss of pathos.

The storm in its work anticipates an interest in the inner life of a person, in its hidden depths, which is characteristic of the culture and literature of the “end of the century”, that is, the next era. So, one of the most famous early Storm short stories, "Immensee" (1850) is a masterpiece not only of German, but also of world novelism of the XIX century. It is no coincidence that the work withstood 30 editions during the life of the author.

"Immenzee" is an example of the so-called lyrical novella or novella of mood, which was brilliantly developed by romantics. The poetic texts are organically interwoven into the work, playing the role of leitmotifs. The story is generally built on a leitmotif technique based on the principle of remembering and shifting temporary layers. She is distinguished by a subtle knowledge of the human psyche and the world of feelings. The story in "Immensea" is built like a memory, which determines the elegiac tone of the story and the dominant sad mood in it. The general melancholic tone of the story is in harmony with the play of nuances of light, color, melody.

A sentimental melancholic mood permeates the entire work. It is initially set in the introduction: “In late autumn, at a quiet evening hour, an elderly well-dressed gentleman slowly descended on the road to the city ... Under his arm he held a long cane with a gold head, his dark eyes. Strangely combined with white, like snow, hair, and seemed to harbor the bitterness of unhappy youth, calmly looked around or down at the city, spread out in the haze of golden rays. The novel ends with a fragment named like the opening "Old Man"; together they create a framework structure within which the plot action develops on the basis of reminiscences. It is dramatic both in problem and in the form of deployment.

In the "Immenzee" rises public issues... Bourgeois calculation destroys love, and the new ambitious bourgeoisie triumphs over the romantic moods of the old-style bourgeoisie. Although the social background of events is invariably present in the novels of the Storm, it is always included in the system of human relations as one of the parts of a whole complex complex, a network of causes and effects that cause certain actions of the heroes and determine their behavior. Among these reasons, the social principle is by no means assigned a primary role along with psychology, feelings, passions, subconsciousness, traditional ideas, habits, individual logic of the personality, which is the main object of the writer's interest.

The plot of the work moves in the context of the accompanying mood. This is a story of lost love: both Reingard and Elizabeth were unable to defend their feelings. Elizabeth gives in to the "cares" of her mother and marries a wealthy, but unloved man, Reinhard does not show the due decisiveness. The plot is not new, the story is almost everyday in the life of the burgher environment. The main events of the novel are associated with the meeting of the heroes who have preserved their feelings in their souls and. as it turned out, grieving the loss.

The author draws the heroes of a completed destiny, some fragments of which have become nodes of remembrance: "Children", "In the Forest", "Letter", "Elizabeth", etc. These are essentially independent scenes of a lyrical plot, which are "fastened" by the experience of the heroes. It is not so much the plot that is important as the artistic means with which the author embodies his plan. The main attention is paid not so much to the movement of the action as to the creation of a lyrical mood. Taken together, the scenes reproduce a sad love story.

The dramatic development of the heroes' feelings is foreseen from the very first pages. Reinhard seems overly romantic. Elizabeth doesn't really believe in his dreams of distant India, and his stories about elves annoy her a little. Perhaps that is why her mother's arguments in favor of marriage to Erich seemed convincing to her. The confrontation between Erich and Reingard is barely outlined in the novel. Well-groomed vineyards, a large vegetable garden, a new distillery, a cozy home - all testify to the efficiency and practicality of Erich, which Reinhard does not possess.

Creating a realistic novella of mood, Storm develops several leitmotifs in it, which give the conflict an additional, reinforcing sound. This is the song: "My mother ordered me / To take another man as a husband." This is the description of the white lily that the hero is trying to get hold of. In the finale of the work, Reinhard, a lonely old man, sits in an armchair, and the deepening darkness seems to him "a wide and gloomy lake", where a white water lily floats alone "among wide leaves."

The drama in the Storm novel is the drama of a particular case, a private life, it manifests itself in an ordinary form, without an explosion of violent passions, experiences, emotional explanations. At the same time, a particular case finds in the work that “ bright light", About the need for which for this genre wrote by Ludwig Tieck.

In the late 1850s - early 1860s, one can state the aggravation of internal conflict in Storm's short stories ("In the Castle" (1862), "University Years" (1863)). It should be noted that one of the best and last stories of the Storm - "The Rider on the White Horse" was written outside the study period, in 1888.

Storm's novelism was surprisingly consonant with the time - both the quiet, but clearly audible sound of social problems, understood as problems common to all mankind, and its form - the play of leitmotifs, the shifting of the temporal layers of the narrative, and symbolism.

One of the main themes of the work of Wilhelm Raabe (1831 - 1910) is the theme of self-determination of the individual, her right to her own life in opposition to modern reality, her inhuman spirit.

The experience of 1848 led Raabe to a complete rejection of both the bourgeois philistinism and the psychology of the success of the practical and aggressive burgher. In his work, the type of eccentric, the original, that is, a strange personality that can exist only by isolating himself from society, constantly arises. Liberation from oppression, from the pressure of the environment and the way out for the individual is salvation in the inner world or overcoming life with the help of humor. The subjective spiritual world of a person always opposes the public world in Raabe.

Raabe's literary activity unfolds in the 50s. The writer became famous for the Chronicle of Sparrow Street (1857), which opened the first period of his work, which lasted until 1870, before the Franco-Prussian war.

The Chronicle is based on a story of love seduction, which in the third generation, however, finds a happy resolution. Full of humor, sentimental enlightenment of reality at the end of the Chronicle smoothes those realistic pictures that at its beginning give an idea of ​​the social and political situation in Germany in the middle of the 19th century. Lawrence Stern, implicitly quoted in it, as well as the young Schiller and Jean-Paul Richter became the model for the writer in this novel. For Raabe, the subjective inner reality of consciousness, experiencing and telling "I" is more essential and richer than objective reality. The Chronicle of Sparrow Street is a kind of chronicle of a Berlin street and its definition as a chronicle rather accurately characterizes the genre of the work. The chronicle is written on behalf of the narrator; this is an old Walchoder who keeps a diary, conveying many stories and episodes, some melodramatic, some tragic, albeit everyday.

In the recollections of the narrator, different temporal levels are mixed, due to which an imaginary parallelism arises between the past and the present, between the time described and the time of the story. In this masterly narrative manner, a story of three generations unfolds, consisting of many episodes, connected by a fictitious chronicler and the unity of the place - Vorobyinaya Street.

Already in this work, the main types are found literary heroes Raabe are simple workers mental qualities which oppose them to people from high society. In this democratism of his, Raabe is comparable to Dickens. At the same time, avoiding sharp Dickensian contrasts, hyperbolism and eccentricity, Raabe approaches the style of romantic Dickens with his assertion of the moral example of small people, their work and life, human unity.

In the novels of 1860 - 1870, Raabe, focusing on the samples of Goethe (novels about Wilhelm Meister) and Dickens ("David Copperfield"), tried to depict both the path of personality development and modern social life, combining two types of novel - the "novel of education" ( or "the novel of becoming") and a novel about modern life. These are the novels "The Hungry Pastor" (1864), "Abu Telfan" (1867), "Funeral Drogues" (1870), which are close to each other and constitute the so-called Stuttgart trilogy, although they are not a trilogy in the literal sense of the word. They are distinguished by a tragic worldview and the idea of ​​the individual's isolation, finding personal refuge and salvation from the world, whose political situation seems hopeless to the writer. But Raabe's pessimism does not prevent him from seeing the comic sides of life and people, humor "removes" the insolubility of conflicts.

It should be noted that as the author of critical novels about modern life, Raabe remains completely alone in German literature of the 1860s. But gradually he also abandons the novel with ramified action and from reproduction social life modernity; the reflection of the world in the individual consciousness becomes in the future the main structural element his images.

German literature of the 30s-70s of the XIX century.

Lecture plan

2. High Biedermeier

3. "Pre-March" literature

4. German literature of the second half of the 19th century. Poetic realism.

1. Socio-political situation in Germany in the 30s - 70s of the nineteenth century and the development of German literature.

The variety of German literary movements in the 1830s undoubtedly reflected significant shifts in the country's economic and socio-political development.

In 1815, after the final defeat of Napoleon, the Congress of Vienna was held, the purpose of which was to determine the state borders and the principles of the existence of post-Napoleonic Europe. The Congress of Vienna and its decisions marked the beginning of a new era in the development of the social and cultural life of the German lands - the era of the Restoration. The end of the era is considered the March revolution of 1848, which became a response to the revolutionary events in France.

In accordance with the decision of the Vienna Congress, a new public education, the so-called German Union. It consists of 38 practically independent territories, which perpetuates a centuries-old tradition of fragmentation in Germany. Relying on the monarchical state structure, the official policy of 1815 - 1848 consolidates the class superiority of the nobility and the clergy, the two pillars of the monarchy. At the same time, the rights of the rest of the population are limited: the emerging bourgeoisie, intelligentsia, officials, artisans, peasants, and the growing stratum of the industrial proletariat. The forces opposed to the Restoration regime continue to fight for the ideals of "unity" and "freedom".

Despite the dominance of monarchical regimes in the German lands, in the 30s Germany made tangible real steps along the path of bourgeois development. Already at this time, those economic and political preconditions that in 1871 would lead to the proclamation of a united German Empire began to be determined. At the same time, during this period, the struggle for a unified republican Germany begins.

The 1930s in Germany are marked by a slower, in comparison with such advanced powers of Europe as England and France, but still a very definite growth of the productive forces. Despite a number of unfavorable conditions, industry is steadily developing in the country. The continental blockade, established during the years of the Napoleonic dictatorship in Europe, was a rather effective, albeit a kind of stimulus to the development of the German national economy. Bourgeois relations are clearing their way into agriculture Germany, developing especially rapidly after the agrarian reform of 1807-1811.

The news of the revolutionary explosion in July 1830 in Paris, like a refreshing, life-giving whirlwind, swept across Germany, backwater and fragmented, deceived in its bright hopes, generated by the patriotic enthusiasm of the liberation war against Napoleon. These events were received with particular enthusiasm by the German youth, whose moods were very vividly expressed by Heine. Upon learning of the revolution in France, he wrote in his diary: “Lafayette, tricolor banner,“ Marseillaise ”... I feel like I'm intoxicated. Bold hopes rise passionately, like trees with golden fruits, with thriving branches spreading their foliage to the very clouds ... I am all joy and song, I am all sword and flame! "

The July Revolution in France was the impetus that caused revolutionary outbreaks in Germany, prepared by the internal development of class contradictions in the country. The revolutionary movement of the early 1930s was politically immature here and was much weaker than in France. However, it showed that even in a backward, fragmented country like Germany, political reaction could not hold back the general course of economic development. Rebellions broke out in Hesse-Darmstadt, where the peasants, armed with scythes and clubs, smashed the landlords, estates and tax offices they hated. In Bavaria, students opposed the government. The unrest spilled over into revolutions and in some other small German states. This was the case, for example, in Saxony and Hanover, where, as a result of these unrest, constitutions were introduced.

The liberal press revived, on the pages of which articles began to appear frequently demanding a constitution and the unification of Germany. Numerous appeals and petitions were sent to the government, reflecting the demands of the liberal bourgeoisie. In May 1832, on the anniversary of the local constitution, the Bavarian liberals staged a demonstration in Gambach, which was attended by about 30 thousand people (the so-called "Gambach festival"). Here speeches were made demanding the unity of Germany, the republican system in the country; speakers talked about support liberation movement in Poland and revolutionary France. Significant student unrest took place in April 1833 in Frankfurt, where an attempt was made to seize the city and occupy the building of the Union Sejm.

These events reflected the growth of the class consciousness of the German bourgeoisie, its desire to eliminate the political fragmentation of the country, which hindered the development of trade and the economy.

Popular unrest in Germany took place against the background of a revolutionary upsurge throughout Europe (the national liberation movement in Poland, revolutionary movement in Belgium, uprisings in a number of Italian states, the end of the struggle for parliamentary reform in England). The opposition movement caused a series of repressions from the ruling circles of the German states. Encouraged by the Austrian Chancellor Meternich, the German Federal Sejm passed reactionary decrees in 1832 prohibiting political gatherings and demonstrations, the making of political speeches and the filing of petitions. Numerous arrests are taking place in the country, especially among the participants in the "Gambakh Festival". The reaction is noticeably intensifying after the Frankfurt events. Courts pass verdicts in the case of participants in the uprising; all meetings are dispersed by troops. In the summer of 1834, a conference of ministers of German states in Vienna worked out and issued the so-called Vienna Act, directed against the progressive press and universities and limiting constitutional principles.

These shifts in the economic and socio-political life of the country did not hesitate to have an impact on various forms of public consciousness, in particular on closely related philosophy and literature. The philosophical movements of the 1930s in Germany had a significant impact on the formation of German realism.

In the 1930s, sharp contradictions were identified in the camp of Hegel's followers - a group of Old Hegelians or Right Hegelians (Gubler, Ginrichs, Erdmann) and a Left Hegelian wing, or Young Hegelians (Bruno and Edgar Bauer, David Strauss, Max Stirner) stand out. From the standpoint of bourgeois radicalism, the Hegelian left had a negative attitude towards Prussianism and sharply criticized the dogmas of the Christian religion.

The character of German literature of this decade is drastically changing in comparison with the literature of the 10s and 20s. The contradictions between the conservative orientation of the official ideology and politics and the increasingly clear need for new forms of social life determine the spiritual culture of the era of the Restoration and the first decade after its end. One of the reasons for the convergence of literature with the "spirit of the times" is the democratization of the literary market, the expansion of the readership and the change in the very status of writers: all large quantity authors moved to the category of professional writers.

Continuing and transforming the tradition of Weimar classicism and romanticism and anticipating many of the attitudes of realism, the verbal art culture The restoration also possesses a number of specific features that cannot be reduced to the aesthetics of previous or subsequent literary trends.

In its famous work Heine's “Romantic School” emphasized that “with the death of Goethe, a new literary era begins in Germany; with him went to the grave old Germany, the age of aristocratic literature has come, to the end, the democratic age begins. "

If Heine's prediction about the onset of the democratic age in German literature was too optimistic, nevertheless, the main phenomena in the German literary process of the 1930s and 1970s testify to its certain democratization in comparison with the previous stage. Moreover, these new tendencies were reflected primarily in the ideological and aesthetic evolution of Heine himself, who already in the 1920s, as the author of the "Book of Songs" and "Travel Pictures", rightfully took a place in the forefront of German literature. But it was precisely in the 1930s that the much more clearly defined progressive socio-political orientation of Heine's work led to his turning to the genre of journalism that was revolutionary-democratic in its content. Opposing the epigones of German romantic poetry, Heine polemically sharpens his understanding of the democratization of literature - he even stops writing poetry for quite a long time, sincerely believing that poetry has outlived its usefulness, and focuses his attention on prose.

For Heine, as for the majority of German writers of that time, the comprehension of the experience of the July Revolution in France is of paramount importance. Perception of the ideas of sensimonism, the prospects for bourgeois-democratic movements and increasing attention to the actions of the working class - these are the circle of questions that underlie creative activity Heine of the 30s.

In his first newspaper correspondence from Paris, where he moved in 1831 (French Affairs (1832)), Heine tells German readers about the lively active social and political life of the French capital, still full of vivid echoes and reminders of the hot days of the end of July 1830 of the year. Questions of philosophy, literature and art, which occupy such a large place in Heine's journalism of this decade, are considered by him in close connection with the socio-political struggle of his time. A shining example of this is his major works: "On the history of religion and philosophy in Germany" (1834) and "Romantic school" (1836). In these works, having sharply criticized the idealistic currents in German philosophy, the poet dealt a devastating blow to the reactionary romanticism in German literature.

During this period, Heine's work, like almost all German literature, was associated with the process of forming the method of critical realism. The literary life of these years was characterized by a sharp polemic with the ideological and aesthetic principles of romanticism, a struggle with the late romantics, who still played a certain role in German literature.

An important feature of German literature from 1815 to 1848 is its appeal to the cultural values ​​of the 18th century. Many important qualities of the literary literature of the Enlightenment, which were intensively refuted by romantics at the turn of the 18th - 19th centuries, are now becoming relevant again. They are "restored" either in the form of frank journalism and didacticism, which sometimes the most prominent representatives of post-romantic literature (Heine, Stifter) did not shy away from, or in the form of sentimental-idyllic utopias (Gotthelf, Mörike) or in the form of Sternian irony, which was perceived and assimilated through the works of Jean-Paul (Immermann, Heine, early Stifter). Returns, largely thanks to the activities of Heine and "Young Germany", respect for documentary and "near-artistic" forms of travel notes, correspondence, literary critical essays.

The well-known "duality", "bi-directional" political and cultural atmosphere in the era of the Restoration inevitably gave rise to a polarization of the literary context depending on the positive (or just loyal) or critical opposition to the officially proclaimed social values. “It is impossible to discuss our modern German literature without sinking into the depths of politics,” Heine wrote in 1832, referring to the first post-romantic generation of writers.

A group of conservatively (politically and aesthetically) oriented German-speaking authors of the era of the Restoration gravitates towards the designation "Biedermeier". The liberal-democratic movement of 1815-1848, opposed to it in its socio-political orientation and political program, is called the literature of the pre-March period (that is, the one preceding the March revolution of 1848) or "pre-March literature" in German literary histories. Often one of these two terms is used as a general designation for all the literature of the period of the Restoration. It seems logical nevertheless to conduct dividing line between two important concepts of literary history, each of which has its own worldview, its own aesthetics and a separate direction in literature.

In addition to the two distinguished groups of "conservatively" and "liberal-democratic" oriented authors - Biedermeier and the pre-March trend in literature - in the context of poetry, drama and prose of the Restoration era, there are also lonely writers who do not completely fit into any of the indicated trends. So, the writer K.L. Immerman (1796 - 1840), the creator of two voluminous epic novels “Epigones. Family Memories in 9 Books "(1825-1836) and" Munchausen. History in arabesques "(1838 - 1839) is called in German sources the theoretician and practitioner of literary" epigonism ", including the poet A. von Platen (1796 - 1835), the author of the famous collections" Gazelles "(1823)," Sonnets from Venice "(1825) and" Polish Songs "(1831 - 1832, publ. 1839). The same Platen, together with N. Lenau, on the dominant theme, their lyrics are sometimes combined into a group of "poets of world sorrow." (Sometimes this group is illegally expanded, supplementing it with Büchner, Heine and Grabbe.) The playwright, prose writer and poet F. Goebbel is represented in the literature of the era for the "Young Hegelian" line.

It is obvious that German literature of this period did not give the world such significant writers as Stendel and Balzac, Dickens and Thackeray. At the same time, the same processes took place in it as in the literatures. European countries, the formation of a new literary direction was actively underway.

The process of the formation of realism in German literature of the 1930s was most clearly manifested in the work of Georg Buchner (1813 - 1837). Buchner lived for less than 24 years and left behind only four small literary texts: one novella and three dramas, which are now included in the treasury of German literature.

Büchner was born shortly before the beginning of the Restoration on the territory of the Rhine principality of Hesse in an enlightened burgher family. Father, an ardent admirer of Napoleon, was a hereditary doctor. Following the wishes of his father, the future writer enters the medical faculty of the University of Strasbourg. In Strasbourg, Büchner establishes contacts with the utopian socialists of the sensimonist orientation. In the minds of a young student, a firm idea of ​​the revolution as a the only way able to bring Germany out of social and political stagnation. Therefore, after transferring to the University of Giessen, Büchner became one of the leaders of a secret political organization - the "Human Rights Society" - which aimed to restore the basic human rights of the poorest strata of the population and had a revolutionary orientation.

The clandestinely published Hesse Vestnik became the organ of the Society. However, the propaganda efforts of Buchner and his comrades were not successful in the general population. Thus, the peasants in most cases took the "Hesse Vestnik" to the nearest police station, without even looking at the sheet. In 1835, many of the leaders of the society were arrested. Buchner escapes arrest only by fleeing to Strasbourg, where he, after a while, completes his education with the defense of his thesis "On the cranial nerves."

The revolutionary's career is cut short. Buchner embarks on a scientific career, accepting an offer to take the place of assistant professor of natural history at the newly founded University of Zurich. However, Büchner's teaching career was not destined to continue. In February 1837, he died suddenly of typhoid fever, never finishing his first teaching semester.

Büchner the writer occupies a special place in the literature of the era of the Restoration. The author's democratic convictions, the spontaneous materialism of his aesthetic ideas, and his polemical attitude to the established literary canons (for example, to Schiller's drama) bring Büchner closer to Young Germany.

The four-act drama Death of Danton was written by Buchner in five weeks in 1835, shortly before leaving for Strasbourg. An appeal to the events of the French bourgeois revolution of 1789 was to a certain extent logical for the ex-revolutionary Buchner, who was also under the fresh impression of the failure of the "Human Rights Society" and under fear of possible arrest. The author of the drama asks questions about the role of the individual in history, about the necessity and possibility of changing social conditions, about the nature of social progress. Writing "Death of Danton" was preceded by a thorough study of historical sources, in particular "History of the French Revolution" (1823 - 1827) by Thiers. Approximately one-sixth of the text of the drama is made up of verbatim excerpts from the speeches of the participants in the events, borrowed from historical documents.

Putting on the material of the French Revolution of the late 18th century the problem of revolutionary violence, the leader and the people in the revolution, Buchner naturally took into account the experience of the events of July 1830 in Paris, clearly showing the limitations of the bourgeois revolution.

Focusing on the historical dramas of Shakespeare and Grabbe, Büchner deliberately opposes his concept of history to the one followed by Schiller. The main collision of Schiller's dramas - the conflict between necessity and freedom - is essentially abolished by Büchner. The personality in Death of Danton no longer has the freedom to make decisions. The emphasis is transferred to the stream of historical being, which is absolutely independent of the efforts of the subject. Schiller's belief in the moral invincibility of the individual, the bearer of a positive moral principle, is opposed by Buchner's conviction of the "devilish fatalism of history" (from a letter to the bride dated March 10, 1834). Personality, according to Büchner, is nothing more than "foam" on the crest of a wave of history, a puppet in the hands of fate. The logic of history is incomprehensible to an individual, life is "chaos" ruled by a god named "Nothing".

The collision of "Danton's Death" is no longer a classic confrontation between two antagonistic heroes - it looks much more complex. Danton and Robespierre, political opponents, are located in a certain sense "on the same side of the barricade" if we mean the isolation of the leaders of the revolution from the vital interests of the French people. At the same time, in accordance with the fatalistic concept of Büchner, both heroes, along with the masses of the people, appear in the historical process only as “puppets” surrendered to “unknown forces”.

In the composition of the drama and the construction of individual scenes, a decisive departure from the principles of classical theater is important. Individual episodes of "Death of Danton" do not follow from one another according to the principle of formal logical sequence. Mass scenes or the introduction of "random" representatives of the people, only once manifested in the action of the people, outwardly look like methods of retardation, but play their artistically significant role: they help to concretize the historical conflict. Buchner gives in The Death of Danton a brilliant example of an "open", "epic" drama, acting in many respects as a direct predecessor of " epic theater"XX century playwright B. Brecht.

The tragedy "Woyzeck", created during 1836 and left unfinished due to the death of the author, is the highest achievement of Büchner the playwright.

As in The Death of Danton, Buechner proceeds in Woyzeck from real events, supported by documentary evidence, only now it is not material from world history, but a criminal case from the life of the lower strata of society, described in detail in the newspapers. In 1821, in Leipzig, the barber soldier Woyzeck, 41, out of jealousy, stabs his mistress, the 46-year-old widow of the regimental surgeon Voost, with a dagger fragment, and is sentenced to death penalty... The execution is carried out despite ample evidence that Wojzeck, a mentally ill person, was apparently in a state of mental insanity at the time of the crime.

By making this real event the plot basis of his drama (6 years earlier Stendhal used the story of Antoine Berthe in the same way in Red and Black), Büchner makes a revolution in his contemporary ideas about tragedy. The hero of a full-fledged tragic action is a lumpen, "the most insignificant person", poor, deprived spiritually and physically. The psychology of the suffering of the "little man" is as interesting to Büchner the artist as the psychopathological grounds of murder are attractive to Büchner the naturalist. The truth of life, the author's first aesthetic commandment, is combined with an equally important principle of penetrating the inner world of an "insignificant" human being.

The theme of human alienation and isolation, touched upon in The Death of Danton, both in the social and in the natural world, becomes the leading motive of the drama. The soldier Woyzeck is poor and sick: he is haunted by voices and ghosts. He has a beloved woman, whom he, as a military man, has no right to marry, and an illegitimate son, for whose maintenance there is not enough money. To provide food for the child, Wojzeck agrees to act as a guinea pig in the experiments of a materialist doctor who makes him eat peas for six months. Wojzeck's only "natural" connection with the universe is destroyed when Maria, his sensual beloved, cheats on him with a tambour major full of vital force. An attempt to stand up for his honor ends in failure: the enemy is physically stronger than the patient, who is also weakened by Wojzeck's "pea diet". The way out of the "vicious circle", as in a classic tragedy, is murder: Wojzeck stabs the unfaithful Maria. The preparation for the murder (buying a knife, saying goodbye to a comrade in the barracks) and the very mechanism of committing a crime are presented in detail, detached and cruelly in the work. However, the author's indifference to what is happening is only apparent. The "grandmother's tale" interspersed into the drama sounds like a symbolic reflection of the restlessness, hopelessness and hopelessness of the fate of the protagonist, but it also carries a huge charge of compassion for the fate of the "little man". The "poor child", abandoned by everyone in this world, turns his complaint to the heavenly bodies. But the sun appears to him as a "withered sunflower", the moon as "rottenness", the stars as "bread crumbs", the earth as an "inverted pot." At the end of the tale, the child "sat down and cried," "and so it sits until now, all alone." The plot of the tale, along with the entire course of the action, is an additional confirmation of the final conclusion of the drama: Wojzeck is not a monster and not a stupid animal, but an unhappy man, hunted by life. (“Suffering is my prayer,” he says once.) The measure of suffering is overflowing, and this pushes him to a crime.

Elements of the Hessian dialect in the speech of the characters, proverbs and fragments of folk songs interspersed with the replicas of the heroes create a specific stylistic flavor in the drama. The stream of warm people's "soulfulness" spontaneously arising in this way contrastingly sets off the inevitably cruel course of events.

Mental suffering and mental illness, loneliness, isolation, alienation, abandonment by God and people - themes common to "Wojzeck" and the short story "Lenz" (1836), found in Büchner's drafts after his death.

The plot is based on an episode from the life of one of the brightest representatives of the "storm and onslaught" movement, playwright J. MR Lenz (1751 - 1792). In 1778, the writer, suffering from severe attacks of schizophrenia, spends two weeks in the Alsatian village of Walderbach (in the novel - Waldbach) in the family of pastor I. F. Oberlin (1740 - 1826), a famous educator of the Enlightenment. Out of habit of working with documentary sources, Büchner, who had long been interested in the life and work of Lenz, turns to Oberlin's diary notes, containing a detailed description of the condition of the sick Lenz during his stay in Alsace.

Adhering to a rather strict sequence of Oberlin's notes (many fragments of the novel are literal quotations from the pastor's manuscript), Buchner in his text places emphasis in a different way. The author replaces the point of view of an objective observer, which dominated in Oberlin, with an internal perspective, with a “look from the inside”, masterfully imitating the form of perception (“stream of consciousness”) of a mentally ill person. In addition, to the substantial corpus of Oberlin's notes are added absolutely original episodes of the hero's external and internal life, connected with the experience of nature and God, as well as Lenz's dispute with the writer Kaufman about art.

The source of the hero's mental suffering, the cause of the "nameless fear" that now and then encompasses Lenz, is the transformation of a previously harmonious world into a chaotic heap of disorderly debris. Natural and human world lost their former integrity in the eyes of the hero, the universe for Lenz is no longer space, there is a "huge gap" on it. The ability to perceive the needs of the entire universe as his personal pain is a quality of Lenz, equally associated with his mental illness, and with the tendency to heroization of the individual (“geniomania”), which was widespread during the Storm and Onslaught. “The universe seemed to him wounded; it hurt him deep, unspeakable. "

Lenz is trying to take upon himself, along with the "universal pain", also responsibility for all the incongruities of the world. The impossibility of somehow influencing the imperfection of being plunges the hero into an even greater abyss of despair, as after a failed attempt to resurrect a dead girl. (Lenz behaves in this situation like Jesus at the tomb of Lazarus.) Calm and bliss visit Lenz's soul only for a short time: while reading the Bible, horseback riding with Oberlin, and also on Sunday, when the pastor allows him to preach a sermon in his place ...

Lenz's schizophrenia, the gradual loss of the whole picture of the world by the hero, is presented by Buchner as a reaction to the disintegrated social relationships, to the alienation of the individual from the world. The composition of the novella (individual fragments are lined up one after the other without a definite connection and transitions), as well as a specific lapidary style, are artistic forms reflections of the "disintegrated" world. The ending of the work can be interpreted in the same sense. Interrupting the novella in a half-phrase (“This is how he lived on ...”), Büchner creates an artistically necessary correspondence to the chaotic, unbalanced way of life and the inner world of the hero.

In the 1930s, qualitatively new trends in the German literary process had an active impact on the creative evolution of Karl Immermann (1796 - 1840), a writer who made a significant contribution to the development of German progressive literature, in particular, to the development of the social novel genre. Immermann's creative quest led him to close personal friendship, and sometimes active creative collaboration with Heine, despite the differences in their political views.

The early period of Immerman's work, dating back to the early 1920s, was marked by a significant influence of romanticism. During this period, the writer did not create any significant works. He publishes selected poems and romantic tragedies "Ronseval Valley", "King Periander", "Cardenio and Celinda". By the end of the 1920s, the ideological orientation of Immerman's work was more clearly defined. Not only among his works of these years, but also in the writer's legacy as a whole, a significant place is occupied by the historical drama "Tragedy in Tyrol" (1827), later called "Andreas Gopher" in a shortened and revised form. Renouncing his unsuccessful searches on the paths of romanticism, Immerman seeks here ways of realistic reflection of reality. Choosing a national-historical plot for his drama, he turns to the recent past - to the Tyrolean uprising in 1809 against Napoleon, led by Andreas Gofer. But due to the limitedness of his social positions, the writer did not understand the deep contradictions of this uprising, which consisted in the fact that it was the only major action of the popular masses against the Napoleonic occupation in Germany at that time. However, it was inspired by the Austrian government and was inspired by reactionary Catholic ideas, setting itself the task of restoring the Austrian monarchy. In accordance with this, Immermann erroneously chose Andreas Hofer as a tragic hero, since in reality he was not fighting for the interests of the people, but was the executor of the will of the Austro-Catholic reaction, which, frightened by the scale of the partisan war, betrayed this popular movement. However, the strong positive side of the drama is Immerman's desire to carry out the idea of ​​the decisive role of the popular masses in the national liberation movements. He critically portrays the Austrian Chancellor, in whom Metternich was easily recognized by his contemporaries.

Some aesthetic aspects of the drama reveal its essential weaknesses - the visions and dreams of the characters in the play, which play an essential role in the development of the plot, the angel directing the course of events, the lengths and the somewhat stilted pathos of the monologues, undoubtedly weaken the realistic sound of the drama.

Immerman's keen interest in the socio-political conflicts of reality was reflected in the collection of his poems in 1830. The cycle of sonnets about the homeland stands out here. Civil poems, characteristic of the collection, are imbued with rejection of the surrounding reality. The author seeks to show the poet's conflict with reality, to paint pictures of the miserable, deplorable state of Germany today. Sonnet IX, dedicated to the theme of the unity of the motherland, sounds especially strong. True, the poet's public protest in these, in many respects still weak, poems is expressed indistinctly, and there is no definite positive program in them either.

Despite the writer's unremitting gravitation towards drama and theater (in 1834, Immermann became the head of the city theater in Dusseldorf), his most significant works that influenced the subsequent development of German literature were the novels Epigones (1836) and Munchausen (1835 - 1839). These novels reflected some the most important points the socio-political development of modern Germany - the gradual ousting from the historical arena of the feudal nobility by a new emerging class, the bourgeoisie.

In the center of the novel "Epigones" is the image of Herman, a burgher by birth, who, after wandering, finds himself in the duke's castle. The writer shows the formation of the character of the hero. And it is in this sense that Immermann's novel has often been compared to Goethe's upbringing novel The Study Years of Wilhelm Meister. Immerman paints a picture of the impoverishment of the ancient noble family. The Duke's estates gradually passed into the hands of the millionaire manufacturer, Uncle Herman. The Duke's close associate, Wilhelmy, calls the nobility an outgoing class, and its current representatives - epigones. The dying aristocracy is described in the novel with some sympathy, sadness, sympathy. The author did not take the ideological positions of the nobility. Sad intonations sound in the work because the writer saw the predatory, self-serving features of the bourgeoisie, which is replacing the aristocracy, which has retained in the author's eyes a certain romanticized halo of exquisite nobility.

Immermann was one of the first in German literature to reflect in the Epigones the process of the withering away of the old feudal order. At the same time, the writer even clearly underestimates the strength of the German nobility, which, due to the economic backwardness of Germany, for a long time kept key political positions... However, the general trend of the novel is correct. There are separate sketches in the work, reflecting character traits of the then social and political life of Germany. So, for example, in the chapter "Demagogues" the student anti-Prussian opposition is quite aptly shown. A lot is said in other pages of the novel about political persecution, censorship persecution, and the fragmentation of the country. Describing the industrial enterprises of the manufacturer, Immerman draws attention to the plight of the workers.

Criticizing bourgeois progress, Immerman was still far from understanding the correct paths leading to the reorganization of society. His ideal had a very definite conservative coloring in the spirit of the populism of the German romantics. The hero of the novel Herman, having destroyed the factory of his deceased uncle, becomes a landowner-farmer, and gives most of his land to the peasants. The novel has significant artistic weaknesses. The lack of a single storyline is replaced by long dialogues and reasoning. Faintly outlined characters actors.

Further ideological and aesthetic evolution of the writer was convincingly reflected in the novel "Munchausen". As in. "Epigones", here the same theme of the development of new bourgeois relations and the death of the old feudal world is raised, but it is revealed with greater depth and concreteness. The traditional image of the liar Baron Munchausen is reinterpreted in the novel in the spirit of modernity - he appears as the personification of idle talk and projection, as a symbol of lies and hypocrisy. The writer expressed his hostility towards the Prussian officers in the image of the thieving deceiver and adventurer Rucciopuccio. It is obvious that Immerman is to a certain extent freed from his illusions in relation to the nobility. In the satirical and caricatured images of the decrepit impoverished landowner Baron Shnik-Shnak-Shnur and his daughter Emerentia, no sympathy is felt by the author. Criticism of bourgeois entrepreneurship takes on a satirical acuteness in Munchausen.

The positive conservative-populist ideal of Immerman, revealed by the author in the large inserted story "Starostin Dvor", also receives a more detailed and convincing artistic motivation in Munchausen. A wealthy farmer who maintains a patriarchal way of life and in his vast economy - this is the healthy social foundation on which, according to Immerman, society should rely. However, with all his desire to idealize the village kulak, the writer noticed in him the features of cold prudence and money-grubbing. The novel's realistic tendencies were also reflected in some attempts to portray class differentiation in the countryside, although the tendency to portray idyllic patriarchal relations somewhat blurred the picture of the contradictions between the farm laborer and the rich farmer.

Close to Immermann in aesthetic positions was the playwright Christian Dietrich Grabbe (1801 - 1836), whose work o played a significant role in German literature in the 1930s.

Like Heine, Grabbe was one of the "troublemakers" in the literary life of Restoration Germany. Unlike the author of The Book of Songs and Traveling Pictures, Grabbe realized his creative potential exclusively in the field of drama, considering the renewal of the German theater main task modern literature.

Heine, who judged on principle about modern literature, spoke with great respect about the talent of Grabbe. In his "Memoirs" (volume 9) Heine wrote: "... Grabbe was one of the greatest German poets and among all our dramatic poets is one of the most akin to Shakespeare."

Grabbe's worldview and aesthetics were not a coherent, harmonious system of ideas. Positive attitude towards the ideals of the French bourgeois revolution, admiration for the personality of Napoleon, enthusiastic acceptance of the revolutionary events of 1830 in France, criticism of the current state German life and literature brings him closer to the "pre-March" writers, in particular Heine (Grabbe became friends with him for a short time while studying in Berlin). At the same time, the cosmopolitanism of the Young Germans and Heine is alien to Grabbe. "Motherland", "people", "national history" for him are no less important values ​​than "freedom, equality, brotherhood."

Contradictions between Grabbe's creativity and weaknesses bourgeois literary criticism tried to explain his artistic skill by the properties of his unbalanced character, passing by the writer's truly plight.

Grabbe's talent manifested itself most vividly in the genre of historical drama, where, in particular, the writer's interest in national-historical themes was reflected. The writer seeks to concentrate the action of his dramas around the central character - any historical personality... Although Grabbe, being an idealist, did not correctly understand the course of historical development in everything, he constantly correlated the actions of his heroes with historical events. So, moving away from the "cult of heroes" he went to a realistic historical drama.

The most significant works of Grabbe are two tragedies from the Hohenstaufen cycle - Emperor Frederick Barbarossa (1829) and Emperor Henry VI (1830), the drama Napoleon, or One Hundred Days (1830), a play based on the antique plot "Hannibal" (1838 - 1835) and The Battle of Hermann (1835).

The central collision of Grabbe's drama is the conflict between the personal and the supra-personal principle. The heroes of Grabbe's plays, as a rule, are strong, outstanding personalities. Often these are historical figures (Sulla, Hannibal, Napoleon, Friedrich Barbarossa) or "eternal" images of world literature (the drama "Don Juan and Faust" (1828)). A kind of "geniocentrism" of Grabbe's aesthetic ideas, the author's undisguised admiration for a "strong personality" associate his work with the tradition of romanticism.

At the same time, in the work of Grabbe, an anti-romantic, "supra-personal" beginning, manifested as the "idea of ​​history", also makes itself felt. The heroes of his historical and mythological tragedies, carriers of a pronounced individual principle, invariably suffer defeat at the end of the play. Circumstances (the will of the masses, the logic of the movement of history, fate, fate, chance) turn out to be stronger. The strong personalities Faust and Don Juan become the prey of Satan; the great Napoleon, after returning to its former glory within 100 days, was finally defeated at the Battle of Waterloo ("Napoleon, or One Hundred Days"); persecuted by the Romans, betrayed by his compatriots, Hannibal ("Hannibal") dies in the consciousness of the uselessness of his own great deeds; the prince of one of the Germanic tribes Hermann ("Battle of Hermann"), although he helps his people to free themselves from Roman dependence, is not able to inspire his fellow tribesmen to conquer Rome.

The author's sympathies, as a rule, are on the side of the individualist hero, even if he is defeated in the struggle of life. The leitmotif of Grabbe's dramas is grief over the “unheroality” of the modern era. The author has in mind precisely his time, the post-Napoleonic era, when he puts the prophetic words into the mouth of his Don Juan: "The time is approaching when war and peace, love and happiness, God and faith will be just empty words." With all the consciousness of the “non-heroism” of the modern era, Grabbe still sees a deep meaning in the existence of lone heroes: their bright, like comets, fates remind from time to time of the high destiny of the individual, thereby preventing humanity from sinking into the abyss of everyday life.

Reality, "circumstances", the objective "course of things" are another important component of Grabbe's experimental dramas. The fates of the heroes unfold against a real, historically and geographically defined background. In the play "Don Juan and Faust" these are specific streets and squares of Rome, Mont Blanc, in historical dramas- "milestone" for German and European history, places of great battles and making "fateful" decisions. Grabbe seeks to bring dramatic action closer to the living movement of history. In a dramatic dilogy about the Hohenstaufens, in "Napoleon", "Hannibal" and "The Battle of Hermann" important role assigned to large-scale mass and battle scenes. Contrary to the canons of the classical theater, Grabbe introduces fragments of battles involving cavalry and artillery, elements of violence, suffering and the groans of the dying into the stage action. Remarks-comments to individual scenes often exceed the volume of monologues and dialogues of the characters.

The specific features of Grabbe's dramaturgy were especially clearly expressed in the dramas about the Hohenstaufens. The author's main attention is paid to the main characters of the plays, but folk scenes also play a significant role in them, revealing the social or political origins of the conflicts that underlie the action. This is how the play about Frederick Barbarossa begins, in the first scene of which the Milanese appear in rebellion against the emperor.

The dramatic dilogy also testifies to Grabe's obvious gravitation towards some of the principles of Shakespearean drama, which manifested itself in his appeal to the acute conflicts of history, to the well-known variegation of numerous scenes, to the frequent change of scene and a large number of characters. While preserving the color of the time, Grabe sometimes achieves deep philosophical generalizations in revealing the eternal themes of life and death.

Grabbe's dramas gravitate towards the type of tragicomedy: "heroic" and comic scenes and situations replace each other. The Grabbe language exhibits two style levels. This, on the one hand, is pathetic, full of rhetorical figures, sometimes pompous syllable of the main characters. The monologues of the protagonists are written, as a rule, in blank verse of a classic tragedy, traces of the influence of the "genius" style of "storm and onslaught" are felt in them. On the other hand, prose is actively introduced into dramas as the language of the crowd, ordinary soldiers, and the “rabble”.

The central work of Grabbe, which most fully embodied his socio-historical principles, is the drama Napoleon, or One Hundred Days. The events of the play, especially the battle scenes, reminded the Germans of the recent struggle for national liberation and aroused opposition sentiments.

The play begins with bright street scenes Parisian life featuring a large number of characters representing various social strata of Paris. These are soldiers of the former Napoleonic army, merchants, Jacobins, emigrant nobles, the future French king Louis Philippe. Already in the first remarks of the characters representing the social lower classes, the idea of ​​the decisive rejection of the Bourbon regime by the broad masses of France is affirmed. Louis XVIII, who tried to pursue a policy of liberal reforms, is shown as a helpless puppet who cannot withstand his ultra-reactionary environment.

The versatile realistic characterization of the image of Napoleon testifies to Grabbe's great historical flair. In addition, it should be noted that main character plays a much smaller role in this drama than in the dramas about the Hohenstaufen. The main role in the work belongs to the people. In the climactic scenes depicting the famous Battle of Waterloo, where, in addition to Napoleon and his marshals, prominent German commanders Blucher, Bülow, Gneisenau, and Zieten appear, the image of the mass of soldiers occupies a greater place. Napoleon in the play is a great commander and statesman, in comparison with whom the Bourbons are just pathetic nonentities. And at the same time, it is the strangler of the revolution, arrogant and contemptuous of the people. He says about himself that he managed to curb the revolution and thereby save the European thrones. But the greatness of Napoleon, with all his contradictions, sharply contrasts with the general European situation of political reaction, with the role of a secondary power that was assigned to France in the international life of Europe after 1815. And in this sense, Napoleon's words that he, one great tyrant, will be replaced by many small ones, sound prophetically. It is noteworthy that both the Bourbons and Napoleon are opposed in the play by the Parisian working Jacobin Jouve.

Aloof from all discernible literary movements and schools of the era of the Restoration was Friedrich Goebbel (1813 - 1863). There is no doubt about its connection with the classical (French classicistic tragedy, J.W. Goethe, F. Schiller), and in prose - with the romantic (E.T.A.Hoffmann, L. Tieck) tradition. At the same time, Goebbel was not "on the way" either with the representatives of the high Biedermeier, or with the Young Germans, like him, who set themselves the task of updating literature.

From the first, Goebbel was separated by his addiction to conflicts sharpened to the limit, to bright and strong human characters, with a certain contempt for details, for the "average measure" of being. An avid follower of Hegel's philosophy, Goebbel insists on the priority of the "universal" over the "separate"; he is convinced of the need for art to reflect “universal” laws, leaving aside the “particular” manifestations of the “world will”.

In the aesthetic ideas of the Young Germans and the "pre-March" poets, Goebbel did not accept the worship of the "spirit of the times", the commandment of the "relevance" of literature. Goebbel opposed the belief of the Young Germans in the absolute superiority of "prose" as the "language of modernity" with his own conviction that the highest kind of art at all times and for all peoples is drama. Therefore, he saw the task of modern literature in the renewal of classical tragedy and the elevation of this genre to its due height.

"Idea" as the basis of a dramatic conflict makes Goebbel's work related to Schiller's drama. In Goebbel, like in Schiller, the "ideological" conflict between the personality and the world is designated with the utmost acuteness and is brought to a tragic denouement. However, there are also serious differences. For Schiller, the death of the hero, the bearer of the moral ideal, acts as a triumph of a high moral principle(Don Carlos, Virgin of Orleans). For Goebbel, heroes are represented not for an "idea", but for themselves: their personal dignity, masculine (feminine) nature, individual "will to live." Not the loftiness of moral ideas, but the strength of character is the main merit of Goebbel's characters. The craving for the realization of a certain huge charge of personal energy inevitably prompts Goebbel's heroes to take active action, to face objective circumstances, and hence to death, since Goebbel, unlike Schiller, insists on the triumph of the "universal world will" over the private manifestation of the individual energy of the hero.

In the form of his dramas, Goebbel consciously follows the traditions of the French classicist tragedy and the drama of Goethe of the period of "Weimar classicism". Plays, as a rule, consist of five, less often - three acts, the number of characters is strictly limited, the principle of unity of action is ideally maintained. Dramas based on historical and mythological plots are written in blank verse (Nibelungs (1855 - 1860), Herod and Mariamne (1849), Gig and His Ring (1856)), prose plays are used in plays based on the “burgher” plot (“ Mary Magdalene "," Agnes Bernauer "(1852)).

The central place in Goebbel's work is occupied by the "philistine tragedy" "Mary Magdalene" (1843). The drama takes place in a small German provincial town. In the center of the action is a typical "burgher" family, the head of which, the carpenter Anton, is presented as a bearer of traditional moral values... Anton's children, Clara and Karl, each in their own way, protest against the rigid moral precepts that have taken on the form of dogma.

Karl, although he studies, according to tradition, the craft of his father, does not want to subordinate his private life to the ascetic commandments of his father: his free time he spends in fun companies and for card game... Karl's frivolous lifestyle incurs suspicion of theft on him, which, although later exposed as a delusion, costs the life of his terminally ill mother. At the end of the play, Karl decides, having left the city (his home for him - "basement" "crypt", "grave"), become a sailor on a long-distance ship.

Anton's daughter Klara is torn apart by a complex internal conflict She is pregnant by her unloved fiancé Leonhard and, knowing that the exposure of the premarital relationship will have a fatal effect on her father, urges Leonhard to marry. At the same time, she tries to drown out the awakened tender feeling for a friend of early youth, who unexpectedly returned to his hometown after graduation (in the play he is designated as "Secretary", by the nature of the service he performs). However, Leonhard, carried away by the prospect of a more profitable party, refuses to marry, citing the "shame" brought upon Anton's family by the arrest of Karl. The Secretary's confession that he still loves Clara does not change anything in her desperate situation. Deciding to sacrifice herself, she throws herself into the well. The play ends with the words of the old master Anton: "I no longer understand this world."

The central collision of Mary Magdalene resembles, in general terms, the typical conflict of classical tragedy: the clash of duty and feeling. The traditional commandment of the primacy of the former over the latter also retains its validity. An individual who does not see an alternative in the very narrowness of the living space provided to him voluntarily decides to follow the principle of "honor". However, an abstract moral covenant is no longer able to restore the individual's agreement with the environment and with himself: in a situation of “misunderstanding” of the world, Karl and the Secretary remain at the end of the play, in addition to Anton.

In "Mary Magdalene" Goebbel managed to highlight the "internal conflict" of the third estate, draw a line under the long-term development of the philistine drama in Germany. A little later, in the era of Gründerism, the naturalist G. Hauptmann, based on the experience of Goebbel, placed the fourth estate - the workers - at the center of the artistic world of drama, thereby laying the foundation for the tradition of German social drama.

Romanticism in German literature began as a protest against Weimar neoclassicism, which was associated with the work of Johann Wolfgang Goethe. The main theorists of the new direction were the brothers August and Friedrich von Schlegel.

August was engaged in the study of literature, he is the author of "Lectures on Fine Literature and Art" and "Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature" (1797 - 1810), which laid the ideological foundations of romanticism. The novel Lucinda (1799) belongs to Friedrich Schlegel.

One of the first romantics was the poet and writer Novalis, the author of the poems "Hymns to the Night" (1800) and the historical novel "Heinrich von Ofterdingen" (1802). The poets Ludwig von Arnim and Clemens Brentano, members of the Heideberg circle of romanticists, published a collection of German folk songs "The Boy's Magic Horn" (1806-1808). Von Arnim is also the author of the historical novel Keepers of the Crown (1817).

The titan of German romanticism was the poet Heinrich von Kleist, author of the comedy Broken Jug (published 1811), the poems Prince Friedrich of Homburg (1810, published 1821) and Ketchen of Heilbronn (published 1810).

The rise of the democratic movement in Germany put an end to romanticism that idealized the Middle Ages. In the 1830s, liberal writers united in the Young Germany movement, whose members began to write in the style of realism. The most significant realist was the poet Heinrich Heine, who for political reasons was forced to leave his homeland and emigrate to Paris.

In 1833 he published the book "Germany" in France, in which he introduced the French to German culture. Heine's work was distinguished by bright satire and protest against social injustice. He penned the poems: "Tannhäuser" (1836), "Atta Troll" (1843), "Germany. Winter's Tale "(1844).

The true flowering of German literature came at the beginning of the 20th century. At this time, a whole galaxy of writers and poets appeared, who determined the development of German culture for decades. Austria became the epicenter of this literary Renaissance.

German symbolism is associated with the name of the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke. He owns the collections of poems "The Book of Images" (1902), "The Book of Hours" (1905) and the collection of short stories "The Last" (1902). Rilke was also the first to make a poetic translation into German"Words about Igor's regiment".

Austrian writer Franz Kafka worked in the expressionist style. His phantasmagoric novels The Trial (published 1925) and The Castle (published 1926) became a prophecy and protest against the emerging totalitarianism.

The works of another Austrian writer Stefan Zweig are imbued with subtle psychologism. He is the author of the historical novels "Mary Stuart" (1931) and "Magellan" (1937), a series of essays "The Star Clock of Humanity", short stories "Amok" (1922), "Confusion of Feelings" (1927).

In the literature of Germany of this period, the work of the brothers Heinrich and Thomas Mann holds a special place. Heinrich Mann is the author of the novels The Master Unrath (1905), the trilogy The Loyal Subject, The Youth of King Henry IV (1935) and The Maturity of King Henry IV (1937).

The very first novel by Thomas Mann "Buddenbrooks", published in 1901, brought him worldwide fame. In 1924 his novel "The Magic Mountain" was published, in 1933-1943 the writer worked on a series of novels on biblical story"Joseph and His Brothers", in 1947 the novel "Doctor Faust" was published. In 1929, Thomas Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize.

Erich Maria Remarque literally burst into literature as the author of the novel "On Western front without change ”(1929), in which for the first time the whole ruthlessness of the First World War was truthfully illuminated. In 1938 he published the novel Three Comrades, in 1946 his most significant work was published, the novel The Arc de Triomphe.

The work of the Swiss writer Hermann Hesse occupies a very special place in German literature. His most famous works are considered: the philosophical novels "Sidkarta" (1922), "Steppenwolf" (1927), "The Glass Bead Game" (1943). In 1946, Hesse was awarded the Nobel Prize.