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Artwork golden pot. Hoffmann in Russia

Artwork golden pot. Hoffmann in Russia

07.04.2019

There are two stages in the history of romanticism: early and late. The division is not only chronological, but based on philosophical ideas era.

Philosophy early romanticism defines a two-sphere world: the world of "infinite" and "finite" ("become", "inert"). "Infinite" - Cosmos, Being. "Final" - earthly existence, ordinary consciousness, everyday life.

The artistic world of early romanticism embodies the dual world of "infinite" and "finite" through the idea universal synthesis. The dominant attitude of the early romantics is a joyful acceptance of the world. The universe is the kingdom of harmony, and world chaos is perceived as a bright source of energy and metamorphosis, the eternal "stream of life".

The world of late romanticism is also a two-sphere world, but already different, it is a world of absolute two-world. Here "finite" is an independent substance, opposite to "infinite". The dominant attitude of the late romantics - disharmony, cosmic chaos is perceived as a source of dark, mystical forces.

Hoffmann's aesthetics is created at the intersection of early and late romanticism, their philosophical interpenetration.

In the world of Hoffmann's characters there is no single true space and time, each has its own reality, its own topos and its own time. But the Romantic, describing these worlds, in his own mind unites them into an integral, albeit contradictory world.

Hoffmann's favorite hero, Kreisler, in The Musical Sufferings of Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler, describes a "tea party" to which he was invited as a pianist playing at the dance:

“... I ... completely exhausted ... A vile wasted evening! But now I feel good and at ease. After all while playing, I took out a pencil and right hand sketched in figures on page 63, under the last variation, several fortunate deviations, while left hand did not stop fighting with the flow of sounds! .. I keep writing on the back blank side<…>like a convalescing patient, who never ceases to talk about what he endured, I describe here in detail the hellish torments of this tea evening. Kreisler, Hoffmann's alter ego, is able to overcome the drama of reality through spiritual being.

In Hoffmann's work, the structure of each text is created by a "two-world", but it enters through " romantic irony».

In the center of Hoffmann's universe - creative person, poet and musician, the main thing for which is act of creation, according to the Romantics, - "music, the being of being itself." aesthetic act and resolves the conflict between the "material" and "spiritual", everyday life and being.

Fairy tale from new times "Golden Pot" was the focus of the philosophical and aesthetic concept of Hoffmann.

The text of the tale reflects the world "out of text" and at the same time individual, characterizing the personality of Hoffmann. According to Yu. M. Lotman, the text is “ author's model of the world”, through all the structural components of which, the chronotope and heroes, the real world is embodied. The philosophy of the romantic two worlds is determined by the plot and plot of the Fairy Tale, composition and chronotope.

To parse the text, we need theoretical concepts, without which students, as a rule, call Anselm the main character of the Tale, and from art spaces two are distinguished - the city of Dresden and the magical and mystical world in its two hypostases - Atlantis (bright beginning) and the space of the Old Woman (dark beginning). The thus outlined chronotope of the tale cuts off individual parts of the composition, reduces the plot by half, reducing it to the plot about Anselm.

If for actor the characters of this plot Anselm, Veronica, Geerbrand, Paulmann, Lindgorst and the old woman Lisa are sufficient for creative fantasies stage performance, then director this compositional deconstruction leads to the loss of the meaning of the Fairy Tale and its main character - Romance.

Theoretical concepts become indicators of artistic and ideological meanings.

Chronotope - "... relationship spatial and temporal relations artistically assimilated in literature” [p. 234].

Author-creator - a real man, the artist is "distinguishable from the image author, narrator and narrator. Author-creator = composer both in relation to his work as a whole, and a separate text as a particle of the whole" [p. 34].

The author is “the carrier of the intensely active unity of the completed whole, the whole hero and the whole work.<...>The consciousness of the author is the consciousness that embraces the consciousness of the hero, his world" [p. 234]. The task of the author is the knowledge of the form of the hero and his world, i.e. aesthetic evaluation of someone else's knowledge and deed.

Narrator (narrator, narrator) - “this is created figure which belongs to the entire literary work. This role conceived and accepted by the author-creator. "The narrator and the characters in their function are "paper creatures", Author storytelling (material) cannot be confused with narrator this story."

Event. There are two types of Events: an artistic event and a plot event:

1) An artistic event - in which the Author-creator and the reader take part. So in The Golden Pot we will see several similar Events that the characters “do not know about”: this is a structural division, the choice of genre, the creation of a chronotope, according to Tynyanov, such an Event “introduces not the hero, but the reader” into the prose.

2) A plot event changes characters, situations, dynamic deployment of the plot in the space of the entire plot.

The text of the "Golden Pot" is a system of several artistic events fixed in the structure of the composition.

The beginning of these Events is the division into the text "printed" and the text "written".

First Event- this is the text “printed”: ““Golden Pot” A Tale from New Times”. It was created by Hoffmann - Creator-Author and has common character with the rest of Hoffmann's work - this is Kreisler, main character"Kreislerians".

Second Event. Author-Creator in your text introduces another author - The narrator. In literature such narrator always exists as the alter ego of the real author. But often the author-creator endows him with the subjective function of the author-narrator, who turns out to be a witness or even a participant in real history, which he is talking about. The "Golden Pot" has just such a subjective author - a romantic writer, who writes "his own text" - about Anselm ("the text being written").

Third Event- this is the "writing text" about Anselm.

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The specifics of Hoffmann's romanticism: a short story "Golden Pot"

The literature of the era of romanticism, which valued, above all, non-normativeness, freedom of creativity, actually still had rules, although, of course, they never took the form of normative poetic treatises like Boileau's Poetics.

An analysis of the literary works of the Romantic era, done by literary scholars over two centuries and already generalized many times, showed that romantic writers use a stable set of romantic “rules”, which are referred to as features of the construction of the artistic world (two worlds, an exalted hero, strange incidents, fantastic images ), as well as the structural features of the work, its poetics (the use of exotic genres, for example, fairy tales; the author’s direct intervention in the world of heroes; the use of grotesque, fantasy, romantic irony etc.).

Let us consider the most striking feature of Hoffmann's fairy tale "The Golden Pot", which betrays its belonging to the era of romanticism.

The world of Hoffmann's fairy tale has pronounced signs of a romantic dual world, which is embodied in the work in various ways. Romantic duality is realized in the story through a direct explanation by the characters of the origin and structure of the world in which they live.

There is a local, earthly, everyday world and another world, some kind of magical Atlantis, from which man once originated. This is exactly what Serpentina tells Anselm about her father, the archivist Lindhorst, who, as it turned out, is the prehistoric elemental spirit of fire Salamander, who lived in the magical land of Atlantis and was exiled to earth by the prince of spirits Phosphorus for his love for the lily's daughter, the snake. pot

This fantastic story is perceived as an arbitrary fiction that is not of serious importance for understanding the characters of the story, but it is said that Phosphorus, the prince of spirits, predicts the future: people will degenerate (namely, they will no longer understand the language of nature) and only longing will vaguely remind of the existence of another world ( ancient homeland man), at this time the Salamander will be reborn and in its development it will reach a person who, having been reborn in this way, will begin to perceive nature again - this is already a new anthropodicy, the doctrine of man. Anselm belongs to the people of the new generation, as he is able to see and hear natural miracles and believe in them - after all, he fell in love with a beautiful snake that appeared to him in a flowering and singing elderberry bush.

Serpentina calls it "naive poetic soul", which is possessed by "those young men, who, because of the excessive simplicity of their morals and their complete lack of so-called secular education, are despised and ridiculed by the crowd." Man is on the verge of two worlds: partly earthly being, partly spiritual. In fact, in all the works of Hoffmann, the world is arranged in this way.

Anselm’s soul is a “battlefield” between these forces, see, for example, how easily Anselm’s worldview changes when he looks into Veronica’s magic mirror: only yesterday he was madly in love with Serpentina and wrote down the history of the archivist in his house with mysterious signs, and today it seems to him that he only thought about Veronica, “that the image that appeared to him yesterday in the blue room was again Veronica and that fantasy tale about the marriage of Salamander with a green snake was only written to him, but not told to him in any way. He himself marveled at his dreams and attributed them to his exalted, due to love for Veronica, state of mind ... "The human consciousness lives in dreams, and each of these dreams always, it would seem, finds objective evidence, but in fact all these states of mind the result of the influence of the fighting spirits of good and evil. The ultimate antinomy of the world and man is feature romantic feeling.

The double world is realized in the images of a mirror, which are found in large numbers in the story: a smooth metal mirror of an old fortune-teller, a crystal mirror made of rays of light from a ring on the hand of the archivist Lindhorst, Veronica's magic mirror that enchanted Anselm.

The color scheme used by Hoffmann in the depiction of objects from the artistic world of the "Golden Pot" betrays that the story belongs to the era of romanticism. These are not just subtle shades of color, but necessarily dynamic, moving colors and whole color schemes, often completely fantastic: “pike-gray tailcoat”, snakes shining with green gold, “sparkling emeralds fell on him and wrapped around him with sparkling golden threads, fluttering and playing around him with thousands of lights”, “blood spattered from the veins, penetrating into the transparent body of the snake and coloring it red", "from precious stone, as if from a burning focus, rays came out in all directions, which, when combined, made up a brilliant crystal mirror.

The same feature - dynamism, elusive fluidity - have sounds in the art world Hoffmann’s works (the rustle of elderberry leaves gradually turns into the ringing of crystal bells, which, in turn, turns out to be a quiet intoxicating whisper, then bells again, and suddenly everything breaks off in rude dissonance, the sound of water under the oars of a boat reminds Anselm of a whisper.

Wealth, gold, money, jewelry are presented in the artistic world of Hoffmann's tale as a mystical object, a fantastic magic tool, an object partly from another world. Spice taler every day - it was this fee that seduced Anselm and helped him overcome his fear to go to the mysterious archivist, it is this spice thaler that turns living people into chained, as if poured into glass. A precious ring from Lindhorst is able to charm a person. In dreams of the future, Veronika imagines her husband, the court councilor Anselm, and he has a “golden watch with a rehearsal”, and he gives her the latest style “nice, wonderful earrings”.

The heroes of the story are distinguished by a clear romantic specificity.

Profession. Archivist Lindhorst is the keeper of ancient mysterious manuscripts containing, apparently, mystical meanings, in addition, he is also engaged in mysterious chemical experiments and no one is allowed into this lab. Anselm is a copyist of manuscripts, who is fluent in calligraphic writing. Anselm, Veronika, Kapellmeister Geerbrand have ear for music able to sing and even compose music. In general, all belong to the scientific community, are associated with the extraction, storage and dissemination of knowledge.

Often romantic heroes suffer incurable disease, which makes the hero seem to be partially dead (or partially unborn!) and already belonging to another world. In The Golden Pot, none of the characters are distinguished by ugliness, dwarfism, etc. romantic illnesses, but there is a motif of madness, for example, Anselm is often mistaken for a madman for his strange behavior: “Yes,” he added, “there are common examples that certain fantasies appear to a person and disturb and torment him a lot; but it is bodily disease, and leeches are very helpful against her, which should be put, so to speak, to the backside, as proved by one famous already deceased scientist, "he himself compares the faint that happened to Anselm at the door of Lindhorst's house with madness, the statement of the tipsy Anselm" after all, you , Mr. Con-Rector, nothing more than an eagle-owl curling its toupei," immediately aroused the suspicion that Anselm had gone mad.

The nationality of the heroes is definitely not mentioned, but it is known that many heroes are not people at all, but magical creatures born from marriage, for example, a black dragon's feather and beetroot. Nevertheless, the rare nationality of the heroes as an obligatory and familiar element romantic literature is still present, although in the form weak motive: the archivist Lindgorst keeps manuscripts in Arabic and Coptic, as well as many books "such as are written in some strange signs that do not belong to any of the known languages."

Household habits of heroes: many of them love tobacco, beer, coffee, that is, ways to bring themselves out of their normal state into an ecstatic one. Anselm was just smoking a pipe stuffed with “useful tobacco” when his miraculous meeting with an elder bush took place, the registrar Geerband “suggested the student Anselm to drink a glass of beer every evening in that coffee house on his account, the registrar, and smoke the pipe until he one way or another, he will not get acquainted with the archivist ... which the student Anselm accepted with gratitude.

The style of the "Golden Pot" is distinguished by the use of the grotesque, which is not only the individual identity of Hoffmann, but also of romantic literature in general. “He stopped and examined a large knocker attached to a bronze figure. But as soon as he wanted to take up this hammer at the last resounding strike of the tower clock on the Cross Church, when suddenly the bronze face twisted and grinned into a disgusting smile and terribly flashed with rays of metal eyes. Oh! It was an apple vendor from the Black Gate…”, “the cord of the bell went down and turned out to be a gigantic white transparent snake…”, “with these words he turned and left, and then everyone realized that the important little man was, in fact, a gray parrot.”

Fiction allows you to create the effect of a romantic dual world: there is a local, real world, where ordinary people think about a portion of coffee with rum, double beer, smart girls, etc. a thousand multi-colored rays, and fought with the dragon, which with its black wings hit the shell ... ". Fantasy in Hoffmann's story comes from grotesque imagery: one of the signs of an object with the help of the grotesque is increased to such an extent that the object, as it were, turns into another, already fantastic. For example, the episode with Anselm moving into a bottle.

The image of a glass-bound man, apparently, is based on Hoffmann's idea that people are sometimes not aware of their lack of freedom - Anselm, having got into a bottle, notices the same unfortunate people around him, but they are quite satisfied with their position and think that they are free, that they they even go to taverns, etc., and Anselm has gone mad (“imagines that he is sitting in glass jar, but stands on the Elbe bridge and looks into the water.

The author's digressions quite often appear in the relatively small text of the story (almost in each of the 12 vigils). Obviously, artistic sense these episodes is to clarify the author's position, namely the author's irony. “I have the right to doubt, kind reader, that you ever happened to be corked in a glass vessel…”. These obvious authorial digressions set the inertia for the perception of the rest of the text, which turns out to be all permeated with romantic irony.

Finally, the author's digressions perform another important role: in the last vigil, the author announced that, firstly, he would not tell the reader how he got to know all this secret history, and secondly, that Salamander Lindhorst himself offered him and helped complete the story of the fate of Anselm, who, as it turned out, had overcome, together with Serpentina, from ordinary earthly life to Atlantis. The very fact of the author’s communication with the elemental spirit Salamander casts a shadow of madness over the entire narrative, but the last words of the story answer many questions and doubts of the reader, reveal the meaning of the key allegories: “Anselm’s bliss is nothing but life in poetry, which is the sacred harmony of all things reveals itself as the deepest of the mysteries of nature!”

Sometimes two realities, two parts of the romantic dual world intersect and give rise to funny situations. So, for example, drunken Anselm begins to talk about the other side of reality known only to him, namely, the true face of the archivist and Serpentina, which looks like nonsense, since those around are not ready to immediately understand that “Mr. the garden of the prince of spirits Phosphorus in hearts because a green snake flew away from him. However, one of the participants in this conversation - the registrar Geerbrand - suddenly showed awareness of what was happening in the parallel real world: “This archivist is indeed a cursed Salamander; he flicks out fire with his fingers and burns holes in frock coats in the manner of a fiery pipe. Carried away by the conversation, the interlocutors completely stopped responding to the amazement of those around them and continued to talk about heroes and events understandable only to them, for example, about the old woman - “her dad is nothing but a tattered wing, her mother is a bad beetroot.”

The author's irony makes it especially noticeable that the characters live between two worlds. Here, for example, is the beginning of Veronica's remark, who suddenly entered into a conversation: "This is a vile slander," Veronica exclaimed with eyes sparkling with anger ... ".

For a moment, it seems to the reader that Veronika, who does not know the whole truth about who an archivist or an old woman is, is outraged by these crazy characteristics of Mr. Lindhorst and old Lisa, whom she knows, but it turns out that Veronika is also aware of the matter and is outraged by something completely different: “... Old Lisa - wise woman, and the black cat is not at all a vicious creature, but an educated young man of the most subtle treatment and her cousin germain.

The conversation of the interlocutors takes absolutely ridiculous forms (Geerbrand, for example, asks the question “can the Salamander eat without burning his beard.?”, Any serious meaning of it is finally destroyed by irony.

However, irony changes our understanding of what happened before: if everyone from Anselm to Geerband and Veronica is familiar with the other side of reality, then this means that in the usual conversations that happened between them before, they withheld their knowledge of a different reality from each other, or these conversations contained hints that are invisible to the reader, but understandable to the characters, ambiguous words, etc. Irony, as it were, dissipates holistic perception things (person, event), settles a vague feeling of understatement and "misunderstanding" of the world around.

The listed features of Hoffmann's story "The Golden Pot" clearly indicate that the work belongs to the era of romanticism. Many remained unexamined and even unaffected important questions romantic nature of this tale of Hoffmann. For example, unusual genre form"a fairy tale from modern times" influenced the fact that Hoffmann's fantasy is not inclined to the forms of implicit fantasy, but on the contrary, it turns out to be explicit, emphasized, magnificently and unrestrainedly developed - this leaves a noticeable imprint on the world order romantic fairy tale Hoffmann.

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"Golden Pot"

The title of this fabulous novel is accompanied by the eloquent subtitle "A Tale from New Times". The meaning of this subtitle is that characters of this tale are contemporaries of Hoffmann, and the action takes place in real Dresden early XIX V. This is how Hoffmann rethinks the Jena tradition of the fairy tale genre - the writer includes a plan of real everyday life in its ideological and artistic structure.

The world of Hoffmann's fairy tale has pronounced signs of a romantic dual world, which is embodied in the work different ways. Romantic duality is realized in the story through a direct explanation by the characters of the origin and structure of the world in which they live. There is a local, earthly, everyday world and another world, some kind of magical Atlantis, from which man once originated. This is exactly what Serpentina tells Anselm about her father, the archivist Lindgorst, who, as it turned out, is the prehistoric elemental fire spirit Salamander, who lived in the magical land of Atlantis and was exiled to earth by the prince of spirits Phosphorus for his love for the daughter of a lily snake.

The hero of the novel, student Anselm, is an eccentric loser, endowed with a "naive poetic soul", and this makes the world of the fabulous and wonderful accessible to him. Man is on the verge of two worlds: partly earthly being, partly spiritual. Faced with the magical world, Anselm begins to lead a dual existence, falling from his prosaic existence into the realm of a fairy tale, adjacent to ordinary real life. In accordance with this, the short story is compositionally built on the interweaving and interpenetration of the fabulous-fantastic plan with the real. Romantic fairy-tale fantasy in its subtle poetry and elegance finds here in Hoffmann one of its best exponents. At the same time, the novel clearly outlines real plan. A widely and vividly developed fairy-tale plan with many bizarre episodes, so unexpectedly and seemingly randomly intruding into the story of real everyday life, is subject to a clear, logical ideological and artistic structure. two-dimensionality creative method Hoffmann, the dual world in his worldview was reflected in the opposition of the real and fantastic worlds.

The duality is realized in the system of characters, namely, in the fact that the characters are clearly distinguished by belonging or inclination to the forces of good and evil. In The Golden Pot, these two forces are represented, for example, by the archivist Lindgorst, his daughter Serpentina, and an old witch, who turns out to be the daughter of a black dragon's feather and a beetroot. An exception is the protagonist, who is under the equal influence of both forces, is subject to this changeable and eternal struggle between good and evil. Anselm's soul is a "battlefield" between these forces. For example, how easily Anselm's worldview changes when he looks into Veronica's magic mirror: only yesterday he was madly in love with Serpentina and wrote down the history of the archivist in his house with mysterious signs, and today it seems to him that he only thought about Veronica.

The dual world is realized in the images of the mirror, which in in large numbers are found in the story: a smooth metal mirror of an old fortune-teller, a crystal mirror made of rays of light from a ring on the hand of the archivist Lindhorst, Veronica's magic mirror that bewitched Anselm. Mirrors are a famous magical tool that has always been popular with all mystics. It is believed that a person endowed with spiritual vision is able to easily see the invisible world with the help of a mirror and act through it, as through a kind of portal.

The Salamander's duality lies in the fact that he is forced to hide his true essence from people and pretend to be a secret archivist. But he allows his essence to manifest itself for those whose gaze is open to the invisible world, the world of higher poetry. And then the one who could, saw his transformation into a kite, his regal appearance, his paradise gardens at home, his duel. Anselm discovers the wisdom of the Salamander, incomprehensible signs in manuscripts and the joy of communicating with the inhabitants of the invisible world, including Serpentina, become available. Another inhabitant of the invisible is an old woman with apples - the fruit of the union of a dragon feather with beets. But she is a representative of the dark forces and is trying in every possible way to prevent the implementation of Salamander's plans. Her worldly counterpart is the old woman Liza, a sorceress and soothsayer, who led Veronica astray.

Gofrat Geerbrand is the twin of Gofrat Anselm. In the role of a groom or husband, each of them duplicates the other. A marriage with one corrugation is a copy of a marriage with another, even in detail, even in the earrings that they bring as a gift to their bride or wife. For Hoffmann, the word "double" is not entirely accurate: Anselm Veronika could exchange not only for Geerbrand, but for hundreds, for a great many of them.

In The Golden Pot, not only Anselm has a double in this sense. Veronica also has a double - Serpentina. True, Veronica herself does not suspect this. When Anselm slips on the way to his beloved Serpentina and loses faith in his dream, Veronica, as a social double, comes to him. And Anselm consoles himself with a social, common detail - “blue eyes” and a sweet appearance. Replaces Serpentina on the same grounds on which Veronica Anselm changed to Gofrat Geerbrand

The double is the greatest offense that can be inflicted human personality. If a double is wound up, then the person as a person stops. Double - individuality is lost in individuality, life and Soul are lost in the living.

Every nation has its own stories. They freely intertwine fiction with real historical events, and they are a kind of encyclopedia of traditions and everyday features different countries. Folk tales existed in oral over the centuries, while the author's fairy tales began to appear only with the development of printing. The tales of Gesner, Wieland, Goethe, Hauff, Brentano were fertile ground for the development of romanticism in Germany. At the turn of the XVIII-XIX centuries, the name of the Brothers Grimm sounded loudly, who created an amazing, Magic world in their works. But one of the most famous fairy tales became the "Golden Pot" (Hoffmann). A brief summary of this work will allow you to get acquainted with some features of German romanticism, which had a huge impact on further development art.

Romanticism: origins

German romanticism is one of the most interesting and fruitful periods in art. It began in literature, giving a powerful impetus to all other art forms. Germany late XVIII- the beginning of the 19th century did not much resemble a magical, poetic country. But the burgher life, simple and rather primitive, turned out, oddly enough, the most fertile ground for the birth of the most spiritualized direction in culture. Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann opened the door to it. The character of the insane Kapellmeister Kreisler, created by him, became the herald of a new hero, overwhelmed by feelings only in the very superlatives immersed in your inner world more than the real one. Hoffmann belongs to amazing work"Golden Pot". This is one of the peaks German literature and a real encyclopedia of romanticism.

History of creation

The fairy tale "The Golden Pot" was written by Hoffmann in 1814 in Dresden. Outside the window, shells exploded and bullets of the Napoleonic army whistled, and at the writer’s table wonderful world filled with wonders and magical characters. Hoffmann had just experienced a severe shock when his beloved Yulia Mark was married off by his parents to a wealthy businessman. Writer in Once again faced with the vulgar rationalism of the philistines. An ideal world in which the harmony of all things reigns - this is what E. Hoffmann longed for. The "Golden Pot" is an attempt to invent such a world and settle in it, at least in the imagination.

Geographical coordinates

An amazing feature of the "Golden Pot" is that the scenery for this fairy tale is based on a real city. The heroes walk along Zamkova Street, bypassing Link's Baths. Pass through the Black and Lake gates. Miracles happen at real festivities on Ascension Day. The heroes go boating, the young ladies Osters pay a visit to their friend Veronica. The registrar Geerbrand tells his fantastic story about the love of Lilia and Phosphorus, drinking punch at the evening at the director Paulman, and no one even raises an eyebrow. Hoffmann interweaves so closely fictional world with the real, that the line between them is erased almost completely.

"Golden Pot" (Hoffmann). Summary: the beginning of an amazing adventure

On the day of the Feast of the Ascension, about three hours in the afternoon, student Anselm strides along the pavement. After passing through the Black Gate, he accidentally knocks over an apple seller's basket and, in order to somehow make amends for his guilt, gives her his last money. The old woman, however, not satisfied with the compensation, pours out a whole stream of curses and curses on Anselm, from which he catches only what threatens to be under glass. Dejected, the young man starts wandering aimlessly around the city when he suddenly hears the slight rustle of an elderberry. Peering into the foliage, Anselm decided that he saw three wonderful golden snakes writhing in the branches and whispering something mysteriously. One of the snakes brings its graceful head closer to him and looks intently into his eyes. Anselm becomes wildly delighted and begins to talk with them, which attracts the bewildered glances of passers-by. The conversation is interrupted by the registrar Geerbrand and the director Paulman with their daughters. Seeing that Anselm is a little out of his mind, they decide that he is crazy from incredible poverty and bad luck. They offer the young man to come to the director in the evening. At this reception, the unfortunate student receives an offer from the archivist Lindgorst to enter his service as a calligrapher. Realizing that he can’t count on anything better, Anselm accepts the offer.

In that initial section is main conflict between the soul seeking miracles (Anselm) and the mundane, preoccupied with everyday consciousness (“Dresden characters”), which forms the basis of the dramaturgy of the story “The Golden Pot” (Hoffmann). A summary of Anselm's further adventures follows.

magic house

Miracles began as soon as Anselm approached the archivist's house. The knocker suddenly turned into the face of an old woman whose basket was overturned by a young man. The cord of the bell turned out to be a white snake, and again Anselm heard the prophetic words of the old woman. In horror, the young man ran away from the strange house, and no amount of persuasion helped convince him to visit this place again. In order to establish contact between the archivist and Anselm, the registrar Geerbrand invited them both to a coffee shop, where he told mythical story about the love of Lily and Phosphorus. It turned out that this Lilia is Lindgorst's great-great-great-grandmother, and royal blood flows in his veins. In addition, he said that the golden snakes that so captivated the young man were his daughters. This finally convinced Anselm that he needed to try his luck again in the archivist's house.

Visit to a fortune teller

The daughter of the registrar Geerbrand, imagining that Anselm could become a court adviser, convinced herself that she was in love, and set out to marry him. To be sure, she went to a fortuneteller, who told her that Anselm had contacted evil forces in the person of the archivist, fell in love with his daughter - a green snake - and he would never become an adviser. In order to somehow console the unfortunate girl, the sorceress promised to help her by making a magic mirror through which Veronica could bewitch Anselm to herself and save him from the evil old man. In fact, there was a long-standing enmity between the fortune teller and the archivist, and in this way the sorceress wanted to settle accounts with her enemy.

magic ink

Lindgorst, in turn, also provided Anselm with a magical artifact - he gave him a bottle with a mysterious black mass, with which the young man was supposed to rewrite the letters from the book. Every day the symbols became more and more understandable to Anselm, soon it began to seem to him that he had known this text for a long time. On one of the working days, Serpentina appeared to him - a snake with which Anselm fell unconsciously in love. She said that her father comes from the Salamander tribe. For his love for the green snake, he was expelled from magical land Atlantis and is doomed to remain in human form until someone can hear the singing of his three daughters and fall in love with them. As a dowry, they were promised a golden pot. When betrothed, a lily will grow out of him, and whoever can learn to understand her language will open the door to Atlantis for himself and for the Salamander.

When Serpentina disappeared, giving Anselm a burning kiss as a farewell, the young man looked at the letters he was copying and realized that everything said by the snake was contained in them.

happy ending

For a while, Veronica's magic mirror had an effect on Anselm. He forgot Serpetina and began to dream of Paulman's daughter. Arriving at the archivist's house, he found that he had ceased to perceive the world of miracles, the letters, which until recently he had read with ease, again turned into incomprehensible squiggles. Having dripped ink on the parchment, the young man was imprisoned in a glass jar as punishment for his oversight. Looking around, he saw several more of the same cans with young people. Only they did not understand at all that they were in captivity, mocking Anselm's suffering.

Suddenly, grumbling came from the coffee pot, and the young man recognized in it the voice of the notorious old woman. She promised to save him if he marries Veronica. Anselm angrily refused, and the witch tried to escape with the golden pot. But then the formidable Salamander blocked her path. A battle took place between them: Lindgorst won, Anselm's mirror spell fell off, and the sorceress turned into a nasty beetroot.

All attempts by Veronica to tie Anselm to her ended in failure, but the girl did not lose heart for long. Con- rector Paulman, who was appointed court councilor, offered her his hand and heart, and she gladly gave her consent. Anselm and Serpentina are happily engaged and find eternal bliss in Atlantis.

"Golden Pot", Hoffmann. Heroes

Enthusiastic student Anselm is unlucky in real life. There is no doubt that Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann associates himself with him. The young man passionately wants to find his place in the social hierarchy, but stumbles upon the rough, unimaginative world of the burghers, that is, the townsfolk. His inconsistency with reality is clearly demonstrated at the very beginning of the story, when he overturns the basket of an apple seller. Powerful people, firmly standing feet on earth, they make fun of him, and he keenly feels his exclusion from their world. But as soon as he gets a job with the archivist Lindhorst, his life begins to improve immediately. In his house, he finds himself in a magical reality and falls in love with a golden snake - youngest daughter Archivist Serpentina. Now the meaning of his existence is the desire to win her love and trust. In the image of Serpentina, Hoffmann embodied the ideal beloved - elusive, elusive and fabulously beautiful.

The magical world of the Salamander is contrasted with "Dresden" characters: the director Paulman, Veronica, the registrar Geerbrand. They are completely deprived of the ability to observe miracles, considering belief in them a manifestation mental illness. Only Veronica, in love with Anselm, sometimes opens the veil over the fantastic world. But she loses this susceptibility as soon as a court adviser appears on the horizon with a marriage proposal.

Genre features

"A Tale from New Times" - this is the name Hoffmann himself suggested for his story "The Golden Pot". Analysis of the features of this work, carried out in several studies, makes it difficult precise definition the genre in which it is written: a chronicle plot makes it possible to attribute it to a story, an abundance of magic - to a fairy tale, a small volume - to a short story. The real, with its dominance of philistinism and pragmatism, and the fantastic land of Atlantis, where access is available only to people with heightened sensitivity, exist in parallel. Thus, Hoffmann affirms the principle of two worlds. Blurring of forms and duality were generally characteristic romantic works. Drawing inspiration from the past, the Romantics looked longingly into the future, hoping to find in such unity the best of all possible worlds.

Hoffmann in Russia

The first translation from the German fairy tale by Hoffmann "The Golden Pot" was published in Russia in the 1920s. years XIX century and immediately attracted the attention of all thinking intelligentsia. Belinsky wrote that the prose of the German writer is opposed to vulgar everyday life and rational clarity. Herzen devoted his first article to an essay on the life and work of Hoffmann. The library of A. S. Pushkin had complete collection Hoffmann's writings. Translation from German was made into French - according to the then tradition to give preference to this language over Russian. Oddly enough, in Russia the German writer was much more popular than in his homeland.

Atlantis is a mythical country where the unattainable in reality harmony of all things was realized. It is in such a place that the student Anselm seeks to get in the fairy tale story “The Golden Pot” (Hoffmann). A brief summary of his adventures, unfortunately, cannot allow you to enjoy either the smallest plot twists, or all the amazing miracles that Hoffmann's fantasy scattered on his way, or the exquisite, peculiar only to German romanticism storytelling style. This article is intended only to awaken your interest in the work of the great musician, writer, artist and lawyer.

Question 7. Romantic hero and romantic ideal in Hoffmann's stories

Consider the romantic features in two of Hoffmann's works: "The Golden Pot" and "Little Tsakhes ..."

1) Golden pot

romantic hero

Anselm is the main character, a romantically inclined student, very constrained in his means. He wears an old-fashioned pike-gray tailcoat and rejoices at the opportunity to earn a thaler by copying papers from the archivist Lindhorst. To a young man unlucky in everyday life, his indecisive nature becomes the cause of many comic situations: his sandwiches always fall to the ground with the smeared side, if he happens to leave the house half an hour earlier than usual, so as not to be late, then he will definitely be doused from the window with soapy water. At the same time, Anselm has a "naive poetic soul" capable of throwing off "the burden of everyday life." It is to him that a poetic fairy-tale world opens up, connected with the second, fantastic life of Lindgorst (he is also the prince of the Salamander spirits from the magical land of Atlantis) and his daughters, who appear to Anselm in the guise of golden-green snakes. The fantastic invades the thick of the real everyday life.

Anselm belongs to the people of the new generation, as he is able to see and hear natural miracles and believe in them - after all, he fell in love with a beautiful snake that appeared to him in a flowering and singing elderberry bush. Serpentina calls it "a naive poetic soul", which is possessed by "those young men who, due to the excessive simplicity of their morals and their complete lack of so-called secular education, the crowd despises and ridicules."

. In The Golden Pot, these two forces are represented, for example, by the archivist Lindgorst, his daughter Serpentina, and an old witch, who turns out to be the daughter of a black dragon's feather and a beetroot. An exception is the protagonist, who is under the equal influence of both forces, is subject to this changeable and eternal struggle between good and evil. Anselm’s soul is a “battlefield” between these forces, see, for example, how easily Anselm’s worldview changes when he looks into Veronica’s magic mirror: only yesterday he was madly in love with Serpentina and wrote down the history of the archivist in his house with mysterious signs, and today it seems to him that he only thought about Veronica, “that the image that appeared to him yesterday in the blue room was again Veronica.

The heroes of the story as a whole are distinguished by a clear romantic specificity.

Profession. Archivist Lindgorst is the keeper of ancient mysterious manuscripts, containing, apparently, mystical meanings, in addition, he is also engaged in mysterious chemical experiments and does not let anyone into this laboratory.

Anselm is a copyist of manuscripts, who is fluent in calligraphic writing. Anselm, Veronica, Kapellmeister Geerbrand have an ear for music, are able to sing and even compose music. In general, all belong to the scientific community, are associated with the extraction, storage and dissemination of knowledge.

Disease. Often, romantic heroes suffer from an incurable disease, which makes the hero seem to be partially dead (or partially unborn!) And already belonging to another world. In The Golden Pot, none of the characters are distinguished by ugliness, dwarfism, etc. romantic diseases, but there is a motif of insanity, for example, Anselm is often mistaken for a madman for his strange behavior.

Nationality. The nationality of the heroes is definitely not mentioned, but it is known that many heroes are not people at all, but magical creatures born from marriage, for example, a black dragon's feather and beetroot. Nevertheless, the rare nationality of the heroes as an obligatory and habitual element of romantic literature is still present, although in the form of a weak motive: the archivist Lindgorst keeps manuscripts in Arabic and Coptic, as well as many books “such that are written in some strange signs that do not belong to any of the known languages.

Household habits of heroes: many of them love tobacco, beer, coffee, that is, ways to bring themselves out of their normal state into an ecstatic one. Anselm was just smoking a pipe stuffed with "useful tobacco" when his miraculous encounter with an elder bush took place; the registrar Geerband “offered the student Anselm to drink a glass of beer every evening in that coffee house on his account, the registrar, and smoke a pipe until he somehow got to know the archivist ... which student Anselm accepted with gratitude”; Geerband told about how he once fell into a drowsy state in reality, which was the result of coffee exposure: “Something similar happened to me once after dinner over coffee ...”; Lindhorst has a habit of taking snuff; in the house of the rector Paulman, a punch was made from a bottle of arak, and “as soon as the alcoholic vapors rose in the head of the student Anselm, all the strangeness and wonders that he had experienced lately rose before him again.”

Portrait of heroes. For example, a few fragments of a portrait of Lindhorst scattered throughout the text will suffice: he had a piercing look of eyes that sparkled from the deep depressions of a thin, wrinkled face as if from a case, he wears gloves, under which a magic ring is hidden, he walks in a wide cloak, the skirts of which , blown by the wind, resemble the wings of a large bird, at home Lindgorst walks "in a damask dressing gown, sparkling like phosphorus."

romantic ideal

The world of Hoffmann's fairy tale has pronounced signs of a romantic dual world, which is embodied in the work in various ways. Romantic duality is realized in the story through a direct explanation by the characters origin and structure of the world in which they live. There is a local, earthly, everyday world and another world, some kind of magical Atlantis, from which man once originated.

Man is on the verge of two worlds: partly earthly being, partly spiritual. In fact, in all the works of Hoffmann, the world is arranged in this way.

Used by Hoffmann color spectrum in the depiction of objects from the artistic world of the "Golden Pot" betrays the belonging of the story to the era of romanticism. These are not just subtle shades of color, but necessarily dynamic, moving colors and whole color schemes, often completely fantastic: “pike-gray tailcoat”, snakes shining with green gold, “sparkling emeralds fell on him and wrapped around him with sparkling golden threads, fluttering and playing around him with thousands of lights", "blood spattered from the veins, penetrating the transparent body of the snake and coloring it red", "from the precious stone, as from a burning focus, rays came out in all directions, which, when combined, made up a brilliant crystal mirror" .

The dual world is realized in the system of characters, namely, in the fact that characters are clearly distinguished by affiliation or inclination to the forces of good and evil.

Duality is realized in images mirrors, which are found in large numbers in the story: a smooth metal mirror of an old fortune-teller, a crystal mirror made of rays of light from a ring on the hand of the archivist Lindgorst, Veronica's magic mirror that enchanted Anselm.

Wealth, gold, money, jewelry presented in the artistic world of Hoffmann's tale as a mystical object, a fantastic magic tool, an object partly from another world. Spice taler every day - it was this payment that seduced Anselm and helped him overcome his fear to go to the mysterious archivist, it is this spice taler that turns living people into chained, as if poured into glass (see the episode of Anselm's conversation with other scribes of manuscripts, who also ended up in bottles). A precious ring from Lindhorst is able to charm a person. In dreams of the future, Veronika imagines her husband, the court councilor Anselm, and he has a “golden watch with a rehearsal”, and he gives her the latest style “nice, wonderful earrings”.

The style of the story is distinguished by the use grotesque, which is not only the individual originality of Hoffmann, but also of romantic literature in general. “He stopped and examined a large knocker attached to a bronze figure. But as soon as he wanted to take up this hammer at the last resounding strike of the tower clock on the Cross Church, when suddenly the bronze face twisted and grinned into a disgusting smile and terribly flashed with rays of metal eyes. Oh! It was an apple vendor from the Black Gate…”, “the cord of the bell went down and turned out to be a gigantic white transparent snake…”, “with these words he turned and left, and then everyone realized that the important little man was, in fact, a gray parrot”.

Fantasy in Hoffmann's story comes from grotesque imagery: one of the signs of an object with the help of the grotesque is increased to such an extent that the object, as it were, turns into another, already fantastic. See, for example, the episode with Anselm moving into a flask. The image of a man bound by glass, apparently, is based on Hoffmann's idea that people sometimes do not realize their lack of freedom - Anselm, having got into a bottle, notices the same unfortunate people around him, but they are quite satisfied with their position and think that they are free, that they they even go to taverns, etc., and Anselm has gone mad (“thinks he is sitting in a glass jar, but stands on the Elbe bridge and looks into the water”).

Irony. Sometimes two realities, two parts of the romantic dual world intersect and give rise to funny situations. So, for example, drunken Anselm begins to talk about the other side of reality known only to him, namely, the true face of the archivist and Serpentina, which looks like nonsense, since those around are not ready to immediately understand that “Mr. the garden of the prince of spirits Phosphorus in hearts because a green snake flew away from him. However, one of the participants in this conversation - the registrar Geerbrand - suddenly showed awareness of what was happening in the parallel real world: “This archivist is indeed a damned Salamander; he flicks out fire with his fingers and burns holes in frock coats in the manner of a fiery pipe. Carried away by the conversation, the interlocutors completely stopped responding to the amazement of those around them and continued to talk about heroes and events understandable only to them, for example, about the old woman - “her dad is nothing but a tattered wing, her mother is a bad beetroot.” The author's irony makes it especially noticeable that the characters live between two worlds.

Irony, as it were, dispels a holistic perception of a thing (a person, an event), settles a vague feeling of understatement and "misunderstanding" of the world around.

2) Baby Tsakhes

Hero

The main character - Balthazar - is a creator, not a consumer, therefore it is to him that the magician Prosper Alpanus reveals a big secret. Only Balthazar can free the world from spiritual emptiness, since he is endowed with inner harmony. It is he who tells the world the love of the nightingale and the rose, as he is able to see beauty.

He is melancholy, immersed in nature and reflection. Like Anselm, he is the only one given the opportunity to see the other side of the world.

Zinnober (Tsakhes) is ugly, like Quasimodo, only here the opposite is true: he seemed beautiful on the outside, but turned out to be ugly inside.

romantic ideal

The ideal in the work, antagonism to reality - this is the kingdom under Demetrius, when people lived in harmony and did not engage in any nonsense.

“Surrounded by mountain ranges, this small country, with its green, fragrant groves, flowering meadows, noisy streams and merrily murmuring springs, was likened - and especially because there were no cities at all, but only friendly villages and in some places lonely castles , -

wonderful, beautiful garden, the inhabitants of which seemed to walk in it for

own joy, unaware of the burdensome burden of life. Everyone knew that

this country is ruled by Prince Demetrius, but no one noticed that she

manageable, and everyone was very pleased with it. Persons who love total freedom

in all his endeavors, the beautiful countryside and mild climate, could

to choose for himself a better residence than in this principality, and therefore it happened

that, among others, beautiful fairies of a good tribe settled there,

who, as you know, place warmth and freedom above all else.

Now everything is sad and terrible.

Irony

Balthasar's love interest: "Balthasar's subject of poetic delight - Candida, with her legible handwriting and a couple of books read - does not indicate the sophistication of the taste of a romantic enthusiast." Irony haunts Hoffmann's heroes to the very end, even to a happy ending. Alpanus, having arranged a safe reunion of Balthazar with his beloved, gives them a wedding gift - “ country house”, on the backyard of which excellent cabbage grows, pots never boil over in the magical kitchen, porcelain does not break in the dining room, carpets do not get dirty in the living room. “The ideal, which, having come to life, by the cunning will of Hoffmann, turns into quite philistinical comfort, thus which the hero shunned and fled; this is after a nightingale after a scarlet rose - an ideal cuisine and excellent cabbage !!! ”. And here, please, in the story kitchen paraphernalia.