Realistic elements in "Buddenbrooks" by T. Mann. Family and main characters of the novel

The problems of the novel - an analysis of the fall and death of the Buddenbrook dynasty

The reasons that led to the fall and death of the “Buddenbrook dynasty” were not clear to the young novelist, he so inquisitively read into the family chronicle of an essentially unremarkable family of Lübeck wholesale wheat traders. Rye and oats. None of these causes, taken separately, had such an obviously destructive power. Unfortunate losses, almost inevitable in a large trading business, were balanced by considerable profits. But for some time now, although the capital of the old company "Johann Buddenbrock" did not decrease, its growth was negligible - in a frightening discrepancy with the rapidly increasing wealth of the Hagenstrems and similar rich "upstarts". The trouble - that is, the growing predominance of losses over profits - was gradually formed from hundreds of small miscalculations and missed "happy opportunities" in the hours of blues, bodily and mental fatigue.

When the great-grandfather and grandfather of little Hanno - Johann Buddenbrook Sr. and his son, Consul Johann Buddenbrock - "returned home angry and upset for dinner." The firm "Strunk and Hagenstrem" intercepted a profitable supply of a large consignment of rye to Holland ... "Well, this Hinrich Hagenstrem is a fox!. Pokosnik, what the world has never seen ..."

Johann Buddenbrock so insisted on the allegedly profitable marriage of his daughter. And Tony reconciled herself: out of child piety, she married an unloved person, gave up the dream of a “marriage for love” with the son of an old pilot, Morten Schwarzkopf, a medical student, a Goettingen free-spirited man, an intelligent and rather handsome fellow. But such a marriage, in the opinion of her family and all the "ruling families" of the glorious city, would be an unacceptable misalliance ... "It won't be long, Tony! It will take its time ... Everything will be forgotten ... "So her older brother, Thomas Buddenbrook, tried to console her. "But I just don’t want to forget! Tony screamed in despair. “To forget… Is that really a consolation?” But soon the son-in-law of the consul, Mr. Bendix Grunlich, went bankrupt.

She did not forget, did not forget after two unsuccessful marriages and scandalous divorces with the rogue Grunlich and the good-natured, lazy philistine Permaneder. The words and reasoning of Morten were preserved in the memory of her ingenuous heart. His "sit on the rocks"; his scathing remarks about the insignificance of the German press; him: "Comb honey you can eat calmly, fraulein Buddenbrock ... Here, at least, it is known what you introduce into the body ..."; even his scientific explanation of pulmonary edema: "In this disease, the pulmonary vesicles are filled with such a watery liquid ... If the disease takes a bad turn, it is impossible for a person to breathe, and he dies ..." - all this was not forgotten, from time to time surfaced from the bottomless depths of her early impressions, became a "leitmotif" in the novel, inextricably linked with the image of Tony Buddenbrock, or rather: with the tragic layer of her subconscious, which her infantile mind had no idea about.

If we talk about the damage caused to the company "Johann Buddenbrock" by the bankruptcy of Bendix Grünlich. It was not so great, this damage ... Consul Buddenbrook did not rescue his scoundrel-in-law from trouble. He easily managed to get his daughter's consent to a divorce from "this Grünlich", who turned out to be a low deceiver, and now "to all of her and bankrupt": "Oh, dad, if you take me and Erika home ... with joy!" "It was not enough for you to go bankrupt! Enough! Never!"

When, in the wake of Johann Buddenbrook Sr., the younger bearer of this name also left the earth, Thomas Buddenbrock became the head of the company; and immediately in the old trading house "breathed a fresh spirit" of bolder enterprise. Thanks to confident secular manners, his endearing courtesy and tact, the new chief managed to conclude more than one pasture deal; under Consul Johann, such brilliant successes associated with risk were not noticed ... But something even then, at the dawn of his activity, oppressed Thomas Buddenbrock: he often complained to Stefan Kistenmaker, his constant friend and admirer, that "the personal intervention of a merchant in everything, alas, goes out of fashion", that "in our time" courses are recognized more and more quickly, due to which the risk is reduced, and thereby the young ladies are also reduced.

The personal charm of Thomas Buddenbrook, his ability to "direct the course of events - with his eyes, in a word, with a kind gesture", reaped considerable benefits, but not so much in the commercial, but in the civil and secular field. He married a brilliant and smart woman, daughter of millionaire Gerda Arnoldsen, married "for love", but also on "a very large dowry"; in addition, she played the violin excellently, as, indeed, did her father, "a big businessman and, perhaps. An even bigger violinist." Brilliant were the successes of Thomas Buddenbrook and as a public, one might even say, statesman- of course, only on a small scale of the Hanseatic city-republic. He, and not Hermann Hagenström (old Hinrich's son) was elected to the senators; moreover, he became the "right hand" of the ruling burgomaster.

But all these successes were reverse side. The morbid need of Thomas Buddenbrock to constantly "invigorate" his easily exhausted forces (he changed clothes three times a day, and this "renewal" acted on him like morphine on a drug addict) this time led to an unreasonable idea to erect a new house, eclipsed by the luxury of modern comfort a venerable family nest on the Mengstrasse, an undertaking that fully corresponded to the high rank of the senator, but in no way to the modest results of his commercial activities.

This expensive "renovation" undermined the well-being of the old firm, but it was from that time that one blow of fate followed another: then an unexpected hailstorm beat the wheat bought in the vine by Thomas Buddenbrook; then the old consul, without the knowledge of Thomas, went to meet the dying request of her youngest daughter and bequeathed "Klara's hereditary share" to her husband, pastor Tiburtius; then Tony's son-in-law, one of the directors of the insurance community, Hugo Weinschenk, was sentenced to three and a half years in prison for serious misconduct.

Thomas Buddenbrock and his lost "will to succeed", he was still a "happy exception", the pride of the family, while the old man Johann Buddenbrock Sr. once said about his Christian brother: "He is a monkey! Maybe he should become a poet ?! - but on his deathbed he turned to him with an urgent appeal: "Try to become a man!"

Christian Buddenbrock did not become a "man" suitable for any activity, much less a "poet", but he remained a "monkey", a virtuoso imitator and a mockingbird. Members of the merchant club were dying of laughter when he reproduced with incomparable comedy the voices and brilliant habits of famous artists and musicians, as well as the famous Berlin lawyer Breslauer, who brilliantly, but unsuccessfully, acted as a defense counsel at the trial of Hugo Weinschenk, somehow involved in the Buddenbrook family ... The fate of Christian Buddenbrook ended in failure: constant delving into his own bodily and mental flaws completely shook his nervous system, and this gave reason to the Hamburg cocotte (whom Khristyan married, adopted her "combined" offspring) to imprison her husband in a psychiatric hospital, although for health reasons he could live at home.

Due to wayward biological processes, the last Buddenbrook, little Hanno, inherited from his mother her "obsession with music"; in order to, like grandfather Arnoldsen, to become a major businessman and, perhaps, an even greater musician, his flawed vitality was no longer enough. And Hanno was the only heir to Senator Buddenbrook: after the first difficult birth, Gerda Buddenbrook, on the advice of doctors, refused to have children. Here the notorious "law of degeneration", about which there was so much talk at the turn of the past and present century, operated with convincing clarity.

The novel, which tells about the death of one family, spoke about the collapse of the patriarchal burgher integrity, about the inhumanity of the reigning imperialism, about a deep crisis and a change of eras. Each new generation of this family is less and less able to continue the work of their fathers due to the lack of inherent burgher qualities, such as thrift, diligence and commitment, and more and more moves away from the real world into religion, philosophy, music, vices, luxury and depravity. . The result of this is not only a gradual loss of interest in commerce and the prestige of the Buddenbrock family, but also the loss of not only the meaning of life, but also the will to live, which turns into ridiculous and tragic deaths of the last representatives of this family.

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Introduction

Thomas Mann - a writer-thinker - has come a difficult way. He grew up in an environment of wealthy, conservative burghers; for a long time philosophers of a reactionary, irrationalist warehouse - Schopenhauer, Nietzsche - had a considerable attractive force for him for a long time. He perceived the First World War in the light of nationalist ideas, this was reflected in his journalism book Reflections of the Apolitical. In the 1920s, Thomas Mann - not without difficulty - revised his former views; he opposed the impending fascist barbarism with a noble but abstract preaching of humanism and justice. During the period of Hitler's dictatorship, Thomas Mann, having left his country, became one of the most prominent representatives of the German anti-fascist intelligentsia.

Thomas Mann loved Russian literature from a young age, she participated in his ideological and creative searches throughout his intellectual life for a decade. Among Western writers of the XX century. Thomas Mann is one of the best experts and connoisseurs of Russian classics. The circle of his readings included Pushkin, Gogol Goncharov, Turgenev, Chekhov, later - Gorky - as well as a number of other writers of the 19th and 20th centuries. And above all - Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.

The history of Thomas Mann's creative development cannot be seriously understood if one does not take into account his deep attachment to Russian literature. Several works have been written about Thomas Mann's attitude towards Russian writers. The most serious view of this issue is the well-known Czech scientist Alois Hoffman. In 1959 he published the book Thomas Mann and Russia in Czech, and in 1967 he published in the German, his extensive work "Thomas Mann and the World of Russian Literature". Both of these books, controversial in certain particulars, are rich in factual material and valuable observations. However, the topic has not been exhausted, especially since thanks to posthumous publications, letters of Thomas Mann, we can penetrate deeper into the laboratory of his thought.

Thomas Mann's letters contain many interesting, generalizing judgments about how he treated Russian literature, how much it meant to him.

Four years before his death, in 1951, Thomas Mann wrote to his Hungarian correspondent Jena Tamas Gemery: “I don’t know a word of Russian, and the German translations in which I read great Russian authors of the 19th century in my younger years were very are weak. And yet I rank this reading as one of the most important experiences that shaped my personality ”(Doronin - p. - 58).

A few years earlier - on February 26, 1948 - Thomas Mann wrote to his school friend Hermann Lange: “You are right in assuming that I have long been devotedly grateful to Russian literature, which I called in my youthful novel Tonio Kroeger“ holy Russian literature. At the age of 23 or 24, I would never have coped with the work on Buddenbrooks if I had not drawn strength and courage from constant reading of Tolstoy. Russian literature of the late 18th and 19th centuries. indeed one of the wonders of spiritual culture, and I have always deeply regretted that Pushkin's poetry remained almost inaccessible to me, since I did not have enough time and excess energy to learn the Russian language. However, Pushkin's stories also give enough reason to admire him. Needless to say, how I bow to Gogol, Dostoevsky, Turgenev. But I would like to mention Nikolai Leskov, who is not known, although he Great master story, almost equal to Dostoevsky ... You can find traces of Maxim Gorky in my essay on Goethe and Tolstoy, which, perhaps, someday caught your eye. I wrote about Tolstoy many times, in last time- in the preface to the American edition of Anna Karenina. I also wrote a preface to the edition of Dostoevsky's stories, which was published in New York in 1945 ... ".

Russian literature evoked responses of various kinds in the work of Thomas Mann, in his novels and essays. With his beloved Russian classics, Thomas Mann sometimes mentally consulted, sometimes argued with them, relied on their experience and example - at different times in different ways - explaining their works to Western readers and drawing conclusions from these works that are relevant for himself and for others. .

As we can see, we can say that Russian literature, in the person of its greatest masters, influenced Thomas Mann, based on his own testimonies. He was a deeply German writer in his spirit, traditions, and problems. And, of course, he - like all truly great writers - was an artist of individual originality. In an article written for the centenary of the birth of L.N. Tolstoy, he very subtly defined the nature of the influence that a great writer can have on his fellow writers in other countries:

“The impressive power of his narrative art is incomparable to anything, any contact with him pours into the soul of a receptive talent (but there are no other talents) a living stream of energy, freshness, primitive creative joy ... This is not about imitation. And is it possible to imitate force? Under its influence, works can arise both in spirit and in form that are very dissimilar to each other, and, most importantly, completely different from the works of Tolstoy himself.

The influence of Russian literature on Thomas Mann (and on many other foreign writers) cannot be measured and appreciated by means of "chasing after parallels", as is often practiced in Western literary science. The point is not at all to look for features of external resemblance to the Russian classics in the books of Thomas Mann, to find coincidences or closeness of individual episodes, figures, details. Such coincidences are sometimes indeed found and, so to speak, lie on the surface. But they are not the point. Our task is to turn to the works of Thomas Mann, and to his statements and testimonies, to find out what and how he used realistic elements.

The work of T. Mann is of interest for research, especially because it has not been studied in detail. There are a number of works devoted to Mann, but the structure of his works, his connection with real events and elements.

The purpose of this work is to study the realistic elements in Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks.

1. reveal the time and place writing a work,

2. study the events that took place in Germany at the time of writing the work,

3. explore realistic elements (place, time, etc.) that are present in the work.

This work consists of 3 chapters. In chapter 1, the time and place of writing the work of T. Mann were considered. Chapter 2 explores the historical events that took place in Germany during the creation of T. Mann "Buddenbrooks". Chapter 3 reveals the realistic elements present in the work, in particular, the place where the action takes place, the family, as part of the real world.

As already mentioned above, this topic arouses interest in its ignorance. Therefore, today it is quite interesting material that will help to understand the essence of the events that take place in the novel, through consideration of the details.

The following were used in the work. literary sources: History of foreign literature of the XX century; Story German literature; Kalashnikov A.A.; Literature of writers of Germany; World history; Motyleva T.L.; Starostin V.V.; Tolstoy L.N.; Fadeeva V.S.; Reader by foreign literature. As well as information from the sites: http://www.eduhmao.ru.; http://www.litera.edu.ru.; http://www.cultinfo.ru.; http:// www.bookz.ru.

1 . Time and place of writing the work "Buddenbrooks"

In the eighties XIX years century when Thomas Mann and his older brother Heinrich were children, the reading public Western Europe She was only just beginning to become widely acquainted with Russian literature. Crime and Punishment first appeared in German translation in 1882, "War and Peace" - in 1885.

In the nineties, when the Mann brothers - each in his own way - took their first steps in literature, the names of the greatest Russian novelists were already known to everyone in the West. educated person. Books by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, as well as Gogol, Goncharov, Turgenev appeared one after another, causing lively responses in the press.

All or almost all of the major German writers who entered conscious life at the end of the 19th or the beginning of the 20th century knew Russian literature, took a keen interest in it, and learned from it in one form or another. Gergart Hauptmann wrote his first famous realist plays under the direct influence of Tolstoy's The Power of Darkness. Bernhard Kellermann in the novel "Der Tor" ("Fool" or "Idiot") created the image of a strange and beautiful-hearted preacher, in many ways close to Prince Myshkin. Rainer Maria Rilke was drawn to Russian culture, tried to write poetry in Russian, visited Tolstoy in Yasnaya Polyana. Leonhard Frank, who wrote one of the first books of anti-militarist prose, A Good Man, during the First World War, considered Dostoevsky his teacher. However, we can safely say that Thomas Mann surpassed all in the depth of perception of Russian classical literature, in the completeness of his spiritual ties with it. German writers of his generation.

Heinrich Mann, who was much less close to Russian literature than his brother, wrote in his book of memoirs Review of the Century several vivid pages about how the books of Russian writers were perceived in Western Europe at the end of the last century. Heinrich Mann is talking here about the interaction between literature and the liberation movement in Russia.

Russian literature of the 19th century, writes Heinrich Mann, “is an event of incredible importance and such enlightening power that we, accustomed to the phenomena of decline and breaking, can hardly believe that we were its contemporaries… How was Dostoevsky read, how was Tolstoy read?

They read with trepidation. They were read - and the eyes opened wider to perceive all this abundance of images, all this abundance of thought, and tears flowed as a gift in return. These novels, from Pushkin to Gorky, link by link in an impeccably soldered chain, taught us to get to know a person more deeply, his weaknesses, his formidable power, his unfulfilled vocation - and they were accepted as a lesson.

In another chapter of the same book, Heinrich Mann recalls how differently he and his brother Thomas spent their years of literary apprenticeship. “When my brother entered the twenties of his life, he was devoted to the Russian masters, while for me a good half of my existence was determined by French literature. Both of us learned to write in German - that's why, I think.

Heinrich and Thomas Mann both occupied exclusively important place in its history national culture. Both of them raised the art of German realistic prose to great height, laid the foundations of the German novel of the 20th century, it became their common cause, one might even say - a common creative feat. And at the same time, they were very different in their spiritual make-up - this was also reflected in the choice of those artistic traditions that they followed. Heinrich Mann gravitated toward satire and, at the same time, toward a concrete social study of Reality: he found a lot of value for himself in Voltaire, and in Balzac, and in Zola. Thomas Mann, as an artist, felt a penchant for psychological and philosophical prose; partly from this came his heightened interest in the masters of the Russian novel (Motyleva 1982:12).

Heinrich Mann surpassed his brother in political radicalism, already in his youth he broke away from the burgher environment, its traditional views and mores. Thomas Mann remained closely associated with this milieu for a long time.

The early stories of Thomas Mann - "Disappointment", "Little Mr. Friedemann", "Louischen", "Clown", "Tobias Mindernickel" - studies on the theme of human suffering. People rise in them, offended by fate, physically or spiritually handicapped, internally alienated from the world around them. The young writer from the very first creative steps attracted sharp psychological collisions: with their help, he revealed the hidden tragedy of bourgeois, petty-bourgeois life.

Already in the sketch story "Disappointment" (1896), a kind of "anti-hero" appears - a middle-aged lonely man: in a conversation with a casual acquaintance, he pours out his disgust for life, for society, for "high words" with which people deceive each other.

A more clearly delineated figure of the "anti-hero" appears in the story "Clown" (1897). It is written in the first person, in that confessional manner, which was first tried by Dostoevsky (in the world literature of the 20th century, this manner was widely developed, but for the West late XIX V. it was still completely new) (Samovalov 1981:166).

In the story of the "clown" about himself, buffoonery is combined with genuine anger, insecurity with narcissism, arrogance with humiliation; before us is the image of a split, torn consciousness.

The outlook of the "buffoon", the whole range of his experiences, is incomparably narrower compared to the tragic hero of Notes from the Underground. However, the story breathes with sincere hostility towards the world of successful "large-scale businessmen": the restless "buffoon", one way or another, is spiritually much higher than the environment from which he voluntarily broke away.

At the turn of the new century, Thomas Mann was working on the novel Buddenbrooks, which was published in 1901. The book was originally conceived as the story of a burgher family, built on the material of domestic traditions, a novel about older relatives, nothing more. A beginner, the writer could not imagine that this book would mark the beginning of his world fame, and that Nobel Prize(he received it in 1920) will be awarded to him precisely as the author of Buddenbrooks (Fadeeva 1982:154).

"Buddenbrooks" by T. Mann are written in the manner of a broad, unhurried narrative, with the mention of many details, with a detailed image of individual episodes, with many dialogues and internal monologues. The impetus for writing was an acquaintance with the novel by the Goncourt brothers Rene Mauperin. T. Mann was delighted with the grace and structural clarity of this work, quite small in volume, but saturated with significant psychological content. Previously, he believed that his genre was a short psychological novel, now it seemed to him that he could try his hand at psychological novel Goncourt type. However, from the idea of ​​a small novel about modernity, about a “problematic” hero of the end of the century, weak and helpless in the face of a ruthless life, a huge epic novel has turned out, covering the fate of four generations (http://litera.edu.ru).

Many years later, in the essay “My Time,” Thomas Mann testified: “I really wrote a novel about my own family ... But in fact, I myself did not realize that, talking about the collapse of a burgher family, I heralded much deeper processes of disintegration and dying, the beginning of a much more significant cultural and socio-historical breakdown. The novel is based on Mann's observations of his family, friends, the customs of his native city, the decline of a family belonging to a hereditary middle class. Realistic in method and detail, the novel, in fact, symbolically depicts the relationship between the burgher world and the spiritual world.

The pessimistic philosophy of Schopenhauer suggested to the young writer the idea of ​​decay and dying as an inevitable fatal law of being. But the sobriety of the artistic vision of life prompted him to paint the decline of the Buddenbrook family. in the light of the concrete, determined by the laws of history, the fate of the bourgeois, proprietary way of life.

When Mann was working on the novel, he was asked what he was writing about. “Ah, this is a boring burgher matter,” he replied, “but it is a matter of decline, and this is why it is literary.” The idea of ​​decline generalizes the whole huge material of everyday life of the novel. It traces the fate of four generations of wealthy burghers, whose entrepreneurial activity and will to live weaken from generation to generation. At the same time, the picture of gradual economic impoverishment and biological degradation, deployed on the example of one family, turns out to be “typical of the entire European burghers” - an obsolete, unviable class.

As the author himself admitted, in order to take place, his work “had to carefully study and master the techniques of a naturalistic novel, having won the right to use them with hard work.” A case from Mann's life at that time is indicative: one of his acquaintances once noticed that the writer was watching him through binoculars. So - as if with the help of a magnifying glass - Mann studied the burgher life, composing an epic canvas from accurately noticed trifles.

Thomas Mann (1875-1955) was only 25 years old when The Buddenbrooks appeared. His success was so impressive that in 1929 he brought Mann the Nobel Prize (http://www.eduhmao.ru.).

In the 1947 article "On a Chapter from the Buddenbrooks", Thomas Mann recalls how he relied in his work on the experience of writers from other countries and not only Russian ones. “The influences that determined the appearance of this book as a work of art came from everywhere: from France, England, Russia, from the Scandinavian North, - the young author absorbed them eagerly, with the zealous zeal of a student, feeling that the ode could not do without them in his work on the work , psychological in its innermost thoughts and intentions, because it sought to convey the psychology of those who are tired of living, to portray the complication of spiritual life and the sharpening of susceptibility to beauty that accompanies biological decline.

And - on the same page - T. Mann clarifies his thought: "... under my gaze, a socio-critical novel hidden under the guise of a family chronicle appeared ...". The motif of "biological decline" is ultimately pushed aside in "Buddenbrooks" by a large socio-critical theme.

It is worth considering another important testimony of Thomas Mann - from his book "Reflections of the Apolitical". There, the memory of the "Buddenbrooks" pops up for an unexpected reason - in connection with the name of Nietzsche. To this philosopher, so influential in Kaiser Germany, Thomas Mann treated with great respect, highly appreciated him literary gift. However, in "Reflections of the Apolitical" T. Mann partially dissociates himself from Nietzsche. He claims that he never, even in his youth, shared the cult of brute force and the aestheticization of “brutal instincts” that comes from Nietzsche. On the contrary, the artistic reference points for him were works generated by "highly moral, sacrificial and Christian-conscientious natures." It's called " Last Judgment Michelangelo, and then the novel Anna Karenina, “which gave me strength when I wrote Buddenbrooks.

It can be assumed that Tolstoy's work - both with its realism and its moral pathos - could "give strength" to the young Thomas Mann in his - not yet fully conscious - opposition to reactionary philosophical teachings.

While working on a story about the fate of a burgher family, Thomas Mann studied the rich experience of the European "family romance". In this regard, too, Anna Karenina, a novel in which Tolstoy, according to own words, loved "family thought". He should have been attracted along with the fact that in Anna Karenina the history of personal destinies, personal relationships of the characters is inextricably linked with the history of society - and contains a strong charge of social criticism directed against the very foundations of a proprietary way of life.

Thomas Mann did not feel a penchant for satirical grotesque, a sharp sharpening of characters and situations. The closer he was to be Tolstoy's way of depicting - irreproachably reliable and at the same time uncompromisingly sober. In "Buddenbrooks" he - like the author of "Anna Karenina" - depicts that class, that social environment, which is vitally close to him. He loves his Buddenbrooks, he himself is flesh of their flesh. But at the same time, he is uncompromisingly frank. Each of the main characters of the story is depicted in the "fluidity" of living inconsistency, the interweaving of good and bad (Mitrofanov 1987:301).

The Buddenbrook clan has its own cultural and moral foundations, its own firm concepts of decency and honesty, about what is possible and what is not. However, the novelist calmly, gently, without pressure, but, in essence, ruthlessly demonstrates the wrong side of this Buddenbrookian morality - the latent antagonism that corrodes the relationship of parents and children, brothers and sisters, those running manifestations of selfishness, hypocrisy, self-interest that flow from the very essence of bourgeois- proprietary relationships.

In the novel by T. Mann, the action begins in 1835 and is brought to the end of the 19th century - four generations of Buddenbrooks pass before the reader. However, with the greatest attention close-up the fate of the third generation is outlined - Thomas, Christian, Tony. The sunset of their life falls on the years that followed the reunification of Germany. In the first years of the Hohenzollern Empire, as in post-reform Russia, everything "turned upside down and only fits in." No matter how dissimilar the social situations depicted in Anna Karenina and in the last parts of Buddenbrooks, both here and there we are talking about the rapid breaking of the old social foundations. Tolstoy recreated the collapse of patriarchal-landowner Russia; Thomas Mann, using the material of his national reality, showed the collapse of the ancient foundations of the German patriarchal-burgher way of life. That life fatigue, a sense of doom, from which Senator Thomas Buddenbrock suffers, and then his fragile and gifted son Hanno, find an explanation not in some metaphysical laws of being, but in the laws of German and world history.

Thomas Mann masterfully conveys the atmosphere of anxiety and uncertainty in which his characters live in the last parts of the novel. Through the fate of his heroes, he feels and reproduces not only the collapse of the old burghers, the commercial "patriciate" of the North German cities, but also something much more significant: the fragility of the rule of the bourgeois, the owners, the precariousness of the foundations on which capitalist society is built.

The theme of death appears several times in Buddenbrooks. And here the creative connection between Thomas Mann and Tolstoy is very noticeable. Here we can recall not only Anna Karenina (and, in particular, the paintings of the dying of Nikolai Levin), but also The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Narrating the last weeks of the life of Senator Thomas Buddenbrook, T. Mann reveals the spiritual drama of this smart and energetic bourgeois, who, in the face of imminent death, faces new, painfully difficult questions for him about the meaning of being, doubts are growing whether he lived his life correctly .

However, the content of the Buddenbrooks is by no means reduced to the theme of dying and decay, or to satirical motifs, which in places, as if imperceptibly, are interspersed in the narrative. The artistic charm and originality of "Buddenbrooks" is largely based on the fact that the author is spiritually attached to his characters, to their way of life, their family traditions. With all its sobriety and irony, with all the social criticism that constitutes ideological basis novel, the writer draws the outgoing Buddenbrook world with sympathy and restrained sadness, "from within".

Buddenbrooks showed the young novelist's amazing ability to depict people and the circumstances of their lives visually, visibly, with great artistic plasticity, in an abundance of aptly grasped details. And in the brilliance of everyday episodes, genre scenes, interiors, in accuracy and richness psychological characteristics, in the realistic full-bloodedness of the general family-group portrait of the Buddenbrooks, connected by a common family resemblance and yet so dissimilar to each other in many ways - the original and mature talent of Thomas Mann affected all this.

T. Mann's "Buddenbrooks" are written in the manner of a broad, unhurried narration, with the mention of many details, with a detailed image of individual episodes, with many dialogues and internal monologues.

The book was originally conceived as the story of a burgher family, built on the material of domestic traditions - a novel about older relatives, nothing more. A beginner, the writer could not imagine that this book would mark the beginning of his world fame, and that the Nobel Prize (he received it in 1920) would be awarded to him precisely as the author of Buddenbrooks.

Through the fate of his heroes, he feels and reproduces not only the collapse of the old burghers, the commercial "patriciate" of the North German cities, but also something much more significant: the fragility of the rule of the bourgeois, the owners, the precariousness of the foundations on which capitalist society is built.

2 . Historical events in Germany during the creation of "Buddenbrooks"

The collapse of attempts to suppress the labor movement and failures in foreign policy predetermined the resignation of Bismarck (1890). Disagreements between Bismarck and the new German Emperor Wilhelm II (who ascended the throne in 1888) also played a significant role in this. Bismarck's successor as Reich Chancellor L. Caprivi began to move away from the policy of agrarian protectionism in the interests of the industrial magnates. Trade agreements were concluded with a number of states, which facilitated, thanks to the mutual reduction of duties, the sale of German industrial goods. This led to the penetration of foreign grain into the German market and caused strong dissatisfaction among the Junkers. In 1894, the post of chancellor was taken over by H. Hohenlohe, who, like Bismarck, tried to stop the continued consolidation of the forces of the German proletariat with the help of repressions.

An indicator of the maturity of the German Social Democracy was its adoption in 1891 of the Erfurt Program, which was a step forward in comparison with the Gotha Program. This program contained provisions on the mastery of political power by the working class, on the abolition of classes and class rule as the ultimate goal of the party. But even in this program there was no mention of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the demand democratic republic as the next target. In 1893, the Social Democrats got 44 deputies into the Reichstag, and in 1898, 56 deputies. The labor movement became a serious factor in the political life of the country. The German Social Democracy at that time played a leading role in the international labor movement. But already at the end of the 19th century. opportunists declared themselves, led by E. Bernstein with a revision of Marxism. The backbone of opportunism was the labor aristocracy, with which the bourgeoisie shared part of the profits, and people from the petty-bourgeois strata (World History 16:256-258).

Germany entered the 20th century as an imperialist power with a highly developed economy. By level industrial production Germany advanced by the beginning of the 20th century. to 1st place in Europe, overtaking the recent "workshop of the world" Great Britain. Under the sign of militarism, the entire economic and political social structure of Germany was restructured. The German imperialist bourgeoisie, which was late in its development, made extensive use of dumping in its struggle for markets; at the same time, it sought to compensate for “losses” by raising prices in the domestic market. The dominant form of monopoly associations in Germany were cartels; their number grew rapidly (in 1890 - 210, in 1911 - 550-600). A characteristic feature of German imperialism was the wide coverage of the entire economy of the country by monopolies. The big banks have become of great importance; this was due to the paramount role they played in the process of folding the monopolies. Therefore, the merging of industrial and banking capital proceeded more intensively in Germany than in other countries. Along with this, in Germany, where the direct influence of the state on economic life was significant even in previous decades, state-monopoly tendencies appeared early.

German imperialism was characterized by a class alliance between the Junkers and the big bourgeoisie. At the beginning of the 20th century the export of capital intensified in Germany. In 1902, German investments abroad amounted to 12.5 billion francs, and in 1914 already 44 billion francs. The monopolies persistently pushed the government to war for the redivision of the world.

Imperialist Germany was constantly building up its armaments. From 1879 to 1914, military spending increased 5 times, exceeding 1,600 million marks, which accounted for more than half of the state budget. The size of the peacetime army increased every year; by 1914 it had reached 800,000; The German army was equipped with the most modern weapons for that time. Programs for the construction of warships have been repeatedly revised upwards. By the beginning of World War I, Germany had 41 battleships, including 15 heavy-duty "dreadnoughts". The ruling circles carried out intensive indoctrination of the population in the spirit of chauvinism.

Early 20th century marked by a new upsurge in the labor movement. The Revolution of 1905-07 in Russia had a great influence on the German proletariat. In 1905-1906, more than 800,000 people took part in strikes in Germany; almost the same as in the previous 15 years. On January 17, 1906, the first mass political strike in the history of the German labor movement took place in Hamburg. The leaders of the left-wing Social Democrats R. Luxemburg, K. Liebknecht, K. Zetkin, F. Mehring, and others propagated the Russian revolutionary experience. Right-wing Social Democrats (E. Bernstein, K. Legin, G. Vollmar, F. , F. Ebert) promoted "class peace". After the defeat of the Russian Revolution of 1905-07, a reactionary course intensified in German policy. In 1907, the Reichstag voted credits for the suppression of tribal uprisings in South West Africa and additional funds for building a fleet. Under these conditions, an enormous responsibility fell on the Social Democratic Party as a force that could prevent the onset of reaction and plans to unleash a world war. If at the beginning of the 20th century German Social Democracy as a whole still stood on the positions of the class struggle, was "... ahead of everyone in its organization, in the integrity and cohesion of the movement," then in the subsequent right-wing opportunists gained more and more influence in its leadership. The centrist group led by K. Kautsky also brought great harm. Figures of the left wing of the Social Democracy, to whom A. Bebel was close in a number of issues, defended the principles of Marxism, waged an active struggle against militarism, and exposed the opportunism of the right-wing leaders. But even the Left Social Democrats did not fully understand the tasks arising from the new conditions of the class struggle, did not dare to break organizationally with the opportunists.

In the years preceding World War I, the working-class movement began to grow again in Germany (in 1910-13, an average of 300,000-400,000 workers went on strike a year). On March 6, 1910, a mass workers' demonstration took place in Berlin under the slogan of introducing universal suffrage in Prussia, which was dispersed by the mounted police ("German Bloody Sunday"). In September-October 1910, in the proletarian district of Berlin, Moabite, barricade battles between strikers and the police unfolded. In March 1912, a strike of 250,000 Ruhr miners began; in the summer of 1913 there were major strikes in Hamburg, Kiel, Stettin, and Bremen. The indignation of the oppressed population of Alsace grew. A political crisis was brewing in Germany. However, the numerous Social Democratic Party (about 1 million in 1912) and the trade unions (more than 2.5 million in 1912-13) failed to lead the working class to storm imperialism and to launch an effective struggle against the threat of war.

In preparing for war, the German government sought to undermine the Franco-Russian alliance and isolate France (Wilhelm II concluded the Treaty of Bjork in 1905 with Nicholas II), and also to liquidate the Anglo-French agreement of 1904. But G. failed to tear Russia or Great Britain away from France; in 1907 these three countries created the Entente, which opposed the Triple Alliance. Overestimating your military power and believing that Great Britain would not support Russia, imperialist Germany unleashed World War I. As a pretext, she used the assassination by Serbian nationalists on June 28, 1914 of the heir to the Austrian throne, Franz Ferdinand (the so-called Sarajevo assassination) (http://www.cultinfo.ru).

Germany entered the 20th century as an imperialist power with a highly developed economy. A characteristic feature of German imperialism was the wide coverage of the entire economy of the country by monopolies. The big banks have become of great importance; this was due to the paramount role they played in the process of folding the monopolies. Therefore, the merging of industrial and banking capital proceeded more intensively in Germany than in other countries. Along with this, in Germany, where the direct influence of the state on economic life was significant even in previous decades, state-monopoly tendencies appeared early.

Along with this, in Germany, where the direct influence of the state on economic life was significant even in previous decades, state-monopoly tendencies appeared early.

3. Realistic elements in Buddenbrooks T. Manna

Family and main characters of the novel

The very title of the novel shows that it describes the life of an entire family. The fate of the Buddenbrook family is a story of gradual decline and decay. "The Decline of a Family" is the subtitle of the novel. The fall of the Buddenbrooks is not a continuous process. Periods of stagnation are replaced by periods of a new upsurge, but still, on the whole, the family gradually weakens and dies.

"Buddenbrooks" is a work that raises great social problems, giving a vivid and truthful picture of the historical development of the bourgeoisie as a class from the 18th (since the Napoleonic wars) to the end of the 19th century. This is a novel about 4 generations of a bourgeois family. The material in this book is inspired by the history of the Mann family. The gradual destruction of the material well-being of the Buddenbrooks, from generation to generation, is combined with their spiritual impoverishment (Starostin 1980: 4.)

Johann Buddenbrock Sr. is a typical burgher of the 18th century, an optimistic and moderate freethinker who optimistically believes in the strength of bourgeois existence.

Johann Buddenbrock, Jr., is a man of a different caste, his consciousness is shaken by the approach of the revolutionary events of 1848, he is seized by anxiety and uncertainty, he seeks solace in religion. With his ostentatious strictly patrician morality, he no longer manages to reconcile his commercial activities with purely human relations, even with family members.

Thomas and Christian no longer feel like an integral part of their class, "the best part of the nation", like grandfather. Thomas, at the cost of terrible efforts of will, still forces himself to wear a mask of imaginary efficiency, imaginary self-confidence, but he no longer feels in himself the ability to compete with entrepreneurs of a new predatory type. Behind his ostentatious restraint lies fatigue, a misunderstanding of the meaning and purpose of his own existence, fear of the future.

Christian is a devastated person, a renegade, a person capable of only buffoonery. The degeneration of the Buddenbrooks for Thomas Mann marks the death of that seemingly indestructible foundation on which the burgher culture was based. The origins of the destruction of the family in the objective appearance among the German burghers of "grunders" - unscrupulous predatory businessmen who abandoned the notorious conscientiousness in matters that broke solid established business ties. The strength and thoroughness of the way of life recede before the insatiable thirst for wealth, the cruel grip of entrepreneurs of the new formation.

Drawing the history of the Buddenbrooks, Thomas Mann simultaneously shows the history of bourgeois thought, its evolution from the philosophy of the Enlightenment to reactionary decadent views. The Voltairian Buddenbrook, the elder, is replaced by the hypocrite Buddenbrock, the younger, and his son Thomas is fond of the philosophy of Schopenhauer (Timofeev 1983:254).

From generation to generation, the spiritual strength of the family dries up. The rudely good-natured founders of the dynasty are finally replaced by refined neuropathic creatures whose fear of life kills their activity, makes them the inevitable victims of history. The last offspring of Hanno Buddenbrook - the son of Thomas - inherited from his mother a passion for music alien to his ancestors, imbued with disgust not only for his father's prosaic activities, but also for everything that is not music, art.
This is how the most important theme for Mann crystallizes: the sharp opposition of all art to bourgeois reality, all mental activity - to the base practice of the bourgeois.

Nietzsche and Schopenhauer have a certain influence on Thomas Mann here. Like the first, Mann considers morbidity to elevate a person above mediocrity, making his worldview sharper and deeper. The bearer of ill health - most often an artist - opposes the selfish and narcissistic world of the bourgeois. The pessimism of Schopenhauer, who sang about the beauty of dying, seemed natural to Mann, who saw in the dying culture of the burghers the death of all human culture.

Ganno, possessed by the "demon" of music, simultaneously symbolizes the spiritual exaltation of the Buddenbrook family and its tragic end. The novel is invaded by the decadent idea that art is linked to biological degeneration.

So, the novel "Buddenbrooks", published, marked a new phase in the creative development of Thomas Mann. It is based on a lot of autobiography. The writer carefully studied family papers, got acquainted with the business correspondence of his father and grandfather, delved into the details of the domestic environment, the home way of his ancestors. Mann's personal memories thus form the main outline of the novel, which makes it even more concrete.

The family chronicle of the Buddenbrooks is an epic tale of the past rise and fall of the once powerful elite of the German merchant bourgeoisie. In this regard, the writer, on the one hand, continues the traditions of German realistic prose of the 70s of the last century, on the other hand, anticipates the emergence of the Western European, social chronicle novel of the 20th century. (Galsworthy - "The Saga of the Forsytes", Roger Martin Du Gard - "The Thibault Family"). Thomas Mann begins the history of the Buddenbrook family from the middle of the 19th century. and traces her fate for three generations. The former economic power and spiritual greatness of this kind are embodied in the image of the old Johann Buddenbrock. His whole appearance, his spiritual physiognomy was formed in the atmosphere of the Enlightenment. Full of inexhaustible life optimism, he is unshakably confident in his personal strengths and in the power of his class. His son Consul Johann Buddenbrock is already deprived of his father's optimism; mature years his life is already taking place in different historical conditions, in a turning point, when the patriarchal burghers are being replaced by a new generation of capitalist entrepreneurs.

In the light of new social conditions, the old Buddenbrook firm becomes for the consul Johann Buddenbrook, and after him and for his son Thomas, not just a commercial enterprise, but a symbol of the greatness of the family, a kind of fetish, to which the personal interests of each family member must obey.

Representing the first generation, Johann Buddenbrock embodies the strength of the burgher way of life, which has not lost touch with the people's environment. He is energetic, assertive, initiative, successful in business. His son, Consul Johann Buddenbrook, is a solid and balanced man, he does business well, but as a person he is less ambitious. After the revolution of 1848, he was not so sure of the inviolability of traditional foundations. For the representatives of the third generation of Thomas and Christian, the firm becomes something internally alien. They develop a tendency to reflection - a phenomenon unusual in the Buddenbrook family. Senator Thomas Buddenbrook maintains a semblance of calm. But internally he is tired and broken. From others and from himself, he tries to hide the decline of the company. Ganno, the only representative of the fourth generation, the son of Thomas, himself draws a line under his name in the family book as a sign that after him the family will cease to exist. The boy is in poor health, but he is musically gifted. Life inspires him with horror and disgust.

Location of the novel

In the opening chapters of the novel, the two chiefs of the firm, old Johann and his son, are depicted with truly epic breadth. The narrative flows smoothly, unhurriedly, lingering for a long time on the material world surrounding the Buddenbrooks. The description of their new home, rich furnishings, decoration emphasizes the solid wealth, heavy life of the top of the patrician bourgeoisie. The “gold-edged notebook with embossed binding”, in which outstanding events in the history of the family were recorded, should, according to Mann, embody the importance historical role German merchant bourgeoisie.

The epic-genre description acquires a dramatic character only with the advent of eldest daughter Consul - Tony. It's not about her, of course. This cheerful young girl is infinitely devoted to her family and its traditions. The disturbing beginning enters the novel along with Tony's fiancé, Mr. Grunlich, described by the author in an acutely grotesque tone. Yielding to the persuasion of people close to her, Tony makes a "profitable game", she marries a man who is not dear to her, who in turn marries a rich bride to pay her debts. Grunlich, this clever, unscrupulous businessman, who even resorts to forging the trading books of his office, undermines the former prestige of the Buddenbrooks firm, destroys the halo of patriarchy that previously surrounded it.

IN emotional drama Tony is intertwined with another image that is completely opposite to Grunlich. This is Morten Schwarzkopf, the pilot's son, a medical student. This simple and honest young man, estranged from the society of rich merchant sons, rises to a sharp protest against police Junker Germany. It is no coincidence that in his modest little room in Göttingen, where he studies medicine, he "puts on" a policeman's uniform over the skeleton. In conversations with Tony, Morten Schwarzkopf opens the veil of a different life for a young girl, full of tireless work, the struggle for existence. In this difficult but rich life, Morten calls Tony, whom he passionately fell in love with. Tony responds to his feeling. But the power of tradition is so great that the girl is unable to overcome it. She breaks with Morten and marries someone who in the eyes of her family was a good match.

The tragic fate of Tony sheds light on the personal drama of her brother, Consul Thomas. This cultured, enlightened, sensitive man sees the approaching collapse of the Buddenbrooks firm. Trying to keep up with the times, Thomas throws himself into speculation, but, not possessing the qualities necessary for a capitalist of a new formation, he is forced to give way to predatory businessmen like Hagenstrem.

The death of Thomas is not aesthetically pleasing. Leaving the office of an ignorant dentist, he dies on the street, falling face down into the mud that floods his snow-white gloves and flawless muffler.

From the writer's point of view, the ugly and sudden death of Consul Buddenbrock is the completion of that internal process of disintegration to which his class, the class of the German patriarchal burghers, was doomed.

Thomas Mann perceives the death of the old burgher culture as the physical and spiritual degradation of the descendants of the patrician bourgeoisie. This degradation leads to a weakening of the will, to the loss of vital optimism and, ultimately, to inevitable death. In the novel, Consul Thomas and his son Ganno become the bearers of death. Painfully refined, fragile young man, esthete, musician, far from real life, Ganno with all his appearance and internally associated with decadence. The seal of decadence lies on the last chapters of the novel. If the first part of the family chronicle is characterized by a deliberately old-fashioned manner of epic writing, then the last chapters of the second part are distinguished by a different style: convulsive impulsiveness, a combination of lyricism and musicality, painful psychologization, and subtle elegance of language (http://bookz.ru.).

The novel "Buddenbrooks" was of great importance for the entire further development of the problems of Thomas Mann. In it, as in a focus, those vital problems for Mann are collected, which he will then begin to develop in short stories about artists and in the novel The Magic Mountain. Thus, the image of the musician, the aesthete Hanno, is the first link in a long chain of Mann artists, refined decadent natures, painfully experiencing the tragedy of loneliness in the world.

In creating an image of reality, Mann is, in fact, realistic. Anyone who has read "Buddenbrooks", the question of whether he can recognize the streets, houses described by the author in the novel, will answer this question in the affirmative. The author himself attaches great importance to the impression of the reality of the events described in the novel. So, for example, in the report, T. Mann recalls the words of one of his technical assistants in Munich: “Now I know how it all really happened!”. T. Mann took this remark as a compliment. The idea of ​​the completeness and objectivity of the reality depicted in T. Mann's novels is also inherent in many researchers of his work. Yu. Bonke notes, for example, that “the accuracy of spatial and temporal characteristics in T. Mann ... is supported by psychological observations, minute-by-minute depiction of gestures, clothes, speech turns and typical habits of heroes, careful study of the “environment”, the use of dialects ... "The researcher emphasizes precisely minute , thoroughness of the image, its, so to speak, naturalism (Kalashnikov 2000:29).

The old town of Lübeck is located on an island, several bridges lead there. Perhaps the most famous of them is the bridge in front of the Holstentor gate. Two massive gate towers built in the 15th century have become a symbol of Lübeck. The old town in Lübeck is extremely complete, without any modern inserts, and all of red brick.

Lübeck also has non-medieval sights. More precisely, one main attraction is the Buddenbrooks house from the famous novel by Thomas Mann "Buddenbrooks", which in fact was the family home of Heinrich and Thomas Mann. It is now the Mann family museum.

For example, let's turn to the image of a landscape room. In the spatial structure of the novel, the landscape plays an extremely important role: after all, "according to routine, the Buddenbrooks met every second Thursday" here. Here they received guests, gave dinner parties etc. The landscape room is, therefore, the room where the idle life of the heroes takes place, devoid of the rigor and expediency to which their working, everyday life, the life of politicians and businessmen, should be subordinated. From the point of view of the completeness and reliability of the plot depiction of the events of the novel, the presentation of the characters of the characters, it would be logical to assume that the text of the novel contains the same detailed descriptions those rooms in which the heroes work or spend hours of solitude. However, this is exactly what is not happening. In the text of the novel, we find only mentions of the existence of office premises and private chambers of the heroes. From a quantitative point of view, the images of these premises are quite widely represented in the text, but in the absence of a more detailed description of them, they remain for the reader a kind of only markers of reality, a kind of mask, an external plan, the content of which is hidden and unclear. Office spaces and bedrooms are deliberately "omitted" spaces.

An analysis of the plot of the novel also reveals the fact that the overwhelming majority of events that are the key plot points of the narrative take place precisely in the landscape room. The fateful visit of Grunlich for Tony Buddenbrook, who seeks her hand and heart, the revolutionary unrest of October 1848, and finally the death of the old consul Johann Buddenbrook - the heroes of the novel experience all these important events in this room. The rest of the space of the house (for example, office space or bedrooms) is, as it were, pushed aside from the main axis of the plot development of the narrative, deprived of its own independent value: Consul Buddenbrock experiences even the presence of his wife Elisabeth and their newborn daughter from the premises adjacent to the landscape room - the dining room, which in the novel forms a functional and semantic, as well as spatial unity with the landscape. The impression of impenetrability, unpreparedness for self-disclosure of the repressed space of the characters’ private life is enhanced in the novel by the introduction of the curtain motif, which always separates, for example, the characters’ bedroom from the outside world: high bed under the canopy on which the consul was lying”; “the green curtains on the open windows in Mrs. Grunlich’s bedroom swayed slightly from the light breath of a clear July night”, “the walls of this room were upholstered with dark matter in large colors ... Light barely broke through the closed curtains”, etc. From the point of view of comprehending the plot material, these spaces turn out to be closed to the reader; by themselves, they do not tell us anything new either about the characters or about the events that happen to them. They are an objective image of reality, which the artist, according to Mann, is called upon to subject to "subjective deepening" (Kalashnikov 2000:34).

As the narrative acquires more and more realistic details (new characters appear, old ones leave, even partly the narrative space associated with the acquisition of a new house by the family changes), the symbolic content deepens, which organizes them into a kind of semantic unity - unity catastrophe, the death of a family. The image of the landscape gradually acquires the ability to reorganize the meaning of the events depicted in the novel, to predetermine the course of their development.

"Buddenbrooks" is a work that raises great social problems, giving a vivid and truthful picture of the historical development of the bourgeoisie as a class from the 18th to the end of the 19th century. This is a novel about 4 generations of a bourgeois family. The material in this book is inspired by the history of the Mann family. The gradual destruction of the material well-being of the Buddenbrooks, from generation to generation, is combined with their spiritual impoverishment.

From generation to generation, the spiritual strength of the family dries up. The rudely good-natured founders of the dynasty are finally replaced by refined neuropathic creatures whose fear of life kills their activity, makes them the inevitable victims of history.

Thomas Mann perceives the death of the old burgher culture as the physical and spiritual degradation of the descendants of the patrician bourgeoisie. This degradation leads to a weakening of the will, to the loss of vital optimism and, ultimately, to inevitable death. In the novel, Consul Thomas and his son Ganno become the bearers of death.

From a quantitative point of view, the images of the premises, which are, as it were, quite widely represented in the text, but in the absence of their more detailed description, they remain for the reader a kind of only marking signs of reality, a kind of mask, an external plan, the content of which is hidden and unclear. Office spaces and bedrooms are deliberately "omitted" spaces. The space of the house is, as it were, pushed aside from the main axis of the plot development of the narrative, deprived of its independent meaning. But it only makes it stronger general impression realism.

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The novel Buddenbrooks was started by Thomas Mann in October 1896. Initially, the writer planned to reflect the history of his family (mainly older relatives) in it, but over time, the biographical narrative grew into an artistic one and spread to four generations of people connected by one common family history. The novel was completed on July 18, 1900, published in 1901, and awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929.

In "Buddenbrooks" the features of a realistic, historical, psychological and family novel are closely intertwined. central idea works - the destruction of the old bourgeois order - is revealed on the example of the degeneration of a classic merchant family living in the German trading city of Lübeck. The duration of the novel covers the period from the autumn of 1835 to the end of the 70s of the 19th century (it is difficult to establish the exact date, since after the last, dated in the autumn of 1876, events from the life of the Buddenbrooks - the liquidation of the company, the sale of the family house and Gerda's move beyond the City Gate , some more time passes).

The work opens with a housewarming scene on the occasion of the Buddenbrooks acquiring a spacious old house that once belonged to the ruined Rathenkamp family, ends with the sale of not only the “family nest” on the Mengstrasse, but also the mansion built by the last head of the Johann Buddenbrook company - Thomas. For forty years of life, the prosperous and respected family of Lübeck first outwardly grows (continuing the work of his father Johann Buddenbrock is the father of two sons - the unlucky Gotthold and the holy guardian of the interests of the cause - Johann, who, in turn, has four children - Anthony, Thomas, Christian and Clara, whose life forms the basis of the plot of Mann's novel), and then gradually descends into "no", degenerating both psychologically and physically.

The cementing foundation of the Buddenbrook family is devotion business is violated every time a sensual principle is introduced into it (the first marriage of old Johann Buddenbrock, the marriage of his son Gotthold for love to the shopkeeper Stüving, the marriage of Christian to the courtesan Alina, etc.) or new blood (aristocratic - Elisabeth Kroeger, artistic - Gerda Arnoldsen and so on.). Trading, rational natures can not withstand any interaction or mixing with spiritual and sensual, far removed from business principles relationship to life. This becomes clear in the example of the third generation of the Buddenbrook family, each representative of which becomes a dead end branch both to preserve the family name and business.

The eldest daughter of Johann Buddenbrock - Anthony- a romantically inclined girl, who reads Hoffmann in her youth and dreams of great love, marries according to calculation, and not her own, but her father's. The calculation turns out to be incorrect. The grasping Grunlich turns out to be an ordinary rogue. Antonia's marriage falls apart. The second marriage of the heroine, who embarked on a respectable, business path of life, also ends in failure, since she connects her life with a person deprived of entrepreneurial potential. The death of a newborn daughter, which was the “first bell” of the degeneration of the Buddenbrook family, also prevents Anthony from reconciling with the cheerful Bavarian, Mr. Permander.

Thomas Buddenbrook- the successor of the family business, who headed the Johann Buddenbrock company after the death of his father, only at first glance seems to be a stable embodiment of the trading spirit. By the end of his life, the hero realizes that all this time, in obedience to the family tradition, he only played a business man, but was not one. The son of Thomas, born a music lover, Gerda Arnoldsen is far from not only the trading business, but also the rough, real world. The boy's inability to adapt to the society around him was visible from childhood: little Ganno was sick a lot, grew up as a very impressionable child and was interested exclusively in music. His death from typhus, within the framework of the theme of family degeneration, looks completely natural and predictable.

Christian Buddenbrook, from a young age prone to posturing, internal self-digging and finding non-existent diseases in himself, remains the same in adulthood. He is incapable of being a partner of a large trading company, nor of working as an employee. All Christian is interested in is entertainment, women, and himself. The hero understands that he does not correspond to the business spirit of the family, but asks his loved ones to be indulgent, vainly appealing to their sense of Christian philanthropy: Thomas accepts his brother as he is, not before admitting his own weakness. For Christian, he (throughout his life) is a deterrent: as soon as Thomas dies, the younger Buddenbrook immediately marries a courtesan, takes part of the family's ancestral capital away from the family and is placed in crazy house his overly enterprising wife.

Clara Buddenbrook from birth is a closed, religious, strict type of character. Having married a priest, she leaves no offspring, and dies of brain tuberculosis.

By the time the novel ends, only the female representatives of the Buddenbrook family remain alive, who are not direct successors to the family business and have other surnames: Permaneder (Antonia), Weinshenk (her daughter Erika), the old maid Clotilde, the illegitimate daughter of Christian - Gisela, about whom in the work is mentioned briefly and the very fact of her biological relationship to the Buddenbrooks is called into question. The only heir of the family - Hanno Buddenbrook rests in the cemetery. The family business has been liquidated. The house is sold.

An artistic feature of the novel is the alternation of detailed descriptions of events (housewarming in the Buddenbrooks' house, the death of Elizabeth Buddenbrooks, one day from Hanno's school life, etc.) with a "fast-forward" story, which is important only in its nominative meaning. The historical signs of the times are expressed in the novel by table talk about the Napoleonic invasion of Germany, the social moods of the 40s, which turned into republican unrest in 1848, and the commercial heyday of Lübeck, which fell on the capitalist development of the country in the 60s and 70s of the XIX century. The psychologism of the novel is manifested in dialogues, descriptions of inner experiences, the most tragic (parting, death, awareness of one's inner self) or beautiful moments (declarations of love, celebration of Christmas, etc.) from the life of heroes.

Thomas Mann's first novel, The Buddenbrooks, depicts the decline of a 19th-century patriarchal merchant family from the city of Lübeck. The action of the novel covers the time from 1835 to 1877 and describes four generations of this family. The novel was published in 1901, when Mann was only 25 years old, and in 1929 the writer was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work.

The Buddenbrooks is partly autobiographical, partly depicting the history of the author's family. The image of one of the three brothers, Thomas, resembles the personality of the German writer's father, in the image of Christian one can find the features of his uncle - Friedrich Wilhelm, and Tony is similar to Thomas Mann's aunt, Elisabeth. The tension between Thomas and Christian was typified by the rivalry between Thomas Mann and his older brother Gernich.

The novel goes back to the realism of the 19th century, but includes modernist elements and traits of decadence, pessimism, which was widespread in Germany in the 1900s. and was a reaction to the rapid industrialization of Germany after unification in 1871.

The writer was inspired by the philosophers Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Both of them believed that historical progress is an illusion, and the only true reality is will. One of the highlights of the novel is at the end of Part 10, when Thomas Buddenbrock reads Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation. That is, the work "Buddenbrooks", published at the turn of the century, marks a transition, when realistic narration acquires the features of reflection.

A parallel can be drawn between the decline of the Buddenbrook family and the decline of the Hanseatic city of Lübeck. At the end of the 19th century, many medium-sized German cities lost their economic importance, while the large cities of Hamburg and Berlin grew rapidly. But besides the reference to historical events, another dimension is also implied - fundamental, timeless, mythological. For example, the fate of the Buddenbrooks repeats the fate of the former owners of their house, the Rathenkamps, who gradually lost their competitiveness.

Thus, it is hardly possible to explain the reason for the decline of the Buddenbrooks with one thing. It can be both in unwillingness to adapt to changing external historical circumstances, and in an internal crisis associated with psychological and biological factors. Each subsequent generation of Buddenbrooks becomes weaker, more indecisive and more and more inclined towards aestheticism. The last man in the family, Hanno, is wasting his last energy playing variations on Wagner's themes on the piano. Is this a reflection of broad socio-historical trends, or have the Buddenbrooks simply squandered all their strength and are doomed to close the next circle of the cycle?

The tension between historical and non-historical interpretations of the novel is reflected in the debate and rivalry between the Buddenbrooks and the Hagenströms. The Marxist critic Georg Lukács has interpreted this rivalry as symbolic of the historical transition from the burghers to the bourgeoisie, that is, from old-fashioned paternalism to cutthroat, impersonal capitalism. According to this reading, the Buddenbrooks cannot adapt to the new way of doing business that the Hagenströms represent, based on credit, high risk, and relentless speculation.

However, Thomas Mann is not on the side of the bourgeoisie, he criticizes it. social criticism bourgeoisie is especially clearly manifested in the characterization of the third generation of the Buddenbrock family: Antonia, Christian and Thomas, as well as in the themes that are the leitmotifs of the novel.

In the fate of Antonia Buddenbrook, we find the author's criticism of society's views on the place of women in it. Since childhood, Antonia, or Tonya, as she is affectionately called, has been expected to marry not for love, but for convenience, and thereby support the family business. Toni's parents convince her to marry entrepreneur Grunlich, a man much older than her. And if, before the engagement, he showed some interest in her, or at least tried to show it, then after marriage, the attitude of this gentleman to Tony becomes simply the attitude of the owner (see quote 1). This marriage is a very vivid illustration of what cold calculation, the greed for profit and the deceit of the bourgeoisie lead to, on the one hand, and the obsolete attitude towards a woman as a creature devoid of will, obliged to meekly obey and act only in the interests of the family - on the other. The next marriage with Mr. Permaneder, who cheated on her, also does not bring happiness to Tony, and as a result she remains a lonely embittered woman with a scandalous reputation.

The central figure of the novel is Thomas Buddenbrook Sr. Thomas selflessly continues the family business, as the eldest son should. At first, he is energetic, eager to keep up with the times. But gradually driving force his actions are weakening. This driving force is essentially the same force that made Tony marry Herr Grunlich - family pride and a sense of self-importance. Towards the end of his life, Thomas realizes that in his quest for greatness he has lost his "true self" (see quotation 2). The social values ​​and norms of the bourgeoisie, which contributed to its flourishing, will eventually lead to its own loss of vitality and death.

At the same time, the decline of the Buddenbrook family is not only to blame for external factors, but also for internal ones - the desire to meet standards. In order to survive, according to the members of the Buddenbrook family, two things were necessary: ​​money and an heir. Thomas Mann emphasizes how important material wealth was to the family. The author describes in detail the details of the interior of the Buddenbrooks' house. (see quote 3). The interior of the rooms should indicate wealth and belonging to the upper class. The family continued to flaunt luxury goods even when business was bad and money was tight. Commitment to material goods also characterizes the episode when Tony cannot refuse the servants, despite the lack of funds for their maintenance. (see quote 4). This old-fashioned devotion to luxury in the 19th century, the century of modernisation, coupled with an unwillingness to change their way of life and their outlook on the world, makes the Buddenbrooks completely uncompetitive. At the end of the novel (at the end of the 19th century), together with the emergence of stock markets and joint-stock companies, the accumulation of capital began to take on an impersonal character, and the economy passed from the hands of individual family firms into the hands of these companies.

Another feature of contemporary society, which the author criticizes, is the class difference. Thomas Mann illustrates this in several scenes. One of them is a description of people waiting outside the meeting room to find out the result of elections for the local Senate. The difference between the lower class and the middle class is striking. The lower classes are more crudely and poorly dressed, while the clothes of the middle class are much better. (see quote 5). The language of the lower class is simple, while that of the middle class is refined, which speaks of the difference in education between them. Another illustration of this difference is the relationship between Tony and Morten, a student, the son of a sea captain. Toni is in love with the young man, which she herself confessed to him (see quote 6), but nevertheless marries Grunlich, since Morten does not have the necessary social status.

The historical morals and ideas of this work may seem somewhat outdated. However, the theme of the family will always be relevant, since the family is social institution having a great impact on people's lives at any time.

Quote 1:

“His treatment of the bride was filled with precautionary delicacy - which, however, was expected from him - without excessive ceremony, but also without obtrusiveness, without any inappropriate tenderness. A modest and affectionate kiss on the forehead in the presence of his parents sealed the betrothal ceremony At times, Tony wondered how little his joy matched the desperation he had shown at her refusal.Now in his eyes, when he looked at her, one could read only the contentment of the owner.But occasionally, when they were alone, he found a cheerful mood : he teased her, tried to seat her on his knees and in a voice breaking from playfulness, asked:

Well, after all, I caught you, grabbed you, huh?

To which Tony replied:

Sir, you are forgetting yourself, - and was in a hurry to free yourself.

Quote 2:

"Ups of fantasy, faith in the best ideals - all this has gone along with youth. Joking while working and working jokingly, half-seriously, half-mockingly referring to your own ambitious plans, striving for a goal that you attach purely symbolic meaning- for such fervently skeptical compromises, for such clever half-heartedness, freshness, humor, peace of mind are needed, and Thomas Buddenbrook felt immensely tired, broken. What he was given to achieve, he achieved and was well aware that the top of his life path long since passed, if only, he corrected himself, on such an ordinary and base path one can speak of heights at all.

Quote 3.

Description of the dining room of the Buddenbrooks' house: "The statues of the gods against the sky-blue background of the tapestries protruded almost in relief between the slender columns. The heavy red curtains on the windows were tightly pushed. In all four corners of the room, in high gilded candelabra, eight candles burned, not counting those that were hung on the table in silver candlesticks. big picture- some kind of Italian bay, the misty blue distances of which looked especially beautiful in this lighting. Along the walls were large sofas with straight backs, upholstered in red Damascus.

Quote 4:

"You're a bad mother, Antonia.

Bad mother? Yeah, I just can't. Housekeeping takes all my time! I wake up with twenty ideas in my head that need to be carried out in a day, and go to bed with forty new ones that I have not yet begun to execute! ..

We have two servants. Such a young woman...

Two servants? That's cute! The teen washes the dishes, cleans the dress, puts it away, serves it to the table. The cook's business is above her head: you've been eating cutlets since morning... Think a little, Grünlich! Sooner or later, Erica will have to take a bonna-tutor.

We cannot afford to keep a special person for her from these years.

Out of our means? Oh my God! No, you are really funny! What are we, beggars, to deny ourselves the most necessary things?

<...>- And you? You ruin me.

Am I... Am I ruining you?

Yes. You ruin me with your laziness, your desire to do everything with someone else's hands, unreasonable costs.

Oh, please don't reproach me for my good upbringing! In my parents' house, I didn't have to lift a finger. Now - and it was not easy for me - I got used to the duties of a hostess, I have no right to demand that you do not refuse me what is necessary. My father is a rich man: it could never have occurred to him that I would have a lack of servants ... "

Quote 5:

"- Here, on the street, representatives of all classes of society have gathered. Sailors with open tattooed necks stand with their hands in wide and deep pockets of their trousers; porters in blouses and short trousers made of black oiled canvas, with courageous and ingenuous faces; draymen with whips in hands — they climbed down from their carts loaded to the top with sacks to find out the results of the elections; maids in kerchiefs tied at their chests, in aprons over thick striped skirts, in little white caps on the back of their heads, with baskets in their bare hands; sellers of fish and herbs, even a few cute flower girls in Dutch caps, short skirts and white blouses with wide pleated sleeves flowing from embroidered bodices; there are also merchants, who jumped out of nearby shops without hats; lively exchanging opinions and well-dressed young people - the sons of wealthy merchants, being trained in offices their fathers or their buddies, even schoolchildren with bookbags in their hands or knapsacks over their shoulders."

Quote 6:

- I know, Morten. - She quietly interrupted him, not taking her eyes off her hand, slowly pouring thin, almost white sand through her fingers.

You know!.. And you... Fraulein Tony...

Yes Morten. I believe in you. And I really like you. More than anyone I know."

Thomas Mann, a writer-thinker, has come a long way. He grew up in an environment of wealthy, conservative burghers; for a long time, philosophers of a reactionary, irrationalist warehouse - Schopenhauer, Nietzsche - had a considerable attractive force for him for a long time. He perceived the First World War in the light of nationalist ideas, this was reflected in his journalism book Reflections of the Apolitical. In the 1920s, Thomas Mann - not without difficulty - revised his former views; he opposed the impending fascist barbarism with a noble but abstract preaching of humanism and justice. During the period of Hitler's dictatorship, Thomas Mann, having left his country, became one of the most prominent representatives of the German anti-fascist intelligentsia.

Thomas Mann loved Russian literature from a young age, she participated in his ideological and creative searches throughout his intellectual life for a decade. Among Western writers of the XX century. Thomas Mann is one of the best connoisseurs and connoisseurs of Russian classics. The circle of his readings included Pushkin, Gogol Goncharov, Turgenev, Chekhov, later Gorky, as well as a number of other writers of the 19th and 20th centuries. And above all - Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.

The history of Thomas Mann's creative development cannot be seriously understood if one does not take into account his deep attachment to Russian literature. Several works have been written about Thomas Mann's attitude towards Russian writers. The most serious view of this issue is the well-known Czech scientist Alois Hoffmann. In 1959, he published the book Thomas Mann and Russia in the Czech language, and in 1967 his extensive work Thomas Mann and the World was published in German in the GDR. Russian Literature". Both of these books, controversial in certain particulars, are rich in factual material and valuable observations. However, the topic has not been exhausted, especially since thanks to posthumous publications, letters of Thomas Mann, we can penetrate deeper into the laboratory of his thought.

Thomas Mann's letters contain many interesting, generalizing judgments about how he treated Russian literature, how much it meant to him.

Four years before his death, in 1951, Thomas Mann wrote to his Hungarian correspondent Jena Tamas Gemery: “I don’t know a word of Russian, and the German translations in which I read great Russian authors of the 19th century in my younger years were very are weak. And yet I rank this reading as one of the most important experiences that shaped my personality ”(Doronin - p. - 58).

A few years earlier, on February 26, 1948, Thomas Mann wrote to his school friend Hermann Lange: “You are right in assuming that I have long been devotedly grateful to Russian literature, which I called in my youthful short story “Tonio Kroeger” holy Russian literature. At the age of 23 or 24, I would never have been able to complete my work on Buddenbrooks if I had not drawn strength and courage from constant reading of Tolstoy. Russian literature of the late 18th and 19th centuries. indeed one of the wonders of spiritual culture, and I have always deeply regretted that Pushkin's poetry remained almost inaccessible to me, since I did not have enough time and excess energy to learn the Russian language. However, Pushkin's stories also give enough reason to admire him. Needless to say, how I bow to Gogol, Dostoevsky, Turgenev. But I would like to mention Nikolai Leskov, who is not known, although he is a great master of storytelling, almost equal to Dostoevsky ... You can find traces of Maxim Gorky in my essay on Goethe and Tolstoy, which, perhaps, sometime came across your eyes. I wrote about Tolstoy more than once, most recently in the preface to the American edition of Anna Karenina. I also wrote a preface to the edition of Dostoevsky's stories, which was published in New York in 1945 ... ".

Russian literature evoked responses of various kinds in the work of Thomas Mann, in his novels and essays. With his beloved Russian classics, Thomas Mann sometimes mentally consulted, sometimes he argued with them, relied on their experience and example - at different times in different ways - explaining their works to Western readers and drawing conclusions from these works that are relevant for himself and for others. .

As we can see, we can say that Russian literature, in the person of its greatest masters, influenced Thomas Mann, based on his own testimonies. He was a deeply German writer in his spirit, traditions, and problems. And, of course, he - like all truly great writers - was an individually original artist. In an article written for the centenary of the birth of L.N. Tolstoy, he very subtly defined the nature of the influence that a great writer can have on his fellow writers in other countries:

“The impressive power of his narrative art is incomparable to anything, any contact with him pours into the soul of a receptive talent (but there are no other talents) a living stream of energy, freshness, primitive creative joy ... This is not about imitation. And is it possible to imitate force? Under its influence, works can arise both in spirit and in form that are very dissimilar to each other, and, most importantly, completely different from the works of Tolstoy himself.

The influence of Russian literature on Thomas Mann (and on many other foreign writers) cannot be measured and appreciated by means of "chasing after parallels", as is often practiced in Western literary science. The point is not at all to look for features of external resemblance to the Russian classics in the books of Thomas Mann, to find coincidences or closeness of individual episodes, figures, details. Such coincidences are sometimes indeed found and, so to speak, lie on the surface. But they are not the point. Our task is to turn to the works of Thomas Mann, and to his statements and testimonies, to find out what and how he used realistic elements.

The work of T. Mann is of interest for research, especially because it has not been studied in detail. There are a number of works devoted to Mann, but the construction of his works, his connection with real events and elements has not been studied.

The purpose of this work is to study the realistic elements in Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks.

1. identify the time and place of writing the work,

2. study the events that took place in Germany at the time of writing the work,

3. explore realistic elements (place, time, etc.) that are present in the work.

This work consists of 3 chapters. In chapter 1, the time and place of writing the work of T. Mann were considered. Chapter 2 explores the historical events that took place in Germany during the creation of T. Mann "Buddenbrooks". Chapter 3 reveals the realistic elements present in the work, in particular, the place where the action takes place, the family, as part of the real world.

As mentioned above, this topic is of interest due to its lack of study. Therefore, today it is quite interesting material that will help to understand the essence of the events that take place in the novel, through consideration of the details.

The following literary sources were used in the work: History of foreign literature of the XX century; History of German Literature; Kalashnikov A.A.; Literature of writers of Germany; World history; Motyleva T.L.; Starostin V.V.; Tolstoy L.N.; Fadeeva V.S.; Reader on foreign literature. As well as information from the sites: http://www.eduhmao.ru.; http://www.litera.edu.ru.; http://www.cultinfo.ru.; http:// www.bookz.ru.

1. Time and place of writing the work "Buddenbrooks"

In the eighties of the 19th century, when Thomas Mann and his older brother Heinrich were children, the reading public of Western Europe was just beginning to become widely acquainted with Russian literature. Crime and Punishment first appeared in German translation in 1882, War and Peace in 1885.

In the nineties, when the Mann brothers - each in his own way - took their first steps in literature, the names of the greatest Russian novelists were already known in the West to every educated person. Books by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, as well as Gogol, Goncharov, Turgenev appeared one after another, causing lively responses in the press.

All or almost all of the major German writers who entered conscious life at the end of the 19th or the beginning of the 20th century knew Russian literature, took a keen interest in it, and learned from it in one form or another. Gergart Hauptmann wrote his first famous realist plays under the direct influence of Tolstoy's The Power of Darkness. Bernhard Kellermann in the novel "Der Tor" ("Fool" or "Idiot") created the image of a strange and beautiful-hearted preacher, in many ways close to Prince Myshkin. Rainer Maria Rilke was drawn to Russian culture, tried to write poetry in Russian, visited Tolstoy in Yasnaya Polyana. Leonhard Frank, who wrote one of the first books of anti-militarist prose, A Good Man, during the First World War, considered Dostoevsky his teacher. However, we can safely say that Thomas Mann, in terms of the depth of perception of Russian classical literature, in the completeness of his spiritual ties with it, surpassed all German writers of his generation.

Heinrich Mann, who was much less close to Russian literature than his brother, wrote in his book of memoirs Review of the Century several vivid pages about how the books of Russian writers were perceived in Western Europe at the end of the last century. Heinrich Mann is talking here about the interaction between literature and the liberation movement in Russia.

Russian literature of the 19th century, writes Heinrich Mann, “is an event of incredible importance and such enlightening power that we, accustomed to the phenomena of decline and breaking, can hardly believe that we were its contemporaries… How was Dostoevsky read, how was Tolstoy read?

They read with trepidation. They were read - and the eyes opened wider to perceive all this abundance of images, all this abundance of thought, and as a response, tears flowed. These novels, from Pushkin to Gorky, link by link in an impeccably soldered chain, taught us to get to know a person more deeply, his weaknesses, his formidable power, his unfulfilled vocation - and they were accepted as a lesson.

In another chapter of the same book, Heinrich Mann recalls how differently he and his brother Thomas spent their years of literary apprenticeship. “When my brother entered the twenties of his life, he was devoted to the Russian masters, while for me a good half of my existence was determined by French literature. Both of us learned to write in German - that's why, I think.

Heinrich and Thomas Mann both occupied an exceptionally important place in the history of their national culture. Both of them raised the art of German realistic prose to a great height, laid the foundations of the German novel of the 20th century, this became their common cause, one might even say - a common creative feat. And at the same time, they were very different in their spiritual make-up - this was also reflected in the choice of those artistic traditions that they followed. Heinrich Mann gravitated toward satire and, at the same time, toward a concrete social study of Reality: he found a lot of value for himself in Voltaire, and in Balzac, and in Zola. Thomas Mann, as an artist, felt a penchant for psychological and philosophical prose; partly from this came his heightened interest in the masters of the Russian novel (Motyleva 1982:12).

Heinrich Mann surpassed his brother in political radicalism, already in his youth he broke away from the burgher environment, its traditional views and mores. Thomas Mann remained closely associated with this milieu for a long time.

Thomas Mann's early stories - "Disappointment", "Little Mr. Friedemann", "Louischen", "Pagliac", "Tobias Mindernickel" - are studies on the theme of human suffering. People rise in them, offended by fate, physically or spiritually handicapped, internally alienated from the world around them. From the very first creative steps, the young writer was attracted by acute psychological collisions: with their help, he revealed the hidden tragedy of bourgeois, petty-bourgeois life.

Already in the sketch story "Disappointment" (1896), a kind of "anti-hero" appears - a middle-aged lonely man: in a conversation with a casual acquaintance, he pours out his disgust for life, for society, for "high words" with which people deceive each other.

A more clearly delineated figure of the "anti-hero" appears in the story "Clown" (1897). It is written in the first person, in the confessional manner that was first tried by Dostoevsky (in the world literature of the 20th century, this manner was widely developed, but for the West at the end of the 19th century it was still completely new) (Samovalov 1981:166).

In the story of the "clown" about himself, buffoonery is combined with genuine anger, insecurity with narcissism, arrogance with humiliation; before us is the image of a split, torn consciousness.

The outlook of the "buffoon", the whole range of his experiences, is incomparably narrower compared to the tragic hero of Notes from the Underground. However, the story breathes with sincere hostility towards the world of successful "large-scale businessmen": the restless "buffoon", one way or another, is spiritually much higher than the environment from which he voluntarily broke away.

On the eve of the new century, Thomas Mann was working on the novel The Buddenbrooks, which was published in 1901. The book was originally conceived as the story of a burgher family, built on the material of domestic traditions - a novel about older relatives, nothing more. A beginner, the writer could not imagine that this book would mark the beginning of his world fame, and that the Nobel Prize (he received it in 1920) would be awarded to him precisely as the author of The Buddenbrooks (Fadeeva 1982:154).

T. Mann's "Buddenbrooks" are written in the manner of a broad, unhurried narration, with the mention of many details, with a detailed image of individual episodes, with many dialogues and internal monologues. The impetus for writing was an acquaintance with the novel by the Goncourt brothers Rene Mauperin. T. Mann was delighted with the grace and structural clarity of this work, quite small in volume, but saturated with significant psychological content. Previously, he believed that his genre was a short psychological novel, now it seemed to him that he could try his hand at a psychological novel of the Goncourt type. However, from the idea of ​​a small novel about modernity, about a “problematic” hero of the end of the century, weak and helpless in the face of a ruthless life, a huge epic novel has turned out, covering the fate of four generations (http://litera.edu.ru).

Many years later, in the essay “My Time,” Thomas Mann testified: “I really wrote a novel about my own family ... But in fact, I myself did not realize that, talking about the collapse of a burgher family, I heralded much deeper processes of disintegration and dying, the beginning of a much more significant cultural and socio-historical breakdown. The novel is based on Mann's observations of his family, friends, the customs of his native city, the decline of a family belonging to a hereditary middle class. Realistic in method and detail, the novel, in fact, symbolically depicts the relationship between the burgher world and the spiritual world.

The pessimistic philosophy of Schopenhauer suggested to the young writer the idea of ​​decay and dying as an inevitable fatal law of being. But the sobriety of the artistic vision of life prompted him to paint the decline of the Buddenbrook family. in the light of the concrete, determined by the laws of history, the fate of the bourgeois, proprietary way of life.

When Mann was working on the novel, he was asked what he was writing about. “Ah, this is a boring burgher matter,” he replied, “but it is a matter of decline, and this is why it is literary.” The idea of ​​decline generalizes the whole huge material of everyday life of the novel. It traces the fate of four generations of wealthy burghers, whose entrepreneurial activity and will to live weaken from generation to generation. At the same time, the picture of gradual economic impoverishment and biological degradation, deployed on the example of one family, turns out to be "typical of the entire European burghers" - an obsolete, unviable class.

As the author himself admitted, in order to take place, his work “had to carefully study and master the techniques of a naturalistic novel, having won the right to use them with hard work.” A case from Mann's life at that time is indicative: one of his acquaintances once noticed that the writer was watching him through binoculars. So - as if with the help of a magnifying glass - Mann studied the burgher life, composing an epic canvas from accurately noticed trifles.

Thomas Mann (1875–1955) was only 25 years old when The Buddenbrooks appeared. His success was so impressive that in 1929 he brought Mann the Nobel Prize (http://www.eduhmao.ru.).

In the 1947 article "On a Chapter from the Buddenbrooks", Thomas Mann recalls how he relied in his work on the experience of writers from other countries and not only Russian ones. “The influences that determined the appearance of this book as a work of art came from everywhere: from France, England, Russia, from the Scandinavian North, - the young author absorbed them eagerly, with the zealous zeal of a student, feeling that the ode could not do without them in his work on the work , psychological in its innermost thoughts and intentions, because it sought to convey the psychology of those who are tired of living, to portray the complication of spiritual life and the sharpening of susceptibility to beauty that accompanies biological decline.

And - on the same page - T. Mann clarifies his idea: "... under my gaze, a socio-critical novel hidden under the mask of a family chronicle appeared ...". The motif of "biological decline" is ultimately pushed aside in "Buddenbrooks" by a large socio-critical theme.

It is worth considering another important testimony of Thomas Mann - from his book "Reflections of the Apolitical". There, the memory of the "Buddenbrooks" pops up for an unexpected reason - in connection with the name of Nietzsche. To this philosopher, so influential in Kaiser's Germany, Thomas Mann treated with great respect, highly appreciated his literary gift. However, in "Reflections of the Apolitical" T. Mann partially dissociates himself from Nietzsche. He claims that he never, even in his youth, shared the cult of brute force and the aestheticization of “brutal instincts” that comes from Nietzsche. On the contrary, the artistic reference points for him were works generated by "highly moral, sacrificial and Christian-conscientious natures." Here is Michelangelo's The Last Judgment, and then Anna Karenina, "which gave me strength when I wrote Buddenbrooks.

It can be assumed that Tolstoy's work - both with its realism and its moral pathos - could "give strength" to the young Thomas Mann in his - not yet fully conscious - opposition to reactionary philosophical teachings.

While working on a story about the fate of a burgher family, Thomas Mann studied the rich experience of the European "family romance". In this regard, too, Anna Karenina, a novel in which Tolstoy, in his own words, loved "the thought of the family," should have attracted him. He should have been attracted by the fact that in Anna Karenina the history of personal destinies, personal relationships of the characters is inextricably linked with the history of society - and contains a strong charge of social criticism directed against the very foundations of a proprietary way of life.

Thomas Mann did not feel a penchant for satirical grotesque, a sharp sharpening of characters and situations. The closer he was to be Tolstoy's way of depicting - irreproachably reliable and at the same time uncompromisingly sober. In "Buddenbrooks" he - like the author of "Anna Karenina" - depicts that class, that social environment, which is vitally close to him. He loves his Buddenbrooks, he himself is flesh of their flesh. But at the same time, he is uncompromisingly frank. Each of the main characters of the story is depicted in the "fluidity" of living inconsistency, the interweaving of good and bad (Mitrofanov 1987:301).

The Buddenbrook clan has its own cultural and moral foundations, its own firm concepts of decency and honesty, about what is possible and what is not. However, the novelist calmly, gently, without pressure, but, in essence, ruthlessly demonstrates the wrong side of this Buddenbrookian morality - the latent antagonism that corrodes the relationship of parents and children, brothers and sisters, those running manifestations of selfishness, hypocrisy, self-interest that flow from the very essence of bourgeois- proprietary relationships.

In the novel by T. Mann, the action begins in 1835 and is brought to the end of the 19th century - four generations of Buddenbrooks pass before the reader. However, the fate of the third generation - Thomas, Christian, Tony - is depicted with the greatest close-up of the author's attention. The sunset of their life falls on the years that followed the reunification of Germany. In the first years of the Hohenzollern empire, as in post-reform Russia, everything “turned upside down and is only getting better.” No matter how dissimilar the social situations depicted in Anna Karenina and in the last parts of Buddenbrooks, both here and there we are talking about the rapid breakdown of the old social foundations. Tolstoy recreated the collapse of patriarchal-landowner Russia; Thomas Mann, using the material of his national reality, showed the collapse of the ancient foundations of the German patriarchal-burgher way of life. That life fatigue, a sense of doom, from which Senator Thomas Buddenbrock suffers, and then his fragile and gifted son Hanno, find an explanation not in some metaphysical laws of being, but in the laws of German and world history.

Thomas Mann masterfully conveys the atmosphere of anxiety and uncertainty in which his characters live in the last parts of the novel. Through the fate of his heroes, he feels and reproduces not only the collapse of the old burghers, the commercial "patriciate" of the North German cities, but also something much more significant: the fragility of the rule of the bourgeois, the owners, the precariousness of the foundations on which capitalist society is built.

The theme of death appears several times in Buddenbrooks. And here the creative connection between Thomas Mann and Tolstoy is very noticeable. Here we can recall not only Anna Karenina (and, in particular, the paintings of the dying of Nikolai Levin), but also The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Narrating the last weeks of the life of Senator Thomas Buddenbrook, T. Mann reveals the spiritual drama of this smart and energetic bourgeois, who, in the face of imminent death, faces new, painfully difficult questions for him about the meaning of being, doubts are growing whether he lived his life correctly .

However, the content of the Buddenbrooks is by no means reduced to the theme of dying and decay, or to satirical motifs, which in places, as if imperceptibly, are interspersed in the narrative. The artistic charm and originality of "Buddenbrooks" is largely based on the fact that the author is spiritually attached to his characters, to their way of life, their family traditions. With all his sobriety and irony, with all the social criticism that forms the ideological basis of the novel, the writer draws the departing Buddenbrook world with sympathy and restrained sadness, “from within”.

Buddenbrooks showed the young novelist's amazing ability to depict people and the circumstances of their lives visually, visibly, with great artistic plasticity, in an abundance of aptly grasped details. And in the brilliance of everyday episodes, genre scenes, interiors, in the accuracy and richness of psychological characteristics, in the realistic full-bloodedness of the general family-group portrait of the Buddenbrooks, connected by a common family resemblance and yet so dissimilar to each other in many ways - the original and mature talent of Thomas Mann.

T. Mann's "Buddenbrooks" are written in the manner of a broad, unhurried narration, with the mention of many details, with a detailed image of individual episodes, with many dialogues and internal monologues.

The book was originally conceived as the story of a burgher family, built on the material of domestic traditions - a novel about older relatives, nothing more. A beginner, the writer could not imagine that this book would mark the beginning of his world fame, and that the Nobel Prize (he received it in 1920) would be awarded to him precisely as the author of Buddenbrooks.

Through the fate of his heroes, he feels and reproduces not only the collapse of the old burghers, the commercial "patriciate" of the North German cities, but also something much more significant: the fragility of the rule of the bourgeois, the owners, the precariousness of the foundations on which capitalist society is built.

2. Historical events in Germany during the creation of "Buddenbrooks"

The collapse of attempts to suppress the labor movement and failures in foreign policy predetermined the resignation of Bismarck (1890). Disagreements between Bismarck and the new German Emperor Wilhelm II (who ascended the throne in 1888) also played a significant role in this. Bismarck's successor as Reich Chancellor L. Caprivi began to move away from the policy of agrarian protectionism in the interests of the industrial magnates. Trade agreements were concluded with a number of states, which facilitated, thanks to the mutual reduction of duties, the sale of German industrial goods. This led to the penetration of foreign grain into the German market and caused strong dissatisfaction among the Junkers. In 1894, the post of chancellor was taken over by H. Hohenlohe, who, like Bismarck, tried to stop the continued consolidation of the forces of the German proletariat with the help of repressions.

An indicator of the maturity of the German Social Democracy was its adoption in 1891 of the Erfurt Program, which was a step forward in comparison with the Gotha Program. This program contained provisions on the mastery of political power by the working class, on the abolition of classes and class rule as the ultimate goal of the party. But even this program lacked even a mention of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the demand for a democratic republic as the immediate goal. In 1893, the Social Democrats brought 44 deputies to the Reichstag, in 1898 - 56 deputies. The labor movement became a serious factor in the political life of the country. The German Social Democracy at that time played a leading role in the international labor movement. But already at the end of the 19th century. opportunists declared themselves, led by E. Bernstein with a revision of Marxism. The backbone of opportunism was the labor aristocracy, with which the bourgeoisie shared part of the profits, and people from the petty-bourgeois strata (World History 16:256–258).

Germany entered the 20th century as an imperialist power with a highly developed economy. In terms of industrial production, Germany advanced by the beginning of the 20th century. to 1st place in Europe, overtaking the recent "workshop of the world" Great Britain. Under the sign of militarism, the entire economic and political social structure of Germany was restructured. The German imperialist bourgeoisie, which was late in its development, made extensive use of dumping in its struggle for markets; at the same time, it sought to compensate for “losses” by raising prices in the domestic market. The dominant form of monopoly associations in Germany were cartels; their number grew rapidly (in 1890 - 210, in 1911 - 550-600). A characteristic feature of German imperialism was the wide coverage of the entire economy of the country by monopolies. The big banks have become of great importance; this was due to the paramount role they played in the process of folding the monopolies. Therefore, the merging of industrial and banking capital proceeded more intensively in Germany than in other countries. Along with this, in Germany, where the direct influence of the state on economic life was significant even in previous decades, state-monopoly tendencies appeared early.

German imperialism was characterized by a class alliance between the Junkers and the big bourgeoisie. At the beginning of the 20th century the export of capital intensified in Germany. In 1902, German investments abroad amounted to 12.5 billion francs, and in 1914 already 44 billion francs. The monopolies persistently pushed the government to war for the redivision of the world.

Imperialist Germany was constantly building up its armaments. From 1879 to 1914, military spending increased 5 times, exceeding 1,600 million marks, which accounted for more than half of the state budget. The size of the peacetime army increased every year; by 1914 it had reached 800,000; The German army was equipped with the most modern weapons for that time. Programs for the construction of warships have been repeatedly revised upwards. By the beginning of World War I, Germany had 41 battleships, including 15 heavy-duty “dreadnoughts”. The ruling circles carried out intensive indoctrination of the population in the spirit of chauvinism.

Early 20th century marked by a new upsurge in the labor movement. The Revolution of 1905–07 in Russia had a great influence on the German proletariat. In 1905–1906, more than 800 thousand people took part in strikes in Germany, i.e. almost the same as in the previous 15 years. On January 17, 1906, the first mass political strike in the history of the German labor movement took place in Hamburg. The leaders of the left-wing Social Democrats R. Luxemburg, K. Liebknecht, K. Zetkin, F. Mehring, and others propagated the Russian revolutionary experience. Right-wing Social Democrats (E. Bernstein, K. Legin, G. Vollmar, F. , F. Ebert) promoted "class peace". After the defeat of the Russian Revolution of 1905–07, a reactionary course intensified in German politics. In 1907, the Reichstag voted credits for the suppression of tribal uprisings in South West Africa and additional funds for building a fleet. Under these conditions, an enormous responsibility fell on the Social Democratic Party as a force that could prevent the onset of reaction and plans to unleash a world war. If at the beginning of the 20th century German Social Democracy as a whole still stood on the positions of the class struggle, was "... ahead of everyone in its organization, in the integrity and cohesion of the movement," then in the subsequent right-wing opportunists gained more and more influence in its leadership. The centrist group led by K. Kautsky also brought great harm. Figures of the left wing of the Social Democracy, to whom A. Bebel was close in a number of issues, defended the principles of Marxism, waged an active struggle against militarism, and exposed the opportunism of the right-wing leaders. But even the Left Social Democrats did not fully understand the tasks arising from the new conditions of the class struggle, did not dare to break organizationally with the opportunists.

In the years preceding World War I, the working-class movement began to grow again in Germany (in 1910–13, an average of 300,000–400,000 workers went on strike a year). On March 6, 1910, a mass workers' demonstration took place in Berlin under the slogan of introducing universal suffrage in Prussia, which was dispersed by the mounted police ("German Bloody Sunday"). In September-October 1910, in the proletarian district of Berlin, Moabit, barricade battles between strikers and the police unfolded. In March 1912, a strike of 250,000 Ruhr miners began; in the summer of 1913 there were major strikes in Hamburg, Kiel, Stettin, and Bremen. The indignation of the oppressed population of Alsace grew. A political crisis was brewing in Germany. However, the numerous Social Democratic Party (about 1 million in 1912) and the trade unions (more than 2.5 million in 1912–13) failed to lead the working class to storm imperialism and to launch an effective struggle against the threat of war.

In preparing for war, the German government sought to undermine the Franco-Russian alliance and isolate France (Wilhelm II concluded the Treaty of Bjork in 1905 with Nicholas II), and also to liquidate the Anglo-French agreement of 1904. But G. failed to tear Russia or Great Britain away from France; in 1907 these three countries created the Entente, which opposed the Triple Alliance. Overestimating its military power and believing that Great Britain would not support Russia, imperialist Germany unleashed World War I. As a pretext, she used the assassination by Serbian nationalists on June 28, 1914 of the heir to the Austrian throne, Franz Ferdinand (the so-called Sarajevo assassination) (http://www.cultinfo.ru).

Germany entered the 20th century as an imperialist power with a highly developed economy. A characteristic feature of German imperialism was the wide coverage of the entire economy of the country by monopolies. The big banks have become of great importance; this was due to the paramount role they played in the process of folding the monopolies. Therefore, the merging of industrial and banking capital proceeded more intensively in Germany than in other countries. Along with this, in Germany, where the direct influence of the state on economic life was significant even in previous decades, state-monopoly tendencies appeared early.

Along with this, in Germany, where the direct influence of the state on economic life was significant even in previous decades, state-monopoly tendencies appeared early.

Realistic elements in "Buddenbrooks" by T. Manna

Family and main characters of the novel

The very title of the novel shows that it describes the life of an entire family. The fate of the Buddenbrook family is a story of gradual decline and decay. "The Decline of a Family" is the subtitle of the novel. The fall of the Buddenbrooks is not a continuous process. Periods of stagnation are replaced by periods of a new upsurge, but still, on the whole, the family gradually weakens and dies.

"Buddenbrooks" is a work that raises great social problems, giving a vivid and truthful picture of the historical development of the bourgeoisie as a class from the 18th (since the Napoleonic wars) to the end of the 19th century. This is a novel about 4 generations of a bourgeois family. The material in this book is inspired by the history of the Mann family. The gradual destruction of the material well-being of the Buddenbrooks, from generation to generation, is combined with their spiritual impoverishment (Starostin 1980: 4.)

Johann Buddenbrock Sr. is a typical burgher of the 18th century, an optimistic and moderate freethinker who optimistically believes in the strength of bourgeois existence.

Johann Buddenbrock, the younger, is a man of a different caste, his consciousness is shaken by the approach of the revolutionary events of 1848, he is seized by anxiety and uncertainty, he seeks solace in religion. With his ostentatious strictly patrician morality, he no longer manages to reconcile his commercial activities with purely human relations, even with family members.

Thomas and Christian no longer feel like an integral part of their class, "the best part of the nation", like grandfather. Thomas, at the cost of terrible efforts of will, still forces himself to wear a mask of imaginary efficiency, imaginary self-confidence, but he no longer feels in himself the ability to compete with entrepreneurs of a new predatory type. Behind his ostentatious restraint lies fatigue, a misunderstanding of the meaning and purpose of his own existence, fear of the future.

Christian is a devastated person, a renegade, a person capable of only buffoonery. The degeneration of the Buddenbrooks for Thomas Mann marks the death of that seemingly indestructible foundation on which the burgher culture was based. The origins of the destruction of the family in the objective appearance among the German burghers of "grunders" - unscrupulous predatory businessmen who abandoned the notorious conscientiousness in matters that broke solid established business ties. The strength and thoroughness of the way of life recede before the insatiable thirst for wealth, the cruel grip of entrepreneurs of the new formation.

Drawing the history of the Buddenbrooks, Thomas Mann simultaneously shows the history of bourgeois thought, its evolution from the philosophy of the Enlightenment to reactionary decadent views. Voltairian Buddenbrook, the elder, is replaced by the hypocrite Buddenbrock, the younger, and his son Thomas is fond of the philosophy of Schopenhauer (Timofeev 1983:254).

From generation to generation, the spiritual strength of the family dries up. The rudely good-natured founders of the dynasty are finally replaced by refined neuropathic creatures whose fear of life kills their activity, makes them the inevitable victims of history. The last offspring of Hanno Buddenbrook, the son of Thomas, inherited from his mother a passion for music alien to his ancestors, imbued with disgust not only for the prosaic activities of his father, but also for everything that is not music, art.
Thus, the most important theme for Mann crystallizes: the sharp opposition of all art to bourgeois reality, all mental activity - to the base practice of the bourgeois.

Nietzsche and Schopenhauer have a certain influence on Thomas Mann here. Like the first, Mann considers morbidity to elevate a person above mediocrity, making his worldview sharper and deeper. The carrier of ill-health - most often an artist - opposes the selfish and narcissistic world of the bourgeois. The pessimism of Schopenhauer, who sang about the beauty of dying, seemed natural to Mann, who saw in the dying culture of the burghers the death of all human culture.

Ganno, possessed by the "demon" of music, simultaneously symbolizes the spiritual exaltation of the Buddenbrook family and its tragic end. The novel is invaded by the decadent idea that art is linked to biological degeneration.

So, the novel "Buddenbrooks", published, marked a new phase in the creative development of Thomas Mann. It is based on a lot of autobiography. The writer carefully studied family papers, got acquainted with the business correspondence of his father and grandfather, delved into the details of the domestic environment, the home way of his ancestors. Mann's personal memories thus form the main outline of the novel, which makes it even more concrete.

The family chronicle of the Buddenbrooks is an epic tale of the past rise and fall of the once powerful elite of the German merchant bourgeoisie. In this regard, the writer, on the one hand, continues the traditions of German realistic prose of the 70s of the last century, on the other hand, anticipates the emergence of the Western European, social chronicle novel of the 20th century. (Galsworthy - "The Saga of the Forsytes", Roger Martin Du Gard - "The Thibaut Family"). Thomas Mann begins the history of the Buddenbrook family from the middle of the 19th century. and traces her fate for three generations. The former economic power and spiritual greatness of this kind are embodied in the image of the old Johann Buddenbrock. His whole appearance, his spiritual physiognomy was formed in the atmosphere of the Enlightenment. Full of inexhaustible life optimism, he is unshakably confident in his personal strengths and in the power of his class. His son Consul Johann Buddenbrock is already deprived of his father's optimism; the mature years of his life are already passing in different historical conditions, in a turning point, when a new generation of capitalist entrepreneurs is replacing the patriarchal burghers.

In the light of new social conditions, the old Buddenbrook firm becomes for the consul Johann Buddenbrook, and after him and for his son Thomas, not just a commercial enterprise, but a symbol of the greatness of the family, a kind of fetish, to which the personal interests of each family member must obey.

Representing the first generation, Johann Buddenbrock embodies the strength of the burgher way of life, which has not lost touch with the people's environment. He is energetic, assertive, initiative, successful in business. His son, Consul Johann Buddenbrook, is a solid and balanced man, he does business well, but as a person he is less ambitious. After the revolution of 1848, he was not so sure of the inviolability of traditional foundations. For the representatives of the third generation of Thomas and Christian, the firm becomes something internally alien. They develop a tendency to reflection - a phenomenon unusual in the Buddenbrook family. Senator Thomas Buddenbrook maintains a semblance of calm. But internally he is tired and broken. From others and from himself, he tries to hide the decline of the company. Ganno, the only representative of the fourth generation, the son of Thomas, himself draws a line under his name in the family book as a sign that after him the family will cease to exist. The boy is in poor health, but he is musically gifted. Life inspires him with horror and disgust.

Location of the novel

In the opening chapters of the novel, the two chiefs of the firm, old Johann and his son, are depicted with truly epic breadth. The narrative flows smoothly, unhurriedly, lingering for a long time on the material world surrounding the Buddenbrooks. The description of their new home, rich furnishings, decoration emphasizes the solid wealth, heavy life of the top of the patrician bourgeoisie. The “gold-edged notebook with embossed binding”, in which outstanding events in the history of the family were recorded, should, according to Mann, embody the importance of the historical role of the German merchant bourgeoisie.

The epic-genre description acquires a dramatic character only with the appearance of the eldest daughter of the consul, Tony. It's not about her, of course. This cheerful young girl is infinitely devoted to her family and its traditions. The disturbing beginning enters the novel along with Tony's fiancé, Mr. Grunlich, described by the author in an acutely grotesque tone. Yielding to the persuasion of people close to her, Tony makes a "profitable game", she marries a man who is not dear to her, who in turn marries a rich bride to pay her debts. Grunlich, this clever, unscrupulous businessman, who even resorts to forging the trading books of his office, undermines the former prestige of the Buddenbrooks firm, destroys the halo of patriarchy that previously surrounded it.

Another image is woven into Tony's emotional drama, completely opposite to Grunlich. This is Morten Schwarzkopf, the pilot's son, a medical student. This simple and honest young man, estranged from the society of rich merchant sons, rises to a sharp protest against police Junker Germany. It is no coincidence that in his modest little room in Göttingen, where he studies medicine, he "puts on" a policeman's uniform over the skeleton. In conversations with Tony, Morten Schwarzkopf opens the veil of a different life for a young girl, full of tireless work, the struggle for existence. In this difficult but rich life, Morten calls Tony, whom he passionately fell in love with. Tony responds to his feeling. But the power of tradition is so great that the girl is unable to overcome it. She breaks with Morten and marries someone who in the eyes of her family was a good match.

The tragic fate of Tony sheds light on the personal drama of her brother, Consul Thomas. This cultured, enlightened, sensitive man sees the approaching collapse of the Buddenbrooks firm. Trying to keep up with the times, Thomas throws himself into speculation, but, not possessing the qualities necessary for a capitalist of a new formation, he is forced to give way to predatory businessmen like Hagenstrem.

The death of Thomas is not aesthetically pleasing. Leaving the office of an ignorant dentist, he dies on the street, falling face down into the mud that floods his snow-white gloves and flawless muffler.

From the writer's point of view, the ugly and sudden death of Consul Buddenbrock is the completion of that internal process of disintegration to which his class, the class of the German patriarchal burghers, was doomed.

Thomas Mann perceives the death of the old burgher culture as the physical and spiritual degradation of the descendants of the patrician bourgeoisie. This degradation leads to a weakening of the will, to the loss of vital optimism and, ultimately, to inevitable death. In the novel, Consul Thomas and his son Ganno become the bearers of death. Painfully refined, fragile young man, esthete, musician, far from real life, Ganno is associated with decadence with all his external appearance and inner essence. The seal of decadence lies on the last chapters of the novel. If the first part of the family chronicle is characterized by a deliberately old-fashioned manner of epic writing, then the last chapters of the second part are distinguished by a different style: convulsive impulsiveness, a combination of lyricism and musicality, painful psychologization, and subtle elegance of language (http://bookz.ru.).

The novel "Buddenbrooks" was of great importance for the entire further development of the problems of Thomas Mann. In it, as in a focus, those vital problems for Mann are collected, which he will then begin to develop in short stories about artists and in the novel The Magic Mountain. Thus, the image of the musician, the esthete Ganno is the first link in a long chain of Mann artists, refined decadent natures, painfully experiencing the tragedy of loneliness in the world.

In creating an image of reality, Mann is, in fact, realistic. Anyone who has read "Buddenbrooks", the question of whether he can recognize the streets, houses described by the author in the novel, will answer this question in the affirmative. The author himself attaches great importance to the impression of the reality of the events described in the novel. So, for example, in the report, T. Mann recalls the words of one of his technical assistants in Munich: “Now I know how it all really happened!”. T. Mann took this remark as a compliment. The idea of ​​the completeness and objectivity of the reality depicted in T. Mann's novels is also inherent in many researchers of his work. Yu. Bonke notes, for example, that “the accuracy of spatial and temporal characteristics in T. Mann ... is supported by psychological observations, minute-by-minute depiction of gestures, clothes, speech turns and typical habits of heroes, careful study of the “environment”, the use of dialects ... "The researcher emphasizes precisely minute , thoroughness of the image, its, so to speak, naturalism (Kalashnikov 2000:29).

The old town of Lübeck is located on an island, several bridges lead there. Perhaps the most famous of them is the bridge in front of the Holstentor gate. Two massive gate towers built in the 15th century have become a symbol of Lübeck. The old town in Lübeck is extremely complete, without any modern inserts, and all of red brick.

Lübeck also has non-medieval sights. More precisely, one main attraction is the Buddenbrooks house from the famous novel by Thomas Mann "Buddenbrooks", which in fact was the family home of Heinrich and Thomas Mann. It is now the Mann family museum.

For example, let's turn to the image of a landscape room. In the spatial structure of the novel, the landscape plays an extremely important role: after all, "according to routine, the Buddenbrooks met every second Thursday" here. Here they received guests, gave dinner parties, etc. The landscape room is, therefore, the room where the idle life of the heroes takes place, devoid of the rigor and expediency to which their working, everyday life, the life of politicians and businessmen, should be subordinated. From the point of view of the completeness and reliability of the plot depiction of the events of the novel, the representation of the characters' characters, it would be logical to assume that the text of the novel contains equally detailed descriptions of the premises in which the characters work or spend hours of solitude. However, this is exactly what is not happening. In the text of the novel, we find only mentions of the existence of office premises and private chambers of the heroes. From a quantitative point of view, the images of these premises are quite widely represented in the text, but in the absence of a more detailed description of them, they remain for the reader a kind of only markers of reality, a kind of mask, an external plan, the content of which is hidden and unclear. Office spaces and bedrooms are deliberately “omitted” spaces.

An analysis of the plot of the novel also reveals the fact that the overwhelming majority of events that are the key plot points of the narrative take place precisely in the landscape room. The fateful visit of Grunlich for Tony Buddenbrook, who seeks her hand and heart, the revolutionary unrest of October 1848, and finally the death of the old consul Johann Buddenbrook - the heroes of the novel experience all these important events in this room. The rest of the space of the house (for example, office space or bedrooms) is, as it were, pushed aside from the main axis of the plot development of the narrative, deprived of its independent meaning: Consul Buddenbrock experiences even the presence of his wife Elisabeth and newborn daughter from the premises adjacent to the landscape room - the dining room, which in the novel forms a functional semantic, as well as spatial unity with the landscape. The impression of impenetrability, unpreparedness for self-disclosure of the repressed space of the characters’ private lives is enhanced in the novel by the introduction of the motif of curtains that always separate, for example, the characters’ bedroom from the outside world: “Johann Buddenbrock ... quietly rocked the cradle with green silk curtains, almost close to the high bed under the canopy, on which lay the consul"; “the green curtains on the open windows in Mrs. Grunlich’s bedroom swayed slightly from the light breath of a clear July night”, “the walls of this room were upholstered with dark matter in large colors ... Light barely broke through the closed curtains”, etc. From the point of view of comprehending the plot material, these spaces turn out to be closed to the reader; by themselves, they do not tell us anything new either about the characters or about the events that happen to them. They are an objective image of reality, which the artist, according to Mann, is called upon to subject to "subjective deepening" (Kalashnikov 2000:34).

As the narrative acquires more and more realistic details (new characters appear, old ones leave, even partly the narrative space associated with the acquisition of a new house by the family changes), the symbolic content deepens, which organizes them into a kind of semantic unity - unity catastrophe, the death of a family. The image of the landscape gradually acquires the ability to reorganize the meaning of the events depicted in the novel, to predetermine the course of their development.

"Buddenbrooks" is a work that raises great social problems, giving a vivid and truthful picture of the historical development of the bourgeoisie as a class from the 18th to the end of the 19th century. This is a novel about 4 generations of a bourgeois family. The material in this book is inspired by the history of the Mann family. The gradual destruction of the material well-being of the Buddenbrooks, from generation to generation, is combined with their spiritual impoverishment.

From generation to generation, the spiritual strength of the family dries up. The rudely good-natured founders of the dynasty are finally replaced by refined neuropathic creatures whose fear of life kills their activity, makes them the inevitable victims of history.

Thomas Mann perceives the death of the old burgher culture as the physical and spiritual degradation of the descendants of the patrician bourgeoisie. This degradation leads to a weakening of the will, to the loss of vital optimism and, ultimately, to inevitable death. In the novel, Consul Thomas and his son Ganno become the bearers of death.

From a quantitative point of view, the images of the premises, which are, as it were, quite widely represented in the text, but in the absence of their more detailed description, they remain for the reader a kind of only marking signs of reality, a kind of mask, an external plan, the content of which is hidden and unclear. Office spaces and bedrooms are deliberately “omitted” spaces. The space of the house is, as it were, pushed aside from the main axis of the plot development of the narrative, deprived of its independent meaning. But this only enhances the overall impression of realism.

Conclusion

The novel Buddenbrooks, published, marked a new phase in the creative development of Thomas Mann. It is based on a lot of autobiography. The writer carefully studied the family papers, got acquainted with the business correspondence of his father and grandfather, delved into the details of the domestic environment, the home way of his ancestors. Mann's personal memories thus form the main outline of the novel, which makes it even more concrete.

The plot of T. Mann develops fundamentally along two lines: explicit ("realistic") and implicit (symbolic). The system of artistic images of his novels can be represented as a matrix that has at least two levels. The first level is a system of pragmatic plot connections between the artistic images of the novel. The relations arising in this system are read in a non-metaphorical way; they do not need to be decoded by the reader. The plot of the development of these images is textually ordered, it develops from chapter to chapter and is a chain of facts informing the reader about what is happening in the novel. This explicit plot can be designated as a narrative plot, the task of which is the plot organization of plot material in the course of storytelling. This level of narration creates intrigue for T. Mann, the illusion of the realism of what is happening. “There are no smooth, chewing and self-satisfied thinkers and artists” (Tolstoy 1982:373).

Thomas Mann, as it were, deploys Tolstoy's motif. What do listeners think about when they play music? The businessman mentally calculates the profits that the organizers of the concert will receive. The music teacher is unhappy with how young pianist holds his hand: “He would have tasted rulers from me!” The officer, looking at the boy, thinks: “You are a person, but I am also a person. Each in his own way,” and clicks his heels, “as if saluting a child prodigy, as he salutes it to all who have power.” With unequivocal irony, the atmosphere of sensation, commerce, advertising that accompanies the concert, and disfigures the talent of the little musician in the bud, is conveyed. The edge of the author's criticism is clearly directed here against social order that turns art into a commodity.

Thus we can see that not only "Buddenbrooks" abound realistic elements. All the works of T. Mann testify that almost all of his works are of a realistic nature and have many realistic elements and figures.

The idea of ​​hostility of the bourgeois world to true culture and true beauty lies at the heart of the short story "The Sword of God". It opens with a colorful, colorful picture of Munich, a city so rich in houses of original architecture, libraries, theaters, art museums. But the initially joyful and vivid impression given by this description of the Bavarian capital is gradually undermined and destroyed by the author's irony. The art store of M. Blutenzweig, where the action of the novel unfolds, is endowed with a recurring definition - "an enterprise that sells beauty." And the owner himself, and the sellers, and the visitors, the conversations that take place in the store and around it - all this bears the imprint of self-satisfied vulgarity. This world of flourishing commerce is opposed by the young monk Hieronymus. He calls a curse on the depraved city, he dreams of bonfires on which sinful pictures and books will burn. Both Munich and Blutenzweig's store are shown, ultimately, through the eyes of Hieronymus, and he has the final say.

However, it is clear that Thomas Mann's point of view does not coincide with the views of his hero. Hieronymus, seized by religious fanaticism, sees evil in art itself, books, paintings. Thomas Mann, who devotedly loves art, worries about its fate, sees evil in those who vulgarize the spiritual wealth of mankind, turning them into an object of base entertainment and profit.

"The Sword of God" was, as it were, a preparatory sketch for Thomas Mann's dramatic sketch "Fiorenza".

The ideological conflict outlined in the story is widely deployed in a two-act play-dispute, the action of which takes place in Italy in the 15th century. The central characters, between whom the dispute is being waged, this time are not an ordinary Munich bourgeois and not a young monk, but real and major historical figures: Lorenzo Medici, ruler of Florence, and preacher Girolamo Savonarola. Thomas Mann in no way simplifies the conflict, does not deny both antagonists either strength of character, or eloquence, or conviction. Lorenzo Medici, surrounded by a motley artistic retinue, is used to highly appreciating his activities as a patron of the arts, and even in anticipation of his imminent death, he does not doubt his innocence. Yes, he shamelessly drew from the state treasury to pay for the magnificent festivities, the purchase of paintings and statues, but he created an artistic treasury that will outlive him for a long time, and "beauty", he claims, "is above law and virtue ...".

The word for T. Mann is always the possibility of a new meaning. The fundamental openness of the artistic image, the possibility of its interpretation with different parties, ready to blow it up with an abundance of meanings, is framed by the writer with the idea of ​​myth as a beginning, holding back the infinity of meanings and returning them to a certain single Foundation, a single Meaning, a single Form. At the level artistic language In the novel, such a formative and meaning-forming beginning is a symbolic image, “nurtured” by the writer on the basis of a purely “realistic” way of narration.

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