Anatoly Lunacharsky 1924
Written: 1924 (Ninth lecture on the history of Western European literature delivered at the Sverdlov Communist University)
First published: 1924 (in Istoria zapadno-evropeyskoy literatury v ieyo vazhneyshikh momentakh, Moscow, Gosidzat)
Source: Lunacharsky Archive
Translated by: Anton P.
German literature has several times risen to the level of serious significance in world culture, but its main rise dates back to the second half of the 18th century and the very beginning of the 19th century.
In addition to the extremely great importance of one of the highest waves of human culture, German literature is also characteristic from a sociological point of view by some of its features, which in part make it related to Russian literature. The fact is that by the middle of the 18th century the German bourgeoisie was in incomparably worse conditions than any other. At a time when England, having made its bourgeois revolution as far back as the 17th century, by that time–by the last half of the 18th century–had achieved great political and cultural freedom, at a time when France was advancing towards a revolution and, therefore, had already experienced a century of Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, Germany was still in an extremely oppressed political and economically backward state. It was, so to speak, a European wilderness. Meanwhile, this people led a rather cultured life in its time. Urban Germany was already an extremely highly-cultured formation even in the depths of the Middle Ages. In fact, Germany was to some extent crippled by the Reformation and the Thirty Years’ War; since then it has been climbing tight economically. But the traditions of the intelligentsia, of course, remained intact, and from this point of view the German bourgeoisie was rich in intellectual forces. The Reformed clergy were not like the Catholic and even less like the Eastern clergy. It still allowed a certain freedom of thought (of course, within the framework of clericalism) and demanded from the pastors a certain effort of the mind, a certain culture. A pastor, unlike a Catholic priest, is married, he is already an earthly person. And this priestly intelligentsia–especially the children of clergy, engaged in intellectual work–were a very significant stratum in Germany. In general, the intelligentsia constituted, both quantitatively and qualitatively, an appreciable group.
She suffered especially from economic backwardness, from the provinciality of all life around her, and from the terrible political oppression and censorship. Everything that went beyond the framework of church or officialdom was immediately subjected to persecution. In addition to the fact that Germany had an autocratic system, which was soon reproduced in Russia by Nicholas I, it was also humiliating that Germany was crumbled into many small principalities and small kingdoms. Each of these princes did whatever he liked in his patrimony, had male and female favorites, robbed his people and tried to arrange his life, if possible, in a Parisian, Versailles style. The German princes and dukes did not stop before selling their subjects as soldiers, for example, to America. The particularity of this “fragmentation of the fatherland” and the lack of freedom of thought had an extremely painful effect on the German intelligentsia. Meanwhile, the German intelligentsia, despite the fact that it was a culturally significant group, was politically completely powerless. The bourgeoisie was still too weak, feudalism too strong. And during the time that France was advancing towards the Great Revolution, having gone through the Great Revolution and already benefiting from its experience, in Germany not only a great revolution did not happen, but not even a small revolution did take place.
The German intelligentsia responded very violently to the French Revolution, was carried away by the ideas of Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, was carried away by the news coming from Paris, especially at the time of the ascending line of the French Revolution, but they could not do anything even a little similar at home. Where was this intelligentsia to go with their protest, with their demands for an ideal culture? Of course, along the line of least resistance, she went into the realm of philosophy and aesthetics, into the realm of literature. The protest of the German intelligentsia and its thoughts about how life on earth should be arranged were also poured out here. And if I told you that, for example, the French Revolution did not single out major artists solely because all the major forces of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie were directed into politics, so there were no major people to take up art which was considered too tertiary a matter, then in Germany the opposite happened: no one went into politics, because politics, except for prison and a completely fruitless expenditure of energy, promised nothing in this deaf swamp. That is why all the forces went partly into philosophy, partly into fine literature and music. And since the tension of the advanced masses of the German bourgeoisie was great, the fountain that gushed from this philosophical and literary hole gave a very high upsurge.
The great German poet Heine was absolutely right when he said that the Germans, in their great philosophers, Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, in their great poets, Schiller, Goethe, had, in essence, Robespierres and Dantons, but only disguised, who did not show themselves in the realm of direct struggle, remaining in the realm of thought and dreams, in the realm of words.
It is not my task to expound the philosophical doctrines of the German philosophers and the significance of Kant, positive and negative. But you must remember that this is one of the pinnacles of philosophical thought, both when we have to proceed from it and when we criticize it. Both Fichte and Schelling are huge figures from whom one can learn a lot, and Hegel is the immediate predecessor of our Marxism, and without a correct understanding of Hegel’s thoughts one cannot correctly understand Marx’s thoughts.
By the way, let me tell you the following. When I was still a very young student, I met Plekhanov in Geneva. I was studying some of the new philosophers, including Schopenhauer. Plekhanov asked me what I was reading and said: “You don’t want to be busy with epigones–get busy with real classical philosophers who can really train your mind.” I say that I have more or less studied Kant and know Hegel a little. “Yes,” he says, “but you probably haven’t read anything from Fichte and Schelling, except perhaps in the exposition of Kuno Fischer?” I say: “It’s a fantastic metaphysics.” He replied sternly: “Try reading and you will see what colossal thinkers they are and how much we need them.” And I am still infinitely grateful to Georgy Valentinovich for showing me these philosophers. German idealist philosophy is indeed a whole vast world, no less instructive in its way than the history of the Great French Revolution.
I point to this because I have to link the exposition of the history of literature with philosophical tendencies, with the philosophical theories of the German intelligentsia of that time.
So, the time we have been talking about must be characterized as a deaf political timelessness, an era of twilight, an era of gray. The intelligentsia, which had a strong centuries-old cultural tradition, woke up partly because, after all, a new life was brewing in Germany. Capital stirred, disintegrated the foundations of feudalism, partly under the influence of pressure from England and France, which were ahead of Germany. In the era of this timelessness, a magnificent flower of activity of the German intelligentsia developed – not in the political field, but in the field of thought and dreams. After that, for a long time the Germans were called the people of thinkers and poets, and they were very proud of this until the time when they approached realism and created a completely new type of German intelligentsia: until the time of Bismarck.
I will not dwell on such early forerunners of this great era of German literature as Klopstock or Wieland. They have the same purely historical significance as in Russia Zhukovsky and Karamzin. They do not have achievements that would be of general cultural significance and more or less long-term. But the same cannot be said of Lessing.
Lessing was born in 1729 and died in 1781, that is, at the age of fifty-two. You can get acquainted with this wonderful figure of the young bourgeoisie, the most likeable, extremely close to us in his tendencies, based on the materials of the latest literature. Firstly, Chernyshevsky–that Russian Lessing, if you like–dedicated his university dissertation to him, which still remains a brilliant and penetrating work. This is a work that does equal credit to both Lessing and Chernyshevsky. I draw attention to this because Chernyshevsky consciously considered himself called to play the role of Lessing in relation to Russia and therefore studied him with such love and with such zeal. But not only that: Franz Mehring, author of the well-known History of the German Social Democracy, who joined the Communist Party when he was already an old man of seventy (this half-relaxed old man was taken to prison by the German government on a stretcher because he became a communist) – Mehring, our brilliant comrade and socialist writer, dedicated his masterpiece to Lessing. This is the Legend of Lessing. This book is undoubtedly the most brilliant study of Marxist literature. Even the best works of Plekhanov are inferior to this work by Mehring. This essay is an example of how a Marxist should develop cultural problems. This exemplary work is of absolutely exceptional importance.
People like Lessing are people about whom it can be said with certainty that they played a gigantic role in the field of bourgeois culture at a time when bourgeois culture was young and progressive, when it was imbued with materialistic tendencies. If people of such a mould lived in our time, they would join the working proletariat.
This can be said about Lessing without any doubt. He had to live by working hard. The best time of his life was when he was in charge of the library of a great gentleman. He had to write under the yoke of censorship, under constant fear of persecution. And, probably, Friedrich Nietzsche was right when he threw an angry reproach to the German bourgeoisie: “You say at every step: Lessing, Lessing, be proud of him, but you ruined him, and his early death followed because he lived among sorrows and dangers.”
To express everything he wanted, he had no opportunity; but he tried to say everything he thought.
First of all, he had a political and religious-philosophical task. He hated absolutism and was a passionate, free-thinking republican. But, of course, then it was impossible to say it out loud, so he said it more or less covertly, sometimes in his works of art, sometimes in letters, in articles, etc. In relation to religion – to offend Christ, all the more to offend faith in God – during that time, it meant if not being burnt at the stake, it still meant irrevocably destroying yourself. Nevertheless, Lessing quite unambiguously fought against Protestantism in his books, made constant hints, loud enough for any attentive reader who had eyes, that he did not believe in Christ or in any god at all.
There was such a case, which was recorded after his death by the idealist and romantic Jacobi, a brilliant German publicist.
At that time, the young poet Goethe’s Prometheus came out, and all of Germany was agitated, for Prometheus was an atheistic work that challenged God, in fact denied him. Jacobi was with Lessing, like a student with a teacher, and expressed his indignation at Prometheus. Lessing told him that he completely adjoined the plan of Prometheus. Jacobi asks: “What are you, a Spinozian?” and Lessing answered him: “Yes, I completely share the views of this philosopher.” Jacobi began to persuade him that this was a very bleak worldview, that without a personal God, God the Father in the sky, it is impossible to exist. To this, Lessing told him that a certain leap must be made from the world of experience and its laws in order to get into the realm of such ideals, “and I have too heavy a head to be able to make such a leap.”
Lessing’s entire struggle against religious prejudices was conducted by him mainly in pamphlets, critical works, and partly in works of art.
Before talking about the political and religious content of Lessing’s artistic works, it must be said how he generally treated contemporary art, in what form he tried to build German art, and how he, finally, treated his own artistic activity.
Lessing considered it necessary that the German bourgeoisie–he did not say bourgeoisie, he said “German educated society”–had its own literature. He believed that every nation, when it begins to live–and he was aware that the German nation begins to live, comes to some kind of rebirth, new forces boil in it–every such nation pours its soul into literature.
Literature is the crystallization of what wanders in the imagination, and at the same time it is the stronghold for the crystallization of society itself. He gave literature a social and educational value. But the literature that existed at that time was extremely unsatisfactory. It was didactic official literature, which was presented in the form of sermons, copybooks, fables and various other forms of morality, mostly of a clerical or semi-priestly type. Against such literature, Lessing spoke with all his might. He stated that didactic poetry lacks the ability to influence. The artist, in his opinion, should be free and should engage in genuine art, that is, depict passions in general, as they are, reflect life, perhaps thickening it as much as possible, reducing it to quintessence. Nothing else, according to Lessing, should the artist ask for.
But, of course, Lessing did not want to say by this that art should be without ideas. He believed that, since the artist would depict life so passionately, intently and effectively, he would, as it were, involuntarily introduce his ideas, his moods into it, but they would already become truly artistic, they would cease to be purely intellectual, purely mental, forcibly introduced values. They will become such forces that, through the medium of image, rhythm, will directly pour into the consciousness of the reader that by which the soul of the artist lives. So, on the one hand, Lessing defended the independence of art as a great function of society from didactics, from pedagogical art, and on the other hand, he himself wrote and consciously wrote such things that were permeated with ideology, taking care, however, that it was not a sermon in a fictional form, but broad art, involving certain ideological ideas and trends into its world.
Lessing was not only a critic of literature, he tried to preach the rules for other arts as well.
He tried to make Germany have a free, serious art, which is really some kind of axis around which the public consciousness of a country torn apart, plunged into darkness, but thirsting for rebirth, is formed. Lessing often fell into error. Criticizing Lessing is an interesting task, because both his correct propositions and his mistakes are powerful and bright.
Lessing was a public art critic. You can find exactly the same tendencies in Belinsky’s articles. Belinsky incessantly attacks didacticism, the tendentiousness of art. You might think that he wants unprincipled art. But if you lived then, you would understand what the didactic nature of art meant then. It was an art that imposed recipes, imposed backward reactionary morality. Therefore, Belinsky passionately fought against it for the freedom of art, for the freedom of the play of images, for the freedom of depicting conflicts of passions. But this does not mean that, in his opinion, it is completely indifferent what the game of the imagination will be. For him, the premise is undoubted, that if an artist takes up a pen, he has something important to say. With Belinsky you will find constant inner work, searching, how to reconcile the demand for deep ideological art and the struggle for the freedom of art from didacticism, from the imposition of morality. The formulation of this question by Lessing and Belinsky is identical. Belinsky, even more than Chernyshevsky, was in the true sense our Lessing.
Lessing did not consider himself a great artist, but looking around he saw no artists. We need artists, but they are not. Knowing that through simple journalism and criticism one cannot influence human hearts strongly enough, and censorship is stricter here, realizing that through art and especially theater, which he considered the strongest, most social, most democratic form of art, one can educate the minds of his own compatriots, he took up literature himself.
Whether Lessing had a great talent as a playwright is hard to say. He was a very intelligent man, he perfectly understood what the German people needed in this area, and therefore, of course, he could not write a stupid and mediocre thing. He had too much for this heart, knowledge, sensitivity. Of course, he did not differ in real dramatic genius, but, however, he achieved such success that some of his works turned out to be not only preceding the great German drama, not only steps leading to it, but also significant works translated into all languages of the world and living even now. This is a huge achievement. If we compare Lessing with Schiller and Goethe, it is clear that Schiller and Goethe are geniuses and Lessing is not; but Lessing was so intelligent, noble, so meaningful that some of his works rose to the same level as the works of geniuses.
Germany, like a backwater, lived at that time in French fashion, and the dominant French fashion was then in the theater Corneille, Racine, and others, right up to Voltaire. Of course, Lessing was unfair when he considered Corneille and Racine to be purely court theatre-makers, when he believed that all stiffness, transparency of forms, politeness in relations between people, refined psychology, scrupulously analyzed in these dramas, sorting out various conflicts on the basis of love – that all this is semi-feudal, courtly and useless. We see now that Corneille and Racine are resurrected for us, that they are of great importance. Lessing was right, however, as a conscious representative of the advanced bourgeoisie, that the bourgeoisie needed this less than the drama that at that time began to be developed in France under the influence of Diderot. But after all, the drama of petty-bourgeois life had to hook the viewer with something – but there are no feats, there is no scope, everything is measured by the average merchant’s arshin, everything moves within the framework of the petty-bourgeois. And then a heart-rending melodrama appeared: the curse of some dissolute son by the father, the tragedy of a girl who is courted by some noble gentleman and tries to achieve his own, putting her in a hopeless situation. Entire streams of tears on the stage – and the audience, for which all this was by no means alien, also shed tears. A period of sentimentalism in the proper sense of the word has set in. Literature became sentimental and lost its heroic element. When they talked about kings, about heroes, about generals, then, no matter how disgusting they were to those who hated the aristocracy, they still had to turn in the field of political ideas, great ambitions, great scope of life; and here everything entered the miniature life of the townsfolk.
Lessing, while promoting the idea that the bourgeoisie should have its own drama, depict its own life, also fell into a certain tearfulness. Before writing the German drama, he wrote a drama as if translated from English, Miss Sara Sampson. The literature of England at that time was experiencing the heyday of sentimentalism. This drama is interesting because Lessing was the first to create a drama in German, the characters of which were bourgeois. The drama was a huge success. Literally, it is a purely imitative play of little importance.
As a man of great intelligence, Lessing very soon realized that all these stereotyped figures of supposedly Englishmen and Englishwomen with an eternal headscarf around their eyes, with eternal whimpering, all this was not enough; he decided to try his hand at national comedy, to bring out the faces he knew, the types that he observed around him with his sharp eyes. So he created the comedy Minna von Barnhelm. Its content lies in the fact that a retired major, a noble man, resists a rich girl in love with him, because he is afraid of being bought, he is afraid in his own eyes of falling into the position of a man who marries a rich girl because of material benefits. It’s a narrow topic, but it’s superbly designed. It displays the pretty appearance of a girl, completely unlike the muslin young ladies who were portrayed before. But the type of an honest, direct major, a little martinet, is also successful, but a cute little one. Folk types are magnificent – a batman, a tramp, an innkeeper. All these are really living faces, depicted with genuine realistic skill. This explains why Minna von Barnhelm, written in the 18th century, still does not leave the stage of German theaters. With it, without a doubt, Lessing opened the era of German comedy. True, the Germans did not show any special comedic talent. But still, the era of German comedy was opened precisely by Minna von Barnhelm.
Lessing’s next play is very characteristic. This is Emilia Galotti She opened a number of plays of the later period. In Emilia Galotti the plot takes the development of such a situation: a depraved prince pursues a young girl. The young girl does not represent such a pearl of virtue as to remain completely insensitive to his courtship, and she is ready to fall, but her father kills the prince lest the honor of the family be dishonored. Lessing used this play to express his hatred in general for the nobles and the authorities. He did this as covertly as possible so as not to be thrown out of society. But everything was said, and said quite sharply. Emilia Galotti is a direct step that leads to a more important work, Intrigue and Love by Schiller.
Finally, we come to Lessing’s masterpiece, which he created towards the end of his life, Nathan the Wise. This play has little stage presence and is boring in the theatre, but it is so saturated with noble ideas, so bright that it is not surprising that it was ranked among the greatest masterpieces of world literature. In Nathan the Wise the Jew is brought out as the main and positive character. No one before Lessing dared to do this. There were three well-known plays in which a Jew played a major role: Marlowe’s play The Jew of Malta, in which the Jew is portrayed as a monster, then Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, in which Shylock says a lot of extremely serious things against the persecution of the Jews, but he himself is depicted as a usurer, ready to cut a piece of meat from a human body in payment of a bill. His personality is anyway ambivalent and rather antipathetic, although it causes some compassion for itself. And here Nathan the Wise is the teacher of all the actors: Saladin, the Muslim Sultan, and the Knight Templar, a noble representative of Christianity. Nathan teaches that religious strife should not alienate people from each other. We see in the finale the marriage of a young couple, people of different nationalities. The essence of Nathan’s preaching remains important to our time. This drama enjoys the most sincere hatred of anti-Semites. But no matter how they tried to use the petty and vile argument – to find Jews in Lessing’s family, they did not even succeed in this not at all convincing means, since Lessing’s ancestors all turned out to be the most Christian pastors.
By the way, in Nathan the Wise there is a fable that has long been formed in the minds of advanced people. It is not known who its author is. Lessing summed it up beautifully. Nathan the Wise, in response to the question which religion of the three great religions – Jewish, Mohammedan and Christian – is better, tells a fable about how a father, dying, gave his children three rings, and it was known that only one of them is real. The dying man said that that ring would be real, which would give its owner the opportunity to live the most virtuous and bright life. So, it was necessary to prove the authenticity of the treasure that you hold in your hands, surpassing others with generosity, love for others. This idea is the basis of Nathan the Wise. This play marks the replacement of the religious idea of ready-made truth with secular morality, the position that a righteous person is one who, by his actions, shows the reality of his philanthropy.
Lessing was followed by a new generation, and Herder was its leader and main critic. We are very inclined to think that Herder was a further step forward from Lessing. However, this is not entirely true. Lessing himself treated Herder somewhat negatively. What did Herder bring to Lessing that was new? If you read separate articles about Lessing and Herder, for example, in the large History of Western European Literature of the 18th-19th Centuries, there you will find all sorts of sympathy for Herder and statements that Lessing was still too stuck in the Latin-Greek culture, that he did not know how to appreciate the freshness of the turn to the national element that Herder revealed. I think that is why Lessing was higher. Since the German intelligentsia realized that it needed to have its own art, it said: let this art of its own be national. She looked for support in folklore, in folk tales, in folk songs, in medieval antiquity. But this national, this truly German trend in literature actually narrowed the scope of Lessing. Lessing strove for the universal. And you will see that when the great disciples of Lessing – Schiller and Goethe – finally matured, they understood the difference between the universal and the national and joined the first.
The bourgeoisie in every newly awakened country behaves nationalistically. In every country that begins to live its own life, its bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie restrict themselves from foreigners, from other nations and defend themselves, firstly, from those who impose their own language on them, and under this pretext impose their own economic and political command, and secondly, from the Jews, as an exceptionally capable nation both in commercial and cultural terms. Here nationalism manifests itself with its independent tendencies and bias towards anti-Semitism. This is a common occurrence in almost every European country. Where there are fewer Jews, anti-Semitism is, of course, weaker; where there is less foreign violence, there is less hatred of strangers. Germany, it is true, was not in the position of an oppressed country in the proper sense, but was in the position of a province, outback and sought to defend their nationality in every possible way. And it can hardly be considered that Lessing was wrong when he thought that the world culture, the highest wave of which he correctly saw in Greece, is more important for Germany than the excavation of her own creations in the depths of the Middle Ages.
Yet Herder was interesting both as a philosopher and as a literary historian.
Goethe was a great student of Herder. Goethe was the completion of what Lessing set himself as a task. Lessing posed the problem of Germany’s own art, and shortly thereafter the young Goethe created the greatest examples of art that placed him, as a young man, in the ranks of the world’s great writers.
Now I am talking only about those writings which were written by Goethe under the influence of Herder and which Lessing could read.
The first such work that made Goethe famous all over Germany was the drama Goetz von Berlichingen. This is a drama from chivalrous times. Goethe sought to create a purely German play on Shakespearean principles. It gives an unusually variegated picture of German medieval life. What is not here! The hero is a noble knight, a bit of a robber, a bit of a servant of his sovereign and, to some extent, a defender of the oppressed, a representative of a petty knightly class, which is crushed from above and below, which does not find a place for itself in society. The figure is noble, although unfinished. Goetz is indeed the most monumental figure that the young bourgeoisie could give birth to. Next to him stands the thin, dexterous politician Weislingen, whom fate drives to crime. Here are charming images of German women, devoted, idealistically ready for sacrifice; they are opposed by the romantic female villain, whose image Goethe was extremely successful in creating. All the scenes around her really give the impression of the wonderful and witchy. In the play there is a secret court, and the court of the archbishop with all its splendor, battle scenes, a magnificent, vividly described monk-preacher, an infinitely devoted warrior-squire. This play is not theatrical, but it is a real pleasure to read it. Then Goethe remade it, combed it a little, made it more rounded, but the play only lost from this.
This play was read literally all of Germany.
This is a purely German work, quite understandable only to the Germans. Lessing reacted to Goetz somewhat negatively. He did not like that there was so much chivalry, so much armor, so much purely national provincial spirit. Lessing would like plays of a more general nature, and not so narrowly German.
The young Goethe then wrote his famous novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, that novel which carried his fame far beyond Germany and made Goethe one of the world’s greatest writers. When Napoleon, having defeated the German army, saw Goethe, he talked to him about Werther and showed him this volume, saying that he always carries it with him. Even Napoleon could not escape the enticing influence of Werther. Then the spread of new literature was slower than now, and therefore it seems especially striking that a few years after the publication of Goethe’s book, Goethe received porcelain from China, painted on the subject of his novel by a Chinese painter. The Asian world already knew this novel.
What does it represent? It presents a truly breathtaking portrayal of the then groundless intellectual.
Speaking of Rousseau, I outlined the situation in which an intellectual found himself at that time, having no resources of his own for life. He had to exist in a semi-servant, semi-secretary position or as a home teacher, slurp with rich people, experience constant harassment, insults to pride. The nerves are thin, the mind is high, the requirements for life are extremely high, one does not want to adapt, and life is clumsy, provincial, swampy, life draws on all sorts of compromises – and in such a person bitterness boils in the heart. In France there was some way out for this bitterness, things were moving towards a revolution, but not in Germany. Therefore, the desire to strengthen in oneself the consciousness of his inner greatness grew. Nevertheless, loneliness is depressing, and the thirst for friendship and participation is growing stronger. And since these are young people, then most often loneliness gives rise to a violently enthusiastic feeling for a woman. Finding a woman who could be a friend is difficult for such a person. In most cases, the then German woman was a petty-bourgeois woman, very virtuous, brought up in the church spirit. She retained great spiritual purity, great grace of some kind of tame animal, and in this respect she was unquestionably superior to her impudent husband, some kind of lawyer. And, of course, it was easier with a woman to talk about her longing, to play music at the harpsichords, she was ready to understand the grief of an intellectual, and it was such happiness for him! But she could only give heartfelt understanding, nothing more. Of course, there could be different romantic combinations. The most frequent romantic combination was that such a woman, approached by such a young man, just entering life, turns out to belong to another: either a rich family that does not give for him, because he has not fledged yet, or she is already married for some bourgeois who has already managed to put together a house for himself, and in such cases a great drama was experienced. Remember Rousseau’s novel The New Heloise, written on this subject. Werther, the hero of the novel, has a friend, a senior official, an established man who has a charming wife. Werther is in love with her, and in an atmosphere of pure melancholy, isolation from everyone, this love becomes fatal. There is a lot of decency in him, he does not want to deceive Charlotte’s husband, he does not call Charlotte for treason, but he feels that his lively, direct passion can be taken as an insult, can only lead to being kicked out of the house. Therefore, seeing that he cannot build his own happiness, Werther kills himself.
And in the image of Werther, all the then young people from the intelligentsia found themselves. They all experienced something similar. It is very characteristic that a wave of suicides began. Dozens of people killed themselves after reading Werther, because they themselves felt in the position of the same isolated people. This is sociological proof that the intelligentsia had outgrown their time and had nowhere to go.
Lessing regarded this novel as a harmful work. Lessing is charged with the passage from his letter to Goethe, in which he writes that you wrote a very good work, but I advise you to end the whole thing as cynically as possible. “Give this novel a good, healthy, cynical ending, it will be the best thing you can do.”
Lessing’s idea is perfectly clear. You can’t kill yourself over such trifles, you have to be able to fight. And is it really possible to say that here Lessing showed some kind of rudeness, and Goethe in his Werther showed extraordinary subtlety? Goethe in Werther undoubtedly showed a certain relaxation. But for Goethe personally it was useful: he did not kill himself, but killed his Werther. Goethe, too, sometimes had the thought of suicide, but he outlived it, outlived his crisis by writing a novel.
But for others it was harmful, and in the end Lessing wanted either Charlotte to simply get along with Werther in the most healthy way and that they both laugh at her honest, prim husband, or Werther to say to himself: “There is more than one Charlotte in the world, you can look for another.” In a word, that this should be resolved in the tones of a healthy attitude towards such problems.
The idea and the first edition of that work, which can be considered the greatest work of bourgeois literature of modern times, the tragedy Faust dates back to Goethe’s youth. He worked on this tragedy all his life and finished it already an old man. I will not break it down chronologically.
The first thought about Faust was born in Goethe at the same time when he wrote Goetz and Werther. The legend of Faust found expression in Germany in a puppet theater like the Petrushka Theatre. Goethe’s Faust was preceded by the Faust of Christopher Marlowe, a contemporary of Shakespeare. Marlowe wrote his Faust after a medieval legend. The medieval Faust of Marlowe and the Faust of Goethe are, as it were, two successive steps.
What was said in the folk legend of Faust? In the Middle Ages, the people, the philistines, treated a learned person with superstitious fear. The learned man was viewed with suspicion by both the church and the tradesman. He sits in his hole with flasks, with retorts, makes either gold or poison with which he wants to poison the wells, a skeleton hangs in his room, and sometimes he buys a corpse and cuts it. All these things are mysterious, enigmatic; with the demons, no doubt, he is in agreement, and if he has any success, it is not without reason: it means that the devils help him, but they help him because he sold his soul to the devil. Therefore, the gloomy alchemists seemed to the street as heretics, sorcerers. Everyone treated them with poorly concealed hostility, and since the alchemists themselves and their students said that they wanted to discover the philosopher’s stone and gold, that science would lead to the greatest power (for they felt the power of science, although they misinterpreted it), a legend easily arose. that alchemists can work miracles, only not in the name of God, but in the name of the devil, and therefore, no matter how powerful things they achieve, in the end the devil will take possession of them.
Marlowe does not deviate from the point of view of this legend, and the devil took Faust from him. His Faust is some kind of pointless rebel who wants to enjoy unlimitedly, but to hell with his soul. Faust wants to do more of all sorts of riots and dirty tricks: in a word, he is mischievous. And Marlowe loves it. It is felt that although Marlowe says that the devil took Faust in all fairness into hell, that it is bad to make an alliance with the devil, but if there were an opportunity to sell his soul, then Marlowe himself would not be averse to this, perhaps take advantage of it.
With Goethe, everything is built in a completely different way. Goethe justifies Faust. For Goethe, Faust is a positive type. What is positive? The fact that he is eternally mobile, full of aspirations. Faust leads the rebellion along two lines: along the line of science and along the line of everyday life. In the line of science, Faust denies scholasticism and theology, denies the scientific rules adopted by universities and scientific corporations. And here Goethe mercilessly, through the mouth of Faust and his wayward double Mephistopheles, beats theology, scholasticism, jurisprudence, ridicules the then medicine. This is a real destruction of dead science. It is a passionate thirst for the true knowledge of nature. Goethe lived at a time when scholastic science was still strong, and it was a refreshing stream.
In addition, Faust fights against inert life. He wants to be young, cheerful, happy, to do what his heart tells him. This individualistic instinct is no longer Werther’s whining, but the desire to take both the knowledge of nature and reality with a fight, a scope for one’s mind and a scope for one’s feelings. And Faust enters into this struggle.
The devil is interpreted by Goethe in a completely original way. Mephistopheles is like a part of Faust’s soul. True, Mephistopheles has a double line: on the one hand, he makes the most sacred thing come up with criticism, infects with the poison of skepticism, trying to use for this the human thirst for the victory of his own mind and heart over all sorts of authorities, over all sorts of time-honored traditions, concepts, objects. In the same way, in relation to everyday life, he pushes for boldness, ready to trample on what seems to everyone worthy of all respect. This is the “satanic” beginning of Faust, but it is also a beginning that we like. Here Goethe resolves the following question: Mephistopheles is a representative of the destructive principle, he would like to destroy the world, he would like to force a person to abandon it, to force everything to fall into the abyss of the eternal “nothing”, but precisely because that he decomposes everything stable, that he undermines everything, he, without realizing it, is transformed from an evil spirit into a creative spirit. It promotes progress, it promotes forward movement. Therefore, Mephistopheles says: I always want evil and always do good. This is how the world works, that this criticism, this corrupting skepticism are the engines of man.
This does not mean, however, that there is no satanic element in Mephistopheles. He is Satan. In the field of science, it would seem that there is little trouble here, but Mephistopheles, teaching a young student, so permeates him with his skepticism of knowledge that after that he will become some kind of scoundrel and charlatan, who understands science as a thing that can be used for a career. This means that skepticism can lead to a rejection of faith in reason and science; and several times Goethe emphasizes that if you come to this limit, if you stop believing in reason, you will perish! But Satanism is much harder in the realm of everyday life. The desire to live for your own happiness is the desire to be a predator. Faust wants to be a predator because he wants to satisfy all his needs.
At first, Goethe wanted to name his play Gretchen. He wanted to portray the heroine as a central figure. Faust ruins her like that, by the way; and meanwhile she is in her own way an extremely valuable being, sweet, full of deep inner grace, and much better than him with all his turmoil. It is he who, precisely because he loves her, will trample her in the dirt, not only make her unhappy, but plunge her into crime, into torment. Then the center of gravity of the drama shifts to Faust. However, Goethe devoted a lot of space to this episode with Gretchen. After rejuvenating Faust, Mephistopheles presents him with a simple girl, no different from any other. She is your average middle-class girl, and they are all almost good when, without encountering anything, they live in their provincial world, like sheep. Faust falls passionately in love with her; while he is in love, she is a goddess for him. And Mephistopheles gives an easy opportunity for victory both with gifts, and with passionate speeches, and with the beauty he bestowed on Faust. Gretchen gives herself up to Faust quite easily. And then the suffering begins. You have to hide from your mother. The daughter gives her some kind of sleeping pill, and the mother dies. And here is the child! Meanwhile, Faust goes on some high journey and abandons her. The girl begins to push and denigrate others. In the end, she tries to free herself from the child, she is accused of infanticide – a common process, and she dies. She should be executed as the murderer of her child. Complete moral and physical death. But Goethe declares that Gretchen is a martyr, that Gretchen is an angel, that she, having experienced all this, becomes a saint, and that the memory of her, as an innocently ruined victim, becomes a beneficial force in Faust’s soul. He will never be able to move away from the consciousness of his crime and the purity that he ruined. And precisely in the fact that, having ruined Gretchen, he atones for his guilt with ardent repentance, is his salvation.
The agreement between Mephistopheles and Faust is this: I will take your soul when you say: stop, a moment, you are beautiful! And the devil is trying to make Faust say this, whether drunk, or enjoying with a beautiful woman, or carried away by fame, because if Faust says this, it means that he has lost his human mission – to move constantly forward – he has lost. Then the devil did his job.
In fact, the devil, wishing evil, does good. He, constantly trying to lead Faust into temptation, opens before him new aspects of life, and Faust is eternally dissatisfied, always striving forward and forward, and only enriches his experience. But the devil did win, once Faust said: stop, a moment!
When Faust became an old man for the second time, he was given a piece not even of the earth, but of the sea, he drove this sea away from the earth and received a piece of land reclaimed from the tides, and a people to whom Faust gives complete freedom settles on this land. This is a fraternal republic of labor on soil reclaimed from the elements. And Faust says: now I have come to know the purpose of man. Man must live for a free society, and only such a society has the right to exist, which every day must re-conquer its freedom and life. “Now I understand this, I founded such a society of people, I live among them, this is the most beautiful moment of life, I would like it not to pass.” And then he dies. Mephistopheles spreads his claws to grab him, but he is told: no, this is not really a stopped moment. Such happiness opens up great prospects for further movement forward. Faust’s death is not death, Faust’s death is the apotheosis of new life. He dies because he did everything he could, and finally merges into the eternal life of mankind.
The idea is deeply collectivist and socialist, which at that time no one could understand, but we understand it now.
The second part was written by Goethe in extreme old age, partly in vague forms, in which a significant thought is always hidden. In some cases, however, this deep content is not even thoughts, but rather conjectures or premonitions, which Goethe himself refused to explain.
Various parts of Faust were written at different times, which gives the whole composition some variegation. Nevertheless, everything is dominated by the idea of humanity as the bearer of a reasonable principle, conquering nature and even death. The collective “We” outgrows the individualistic “I”, which was the center of the world in the first part of Faust, and the human collective is proclaimed the center of all being.
Such is the content of Faust. In stating it, I am getting ahead of myself. Only the first part of Faust, in which these profound human principles had not yet been expounded, was written by the young Goethe. Already at that time life began to boil around him. The intelligentsia rushed after Goethe, and an impulse arose. This impulse coincided with the French Revolution. This impulse was not political, because this movement, called Sturm und Drang – storm and stress, was only purely literary. A number of writers have spoken, and we cannot dwell on them. There were, however, such talents as Lenz, Klinger, Heinse, and others. All of these were individualistic rebels. Their works are sharp, full of paradoxes. These people take strange positions, shout out their dramas, strive for a scandal. Romantic sharpness they have as much as you want. Characteristic here is the desire for revolutionary energy, so far poured out in words and on paper, but ready every minute, if there is combustible material around, to kindle a big revolutionary fire.
This wave brought with it the great German writer Schiller. He also has to be considered in two sections: the young Schiller and the late Schiller.
The young Schiller was a revolutionary. This does not mean that he was a revolutionary in our sense of the word, in the sense of some Robespierre. But for his drama Robbers the then French Republic chose him as its citizen, and he was flattered by this. Then, when France turned to terror, he renounced his citizenship. Schiller could not understand such forms of revolution–his revolutionary nature is half-hearted. But if we evaluate his revolutionary nature against the backdrop of the German outback, then it is majestic, huge, unusually bold. And Schiller expressed this revolutionary spirit in an artistic form, works were born that went beyond the borders of Germany and made him a universal writer.
By the way, Schiller once wrote a phrase that very much characterizes the situation at that time: “Despite the restrictive forms of government, which provide us with only the possibility of a passive existence, the Germans are still people; they have passions and can act like any Frenchman or Briton.” See how humiliated the German considered himself. He says that, of course, we are political slaves and we have to be passive, but we are still people, no worse than the French and the British! This throws light on the roots of German literature of the time.
The young Schiller wrote several dramatic works, of which three deserve to be mentioned: The Robbers, Intrigue and Love and Don Carlos.
The Robbers is a work saturated with a revolutionary charge to a high degree. It is very characteristic that the author makes Karl Moor, this “robber” – essentially a revolutionary who breaks all sorts of prejudices, stands up for the oppressed, throws angry speeches in the face of petty-bourgeois society and its government and clergy – in the end say: “I do not have succeeded. One must not follow the path of violence, one must believe in Providence!” Karl Moor eventually complied. For us, this ruins the drama of Schiller. Schiller, in this first drama, bowed his banners before fate, destiny. It must be remembered that this fate “ German inertia ” was a wall that it was impossible to break through. And yet Schiller unleashes tremendous revolutionary energy in The Robbers. Every young person in his time is carried away by the seething juices of this drama. There is such passion in it, so many adventures, such sharp conflicts, that the play is now desirable for our stages. The play Robbers should be played in a monumental, poster form, with a sharp emphasis on style, accompanied by some exciting music and the way Schiller wrote it, without changing anything! It is mainly aimed at young people. The Robbers then went around the whole world, and everywhere the drama was regarded as a revolutionary play, awakening consciousness.
The drama Intrigue and Love is a masterpiece of its kind. It is superbly built, looking with passion from start to finish. All types in it are complete, interesting, sympathy for one side and antipathy for the other is manifested with all sharpness and certainty. There is much noble hatred for violence, much pity for oppressed humanity. There is a scene where, unexpectedly, the lackey, unable to restrain himself, tells a high-ranking person, Lady Milford, how the sovereign sold his subjects as soldiers to America, how the people saw them off. This is a revolutionary speech having the character of a proclamation against the autocracy. We see in this play such persons as the president himself, as Wurm, the secretary. Their caricature remains a very accurate reference to what our enemies represent at the present time. Roles provide excellent material for acting.
Don Carlos is a play in which the tension of Schiller’s revolutionism subsided. In it, to King Philip II, one of the darkest despots, the fictitious person of the Marquis of Posa tells the “real truth”. The play is noble, well constructed. But the Marquis of Posa says to the king: “Our age for ideals is not ripe, / I am a citizen of future generations.”
It is a bitter confession that, in essence, nothing can be done in life. And this consciousness in Schiller then becomes more and more dominant.
“The most perfect work of art,” he writes in one of his articles, “is a free civil society.”
You see that a person had the consciousness that in order to be the highest artist, one must be a revolutionary. But you can’t build it in any way, this is a free society, and here is another conclusion in a later article: “Only through beauty can one reach freedom.” If only it were the consciousness that thanks to some beautiful and incendiary agitation it would be possible to move the masses towards freedom! But this is not the case either. Here is Schiller’s program in verse form: “Enclose in holy solitude, In the peace of the heart, alien to fuss. Beauty blooms only in thought, And freedom in the realm of dreams.”
There is already a complete rejection of the implementation of the ideal. Here it is clear that “to achieve freedom in beauty” means to leave the world and imagine yourself free in dreams.
What is the matter here? The point is that Sturm und Drang, and with it both the young Schiller and the young Goethe, ran into an obstacle that they could not overcome. The French Revolution did not produce the desired results. On the one hand, she “drowned in blood and cruelty.” On the other hand, she was defeated, and she replaced herself with Napoleon and a military dictatorship. This finally disappointed the Germans, and they abandoned all hope of a revolution, retreated completely into the realm of their dreams, into the realm of artistic creativity.
But this does not mean, however, that their artistic creativity has lost all social significance. True, they began to renounce the public. They seem to have gone into pure aesthetics. But what was the essence of their demands at that time? To create for themselves some kind of Olympus among the philistine hustle and bustle. To find at least for oneself salvation by surrounding oneself with aesthetic artistic pursuits, by creating one’s own, aristocratic way of life – at least for oneself and for a narrow circle of intellectuals, since nothing else can be done, since it is impossible to create a higher humanity. It was an impulse to ensure that, having fenced off from reality, to reform that which cannot be altered, at least to personally achieve an existence close to the ideal. Both Schiller and Goethe strove for this.
Schiller is one of the greatest playwrights. Schiller’s mature works are remarkable. He needed to create images that would take him away from reality, which, by their depth, their brilliance, their sublimity, would allow both him and others to breathe some new air, which would give some kind of foreboding of freedom, which would re-educate his soul and would have kept him above the level of the petty-bourgeoisie crushed by the autocracy and the church.
His first drama of the period when he definitively deviates from immediate political tasks is the play William Tell, which, however, is considered revolutionary. The struggle of Switzerland for its independence is depicted here. William Tell is a tyrant’s killer, a terrorist. But Schiller seeks to justify William Tell by saying that he killed Gessler not because he was a tyrant, but to protect his wife and children from him. “I fight for the family, and everyone has the right to defend the family!” So, the justification for this murder was the individualistic defense of his nest, and if it was a political murder, then Schiller would have said that William Tell should be condemned. Here the petty-bourgeois principle prevailed. There is a worm in William Tell that ruins the drama.
Further remarkable works are The Bride of Messina, The Maid of Orleans and Maria Stuart. These dramas are artistic masterpieces. You can look at them again and again, there is a lot of purity and strength in them, but they have nothing to do with social construction. It can be seen that Schiller has completely escaped from reality: to live among these high wives and husbands, to understand their hearts, their sorrows and joys, to create more and more living and monumental types, this is his current element. These plays are “untendentious”. Schiller does not want to prove anything with them. But since he is a noble man, then, of course, his nobility, his sympathy for the offended, his protest against violence, his sympathy for those who can implement broad ideals in life, is reflected here too. But since he is a philistine and has ceased to defend himself against philistinism, as he used to defend himself with his revolutionary radicalism, then more and more often there are petty-bourgeois moods, and next to the nobility we see the burgher sugary beautiful soul, which makes you sick.
Goethe realized the ideal of the complete man much more fully. The Germans say that Goethe is the great man to be looked up to, the great man of our time, the most complete, self-contained and encyclopedic, most harmonious type imaginable. This needs to be stopped for a bit.
Schiller was the son of a paramedic. His early enrollment in Karlsschule, in the school of Archduke Karl, who was personally an inspector, put him in a punishment cell, mocked the boy. Schiller had to run. On the run, he conceived his Robbers. And the rest of his life passed like the life of a consumptive, perishing in poverty. He never earned enough literary work, and only at the end of his life, when he became friends with Goethe, his friend extended his hand and helped Schiller by giving him a chair at the University of Jena. Then Schiller breathed more freely.
Goethe was the son of a wealthy Frankfurt merchant, had a mother, a good woman, who gave him much happiness in his childhood. He was handsome. He always had good means, was a huge success with the public, with comrades, with women – and this success lasted for all his life. He was very soon discovered by the Archduke of Meiningen, who made him his friend and minister. He could live in unconditional comfort, he had the means for scientific research, he had leisure for writing poetry, he could travel, for example, his famous trip to Italy, which gave him a lot. His life is a continuous chain of very beautiful and soul-enriching novels. In those deaf times, when German women were a slightly positive type, Goethe, thanks to his attractiveness, his personal charm, just knew how to bring the best natures closer to him. His life was full of success and happiness. As a result of this, it was easy for him to become that “Olympian” as he is usually portrayed – however, noticing at the same time that there is a lot of coldness and indifference in him, that Goethe was too concerned about his balance, about his scientific office, about his labors and seemed to be protected by a Chinese wall from the world. This is largely true. Why is it so? Is it because Goethe is really a heartless person? No, he was a warm person. This is evident from a number of facts, from a number of his works, for example, in Werther. In his famous drama Torquato Tasso, the poet is portrayed as a gentle, warm-hearted, sympathetic person, ready to be carried away to the limit, and he is opposed by the cold courtier Antonio, who tries to put Tasso within the framework of reasonableness. Tasso is depicted as living at the court of a prince who resembles the archduke with whom Goethe lived. Goethe knew that poets who live at court must beware, otherwise they may die, because all dukes are beastly offspring, and a tender heart can bleed if you are not very, very careful. It takes great skill and great intelligence to live with these wolves. Goethe had such a mind.
Marx perfectly understood Goethe. In one small article, Marx answers just those who attacked Goethe and reproached him for Olympianism, that Goethe, in terms of the breadth of his scientific horizons, in terms of his poetic talent, is an incomparable and truly great person. True, this great man closed himself in his uniform. But is Goethe to blame for this? It is not Goethe who is to blame for this, says Marx, but the Germany of that time. If he had not been able to do this, if he had not protected his humanity, which originated at the dawn of the bourgeoisie, he would have been pecked, he would have been killed, just as Schiller, who did not know how to defend himself, was killed. And he was able to convey to us that degree of free humanity that caught fire when the young class of the bourgeoisie created really great things, precisely because he defended himself by creating such an Olympian aura around him.
The best proof that Marx penetrated the mysteries of this Olympianism with genius sensitivity is that Goethe avoided writing real tragedies, with a hard ending, and once said: “My soul would break if I wrote a tragedy.” This shows how sensitive and fragile this man really was.
Goethe’s tragedies have a different character. Take the tragedy Egmont, in which he depicts a man who looks like Goethe himself, longing for happiness, free in morals and politics, loved by the people because he is brilliant, because he is young, sweet and affectionate, because he is humane. Love for Klaerchen, a girl from the people who loves him, is free on both sides, a hot feeling. This splendidly developed personality, sympathetic to the masses of the people, perishes because it becomes a center of attraction for dissatisfied elements during the uprising of the Netherlands against Spain. Egmont dies, but in prison, before his death, he has a vision that tells him about the bright future of mankind.
Iphigenia appeared at a time when Greece was glorified as the fatherland of the freedom of the spirit, as an era in which the highest humanity was achieved. Goethe takes Greek tragedy as a model. But the meaning of the Greek tragedy is such that if a person acted against general civil laws, he irrevocably perishes. Everything ends well in Goethe’s Iphigenia. His Iphigenia is so beautiful in soul that everyone bows before her: both the forces of fate and animal-like people. After suffering, everything comes to peace. Then it was Goethe who wrote his famous words: “I can’t write a tragedy, my soul would break.” He certainly needed some kind of consolation, some kind of reassurance, it was necessary to find harmonious agreements. And the people-statues that he sculpted, and the wonderful marble buildings that his works look like, bear in themselves something of that perfect man, whose creation he called for.
Goethe tried to be a universal man, to whom nothing human is alien. He was a great scientist. He made important discoveries in the field of biology, gave interesting hypotheses in the field of physics. He was engaged in geology, mineralogy, osteology, botany, and was engaged not as an amateur, but as a real scientist, so that his works are of scientific importance. He was the forerunner of Darwin. In his book Metamorphosis of Plants, he developed the idea that all plants originated from some original species. He was the first to discover that leaves, flowers and fruits are all variations of the same original plant organ. He transferred this method of consideration to animals; he began to prove that the animal skeleton is one according to the basic plan, that the human skeleton is the direct content of the animal skeleton. He made purely osteological discoveries, proving the correctness of this idea.
The very formulation of the cosmological problem in Goethe is so exciting that we cannot ignore his interpretation of the universe as a living, organized force. And in his delusions he too was great. For a long time, Goethe’s theory of light was completely denied, and we recognized Huygens’ theory, but now science is beginning to think that perhaps Goethe was closer to the truth. Completely new theories are being created, and in science there are a number of signs that make it come to the conclusion that Goethe in many cases showed remarkable insight even in this “mistake”.
And the very theory of colors in Goethe’s inner harmony and beauty of construction is amazingly beautiful. Goethe was peculiar, with a huge strain of scientific thought, with the desire to constantly reckon with the facts that he studied, to build poetically constructive, whimsical and exciting, broad and harmonious hypotheses.
Along with this, we have before us the greatest poet. Of course, I cannot stop at all his works.
His songs are full of indescribable charm. He did not like the German language, because this language does not lend itself well to melodiousness. But his songs have become tremendously popular. He gave great examples of the German ballad: The Corinthian Bride, God and Bayadere.
I will dwell on two more major poetic works of Goethe: on his poem Hermann and Dorothea and on the novel Wilhelm Meister.
Herman and Dorothea is a complete glorification of philistinism. Goethe needed to make peace with philistinism and say: this world is not so bad anymore, there is good in it. He needed this, although inwardly he often seethed with revolutionary fire.
Our comrade, who died in Munich, Landauer, recalled many quotations from Goethe’s letters and argued that at heart he was a revolutionary, but he considered, however, that the natural evolution of nationality was violated by revolution. Or rather, it was clear to him that the revolution at the present time would not give anything, and if it did, it would not be much. This is exactly the same form of his adaptation, the requirement of his inner harmony: you need to justify the world as it is. This is the greatest sin of the poet. The undoubted proof of Goethe’s opportunistic reconciliation with reality is Hermann and Dorothea. This is a glorification of the musty petty-bourgeois way of life, labor processes and mores of petty-bourgeois life. The pastor, the apothecary, the old and the young, they are all disgusting in their sheepish health. If you think about this world, this Dorothea, smelling of manure, which she scattered over the beds, if you look at this well-fed Herman – these are all fists, and rather nasty ones. If the whole human race consisted of such fists, it would be better not to live in the world. And Goethe incenses them and in the tone of Homer’s Iliad describes to the smallest detail their walks through the barnyard. Here everything is presented as a pearl of art, and, what is most annoying of all, it is really beautiful: with all the disgust for this stuffy, overheated comfort, for all this animal-human existence, one cannot deny him charm. Goethe narrates about these people as if he had renounced the fact that they are people, but describes their life as animals or plants are described. See how good it is! How great it comes out! And healthy children are bred, and the household is well run – in all this there is the unconditional poetic beauty of a self-sufficient life, A more everyday thing – although it is written in Homeric tones, resembles a marble bas-relief – cannot be imagined. And as if in order to emphasize the advantages of petty-bourgeois life, Goethe brings out refugees here, who flee under the onslaught of the French troops, devastated, exhausted. Here such rosy cheeks, such happy faces, and there people are torn in the convulsions of the revolution. It can be objected that even in peaceful Germany not everyone lives like Herman and Dorothea, their parents and neighbors, that this is a kulak stratum, that all around are seas of grief and tears; but Goethe does not speak of this. The poem acquires significance because here we see the glorification of philistinism on the part of a man who hated it and, in the era of Werther, was ready to go to the grave from philistinism, but then, having buried Werther, he said to the philistine: do not touch me, but I am for you. I will lift up the incense smoke.
Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meister, in particular the first part, is a work of genius. When it was published, all of Europe was convinced that it was a masterpiece, the best creation of the century. The novel is really intriguing. A whole series of operas, dramatic adaptations, a movie, etc. appeared on its plot. The content is very rich. But what is the main idea? The idea is that this little Wilhelm by the name of Meister is a growing future master. He is studying. The first part of the novel is the years of apprenticeship. It depicts the adventures of a young man whose life is gradually polishing. The main motive of this part is this: you, a talented young man, are trying to live some kind of artistic life, eagerly seizing everything, but you are more attracted to false brilliance, life will make you settle down and become a wise realist.
Little Wilhelm is carried away by the stage, travels around Germany with wandering actors, but meanwhile this is a false path, the path of dilettantes. Every person must become a master, that is, every person who is worth living in the world must choose some specialty for himself and bring himself to subtlety in this specialty. Through all the magnificent vicissitudes of the novel, unusually fascinating and purely in Goethe’s way, in the sense that all the colors are combined into some kind of happy harmony, and even in the most difficult trials one feels a thirst for happiness and the ability to be happy – all this leads to that Wilhelm Meister marries a girl who seemed unattainable to him. At the same time, he becomes a surgeon (and at that time the surgeon was something like a qualified barber). As if on purpose, Goethe wanted to say: do not get carried away by what to be such a universal Goethe as I am. A real person must have at least a minor specialty, and then he will take his place in human society. What matters is the whole, not the individual. This ending is a little dull after the vivid paintings, wonderful female images, wandering life, thirst for creativity, but such is the wisdom ending in “balance”.
Goethe depicts in the second part of the novel a fantastic province where, according to his methods, children are brought up so that they together form an integral organism, where everyone would find himself as a whole. In the same part, he creates a female image, this is Macarius – happy, and makes hints that in the case of serving the social idea, a person will develop to a human-divine being, to harmony, in which eyes will be opened to the inner depths of the world – which Goethe does not speak of. He had to speak intimately: the purpose of life is not to please God, but to be in harmony with the cosmos.
However, the further Goethe takes the reader away from the wandering years of Wilhelm Meister, from the first student years, the more confused and dimmer the novel becomes. Speaking about the future, he had to guess, partly, however, taking himself as an example as the greatest person who really achieved something like universal completeness in science, in art and life. His age, even during his lifetime, began to be called the age of Goethe.
Goethe died a deep old man, and yet he could not form a concrete idea of where man and mankind should go. Therefore, his very personality remains largely tragic.
The well-known German playwright Sternheim, a communist belonging to the German Communist Workers’ Party, mired in childhood illnesses of leftism, declared that Goethe is some kind of Olympian bull and that the proletariat should beware of Goethe, since his calmness, poise and beauty are only harmful. This view finds confirmation in the authority of Mehring, who has a statement that, of course, Goethe is a great figure, but it is better for the proletariat not to study him. Here, he says, when we win, we will return to Goethe and Goethe will teach us how to be happy. But he does not know how and cannot teach us how to fight. Therefore, while we are in the struggle, it is better for us not to get carried away by Goethe.
Landauer takes a different point of view. He argues that Goethe’s imaginary calm is a forced self-defense of the greatest man of that time from the bourgeoisie surrounding him, that it was a forced compromise. But this is such a compromise, which contains the seed of amazing activity, a huge impetus for us.
Goethe remains a dual personality. Either this is a sunny person, or a person who represents only a great tradesman, a brilliant inhabitant, with all the immensity of his poetic and scientific talent. Of course, he has both, because, indeed, Goethe had to compromise. And when Nietzsche reproached the German bourgeoisie: “You keep saying Lessing, Schiller; don’t you know that they died prematurely, died of exhaustion, from internal pains and from constant fear for their existence? that you killed them?!”, he could add: you see that the great Goethe has a clear forehead, that Goethe is indifferent, that he does not want to write tragedies, because he is afraid that his heart will break, and rejoices that everything is calm in Weimar and nothing interferes with work, and you reproach him for this? Know that it was only through compromise that Goethe was able to get away from the philistinism surrounding him. It was a compromise imposed by the environment.
There are martyrs among the great artists who broke down internally and physically smashed against the wall of the bourgeoisie, but there are also those who protected themselves and adapted themselves. And the greatest of them was Goethe.
Of course, in our society, our geniuses will neither break down like Lessing, nor adapt like Goethe. We will win complete freedom for them, and they, who surpass the rest of the masses in talent, will be their direct spokesmen and teachers.