Hermann Hesse. Hermann Hesse Hermann Hesse German writer

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Biography

Hesse was born on July 2, 1877 in the town of Calw in the German state of Baden-Württemberg. As the son of Christian missionaries, he began studying theology in Maulbronn in 1891, but dropped out a year later, becoming first a mechanic, then a bookseller. In 1912, Hesse emigrated to Switzerland and in 1923 received Swiss citizenship.

The writer gained literary fame thanks to the novel "Peter Kamenzind" (Peter Camenzind, 1904). The success of this work allowed Hesse to devote himself entirely to literature.

Starting with the Roman "Damian", Hesse is influenced by the Hermetic tradition, and the idea of ​​​​combining opposites becomes the main theme of his work. In "Damian" he formulates the idea of ​​God named Abraxas, who combines good and evil, while standing on the other side of opposites. Perhaps even then Hesse was familiar with Carl Jung's "Seven Instructions to the Dead", especially since it is reliably known that Hesse underwent psychoanalysis with a student of K.G. Young Joseph Lang.

The result of this training was the writing of two landmark novels - "Siddhartha" and " steppe wolf". In the first of them, the action takes place during the time of Buddha Gautama, where, passing through different stages of life from extreme asceticism to hedonism, the Hero comprehends the unity of everything and everything, coming to his Self.

"Steppenwolf" is an open-ended book, in many ways a confession, and describes what is happening in the soul of Hesse himself during Lang's Analysis, like Magical theater. It is easy to trace the throwing of Hesse himself - between the world of spirit and the world of matter, as well as the fear of falling into philistinism.

During the spiritual revolution of the sixties, Hesse's books gained immense popularity among the youth, who rebelled against the usual boundaries of Judeo-Christian morality. His books became a spiritual impetus for a mass "pilgrimage to the countries of the East" and a turn from the hustle and bustle of the outside to a look inside.

The writer was married three times and raised three sons.

Hesse died in Montagnola (now a district of the city of Lugano, Switzerland) on August 9, 1962 in his sleep from a cerebral hemorrhage.

Artworks

Peter Camenzind (German: Peter Camenzind, 1904)
Francis of Assisi (German: Franz von Assisi, 1904)
Under the Wheel (German: Unterm Rad, 1906)
Gertrud (German: Gertrud, 1910)
Roskhald (German: Ro?halde, 1912-1913)
Knulp (German: Knulp, 1915)
Demian (German Demian, 1919)
Klein and Wagner, (German Klein und Wagner, 1919)
Klingsor's Last Summer (German: Klingsors letzter Sommer, 1919-1920)
Siddhartha (German: Siddhartha, 1922)
Steppenwolf (German: Der Steppenwolf, 1927)
Narcissus and Goldmund (German: Narziss und Goldmund, 1930)
Pilgrimage to the Land of the East (German: Die Morgenlandfahrt, 1932)
The Glass Bead Game (German: Das Glasperlenspiel, 1943)

Collections of poems

Poems (German: Gedichte, 1922)
Comfort of the night (German Trost der Nacht, 1929).

Biography

Hermann Hesse is an outstanding German novelist, publicist, critic, poet, artist, Nobel Prize winner, which he received for his contribution to world literature, winner of many other awards.

Hermann Hesse is a man who believed that "... to be a man means to suffer from incurable duality, it means to be torn between good and evil ...", and this idea runs like a red thread in all his works. Hermann Hesse is three years old

Hermann Hesse was born into a family of German pietist missionaries on July 2, 1877 in the city of Calw, in Württemberg.

Father Johannes Hesse was an evangelical priest, engaged in the publication of theological literature, teaching.

Mother - Maria Hesse, was a philologist and missionary, long years lived in India, and married Hesse's father, already a widow.

The family was pious, the spirit of Christianity and obedience reigned in the house.

A great influence on the formation of the views of young Hesse was exerted by his maternal grandfather Hermann Gundert, an orientalist philologist, a well-known linguist, the author of the grammar of the Dravidian Malayalam language, who lived in India for more than a quarter of a century.

The parents wanted to see their son as a theologian and send him to the Latin school in Göppingen, and then to the seminary at the Maulbronn monastery, where his studies almost bring him to suicide, and since he sees no point in this teaching, he runs away.

After undergoing treatment at a psychiatric clinic, he takes exams for the penultimate course of the gymnasium in the city of Canstatta and begins working first with a bookseller in the shop, and soon as an assistant to his father.

Hermann Hesse works as an apprentice in a mechanical workshop of tower clocks, in a bookstore, and all this time he reads avidly, swallowing books of German romantics and classics one after another.

In 1899 he makes the first attempts to publish his poems, stories, reviews, articles.

In 1901, his first novel, The Posthumous Writings and Poems of Hermann Lauscher, was published, but his literary success came from his novel, published three years later, Peter Kamencid.

In 1902, Hermann Hesse set off on a trip to Italy, having lived for some time in Venice, Florence, Genoa.

After the death of his mother in 1903, he published his story "Under the Wheels" and a collection of poems "Poems".

Having bought a country house, Hermann Hesse married Maria Bernouilly and lives there on his literary income, they have three children.

Hesse meets many people from the arts, writers, artists, musicians, journalists, devotes himself entirely to literature, writes for newspapers and magazines.

In 1911, with his friend, he went on a trip to India, called in Malaysia, Singapore, Ceylon, Sumatra, from where he returned completely disappointed and sick, not finding even in these heavenly places happy people.

As a person who subtly feels and experiences everything that happens around him, being in essence also an idealist, he could not be indifferent to any manifestations of injustice, cruelty, violence from his point of view.

In 1914, Hermann Hesse asked to go to the front, was refused, and then began his work in the Committee for Assistance to Prisoners of War, established a publishing house to supply German prisoners with literature.

The publication of anti-militarist articles, with criticism of the ruling strata of society, appeals in the journals of Austria and Switzerland are all the result of his life position.

Misfortunes fall on Hermann Hesse one after another, mental illness wife, son's illness, father's death, the hardships of war lead the writer to a nervous breakdown.

He is undergoing a course of psychoanalysis with a student of Jung, the result of this communication was the novels Demian and Sidhartha, which became very popular among German youth, since the first accurately reflected the mood of people in the post-war period. In "Dimian" Hesse tries to draw the image of God, containing both good and evil, and a young man, faced with the contradictions of his dual nature.

Hermann Hesse is divorcing his wife and trying to start new life full of self-knowledge.

The next epochal novel "Steppenwolf" is a work about a middle-aged intellectual and about his spiritual search for his integrity, the meaning of life.

In 1931, Hermann Hesse marries Ninon Dolbin for the third time, and publishes his utopian novel The Glass Bead Game, which demonstrated in this work "all the classical ideals of humanism", as well as his throwing between the world of spirit and the world of matter. The novel stirred up the public, attracted the attention of critics and philosophers, as well as the attention of millions of readers.

Hermann Hesse, having bought a house in Switzerland, where he lives until the end of his days in peace and quiet until the age of 85, occasionally delighting admirers of his talent with short essays and reviews.

The writer's work was highly valued by such famous classics as Mann, Gide, Eliot, his works have been translated into many languages ​​of the world, Hermann Hesse is considered the greatest writer of the 20th century, his books are interesting for many generations of people who are searching for, knowing themselves and their nature.

THE PATH OF HERMANN HESSE

S. S. Averintsev

(Hesse G. Selected. - M., 1977)

The writer's fate of Hermann Hesse (1877-1962) is unusual. It was unusual during his lifetime and remained unusual after his death.

Indeed, how did generations of readers see it?

At first everything was simple. After the twenty-six-year-old author Peter Kamenzind was published in 1904, for about fifteen years there was no reason to doubt who Hesse was: a handsome and highly gifted, but limited epigone of romanticism and naturalism, a leisurely depiction of provincial life in the emotional experiences of an introspective dreamer who conducts its own lawsuit with this way of life, and yet we think only on its basis. What is called "Heimatdichtung", old German provincialism as a theme and at the same time as a way to approach the theme. It seemed that this is how he would write novel after novel from decade to decade - maybe everything is better, everything is thinner, but hardly in a different way ...

However, already in 1914 there were eyes that saw something else. The well-known left-wing writer and publicist Kurt Tucholsky then wrote about his new novel: “If Hesse’s name had not been on the title page, we would not have known that he wrote the book. This is no longer our dear, venerable old Hesse; it's someone else. The chrysalis lies in a cocoon, and no one can tell in advance what the butterfly will turn out to be. Over time, it became clear to everyone: the former writer seemed to have died, and another was born, at first inexperienced, almost tongue-tied. The book "Demian" (1919) - a vague and passionate evidence of the formation of a new type of person - was not without reason published under a pseudonym, not without reason was taken by readers as a confession of a young genius who managed to express the feelings of his peers, incomprehensible to people of the older generation. How strange it was to learn that this truly youthful book was written by a forty-year-old, long-established novelist! Another ten years passed, and the critic wrote about him: “He is actually younger than the generation of those who are now twenty years old. The former provincial idyllic Hesse becomes a sensitive forerunner and interpreter of the all-European crisis.

What do readers think of him in the late 30s and early 40s? In truth, he has almost no readers left. Even before 1933, fans of his early novels vying with each other in letters to him renounce him and rush to inform him that he had ceased to be a "truly German" writer, succumbed to "neurasthenic" moods, "internationalized" and betrayed "the sacred gardens of German idealism, the German faith and German loyalty. During the years of Hitlerism, Swiss citizenship provided the writer with personal security, but contact with the German reader was cut off. Nazi critics alternately politely and rudely send him into oblivion. Hesse writes almost "for no one", almost "for himself." The philosophical novel "The Glass Bead Game" was published in neutral Zurich in 1943 and should have seemed unnecessary, like a jewelry miracle among the trenches. Few recognized and loved him; among these few was, in particular, Thomas Mann.

In less than three years, everything turned upside down. The “unnecessary” book turns out to be the most necessary spiritual guide for entire generations seeking a return to lost values. Its author, awarded the Goethe Prize of the city of Frankfurt and then the Nobel Prize, is perceived as a living classic of German literature. At the end of the 40s, the name of Hesse was an object of reverence, moreover, an object of a sentimental cult that inevitably created its own meaningless clichés. Hesse is glorified as a blessed and wise singer of "love for man", "love for nature", "love for God".

There was a change of generations, and everything turned upside down again. The annoyingly looming figure of a respectable classic and moralist began to get on the nerves of West German critics (Hesse himself was no longer alive by this time). “After all, we agreed,” notes an influential critic in 1972, ten years after his death, “that Hesse, in fact, was a mistake, that although he was widely read and revered, however, in fact, the Nobel Prize, if you have mind not politics, but literature, was more of a nuisance for us. Entertaining novelist, moralist, teacher of life - wherever it went! But he catapulted himself out of "high" literature because he was too simple." Let us note the irony of fate: when The Glass Bead Game became widely known, it was perceived more as an example of difficult and mysterious "intellectual" literature, but the criteria for "highbrow" changed so rapidly that Hesse was thrown toe into the pit of kitsch. From now on, he is "too simple."

Everything seemed to be decided, the rulers of the thoughts of the West German intellectual youth came to an inviolable agreement: Hesse is outdated, Hesse is dead, Hesse is no more. But everything turns upside down again - this time away from Germany. Everyone is used to thinking that Hesse is a specifically German, or at least a specifically European writer; this is how he himself understood his place in literature, this is how his friends looked at him, and, by the way, also his enemies, who reproached him for his provincial backwardness. True, interest in his work is noticeable in Japan and India; Asia, dear to the writer, responded with love for love. Already in the 50s, four (!) Different translations of the Glass Bead Game appeared in Japanese. But America! In the year of the writer's death, The New York Times noted that Hesse's novels were "generally inaccessible" to the American reader. And suddenly the wheel of Fortune made a turn. Events are taking place which, as always, any critic can easily explain in hindsight, but which at the first moment were unexpected to the point of being dumbfounded: Hesse is the most "read" European writer in the USA! The American book market is absorbing millions of copies of his books! Everyday detail: young rebels in their "communes" pass from hand to hand one tattered, filthy, well-read book - this is a translation of "Siddharta", or "Steppenwolf", or the same "Game of Glasses". Even though the West German literary-critical Areopagus has authoritatively ruled that Hesse cannot say anything to a person of the industrial age, the unceremonious youth of the most industrial country in the world ignores this verdict and reaches for the “archaizing” writings of the belated romantic Hesse, as the word of his contemporary and comrade. Such a surprise cannot but be found remarkable. Of course, the case this time is not without a fair dose of nonsense. The new cult of Hesse is much louder than the old one, it develops in an atmosphere of an advertising boom and fashionable hysteria. Savvy owners name their cafes after Hessian novels, so New Yorkers can grab a bite to eat at The Glass Bead Game, for example. The sensational pop ensemble is called "Steppenwolf" and performs in the costumes of the characters from this novel. However, by all appearances, the interest of American youth in Hesse includes more serious aspects. From the writer one learns not only the dreamy introvertedness - deepening into oneself - thoroughly vulgarized in the minds of the average American, but above all two things: a hatred of practicality and a hatred of violence. During the years of struggle against the Vietnam War, Hesse was a good ally.

As for the West German critics, they could, of course, console themselves by referring to the bad taste of the American reader. However, from time to time, this or that critic notifies the public that he has re-read The Glass Bead Game or another novel by Hesse and, along with archaism, stylization and overdue romance, to his amazement, found sense in the book. Even the sociological ideas of Hesse were, it turns out, not so meaningless! The Wheel of Fortune keeps turning and no one can tell when it will stop. Today, a century after his birth and fifteen years after his death, Hesse continues to evoke unconditional admiration and equally unconditional denial. His name remains controversial.

Let us once again look back at the reflections of Hesse's face in other people's eyes. A quiet idyllic of the 900s and a violent outcast of bourgeois prosperity in the period between the two world wars; an aged sage and teacher of life, in whom others hastened to see a spiritual bankrupt; an old-fashioned master of "well-tempered" German prose and an idol of the long-haired youths of America - how, one wonders, to collect such various denunciations into a single image? Who was this Hesse really? What fate drove him from one metamorphosis to another?

Hermann Hesse was born on July 2, 1877 in the small southern German town of Calw. This is a real town from a fairy tale - with toy old houses, with steep gable roofs, with a medieval bridge reflected in the waters of the Nagold River.

Calw lies in Swabia, a region of Germany that for a particularly long time retained the features of a patriarchal life, bypassed by political and economic development, but gave the world such daring thinkers as Kepler, Hegel and Schelling, such self-absorbed and pure poets as Hölderlin and Mörike.

Swabian history has developed a special type of person - a quiet stubborn, eccentric and original, immersed in his thoughts, original and intractable. Swabia experienced in the 18th century the heyday of pietism - a mystical movement that bizarrely combined a culture of introspection, original ideas and insights, echoes of popular heresy in the spirit of Jacob Böhm and a protest against callous Lutheran orthodoxy - with the most tragicomic sectarian narrowness. Bengel, Etinger, Zinzendorf, all these thoughtful visionaries, original seekers of truth, truth-seekers and one-minded people are colorful characters of Swabian antiquity, and the writer kept true love for them all his life; memories of them pass through his books - from the figure of the wise shoemaker master Flyg from the story "Under the Wheel" to individual motifs that appear in the "Glass Game" and dominate in the unfinished "Fourth Biography of Joseph Knecht".

Atmosphere parental home was a match for these Swabian traditions. Both the father and mother of Hermann Hesse from their youth chose the path of missionaries, prepared for preaching work in India, due to lack of physical endurance were forced to return to Europe, but continued to live in the interests of the mission. They were old-fashioned, limited, but pure and convinced people; their son could eventually become disillusioned with their ideal, but not with their devotion to the ideal, which he called the most important experience of his childhood, and therefore the self-confident world of bourgeois practicality remained incomprehensible and unreal for him all his life. The childhood years of Hermann Hesse passed in another world. “It was a world of German and Protestant coinage,” he later recalled, “but open to worldwide contacts and perspectives, and it was a whole, unified, undamaged, healthy world, a world without gaps and ghostly veils, a humane and Christian world, in in which the forest and the stream, the roe deer and the fox, the neighbor and the aunts, were as indispensable and organic parts as Christmas and Easter, Latin and Greek, as Goethe, Matthias Claudius and Eichendorff.

Such was the world, cozy as his father's house, from which Hesse left, like the prodigal son of a parable, where he tried to return and from where he left again and again, until it became absolutely clear that this lost paradise no longer exists.

The adolescence and youth of the future writer were filled with acute inner anxiety, which sometimes took on convulsive, painful forms. One can recall the words of Alexander Blok about the generations that survived puberty on the eve of the advent of the 20th century: “... in each offspring something new and something sharper matures and is deposited, at the cost of endless losses, personal tragedies, life failures, falls, etc .; at the cost, finally, of the loss of those infinitely lofty properties that once shone like the best diamonds in the human crown (such as humane properties, virtues, impeccable honesty, high morality, etc.). The teenager Hermann Hesse lost the faith of his parents and responded with violent stubbornness to the meek stubbornness with which they imposed their commandments on him, rapturously tormented and bitterly enjoyed his incomprehension, his loneliness and "wretchedness". (Note that not only then, but also in his mature years, at the age of fifty "ribs and demons", Hesse curiously retained something from the ideas of a boy from a pious family - ideas that allow a person who has sat up in a tavern, undertook an escapade to a restaurant or danced with an unfamiliar woman, not without pride to feel like the chosen one of the Prince of Darkness; the reader will feel this more than once even in the clever novel "Steppenwolf"). The obsessive visions of murder and suicide that emerge in the same Steppenwolf, in the book Crisis, and especially in Klein and Wagner, date back to the same years. The first emotional storm broke out in the ancient walls of the Gothic Maulbronn Abbey, where since the Reformation a Protestant seminary has been located, which saw among its pupils the still young Hölderlin (albums on the history of German art often contain photographs of the Maulbronn chapel, where, under the lancet vaults, erected in the middle of the 14th century. , spring streams splash, flowing from one bowl to another). The aesthetically attractive image of a medieval monastery, whose pupils among the noble old stones from generation to generation are engaged in the cultivation of their spirit, had an indelible impact on the fantasy of the fourteen-year-old Hesse; artistically transformed memories of Maulbronn can be traced back to later novels - "Narcissus and Goldmund" and "The Glass Bead Game". The teenager at first enthusiastically studied ancient Greek and Hebrew, performed with recitations, played music, but turned out to be unsuitable for the role of an obedient seminarian; one fine day, unexpectedly for himself, he ran “to nowhere”, spent the night on a frosty night in a haystack, like a homeless tramp, then for several painful years, to the horror of his parents, he discovered a complete inability to socially adapt, incurring suspicion of mental inferiority, refused to accept any ready and preordained life path, did not study anywhere, although he diligently engaged in a wide literary and philosophical self-education according to his own plan. In order to somehow earn a living, he went to study at a tower clock factory, then practiced for some time in antiques and bookshops in Tübingen and Basel. Meanwhile, his articles and reviews appear in the press, then the first books: a collection of poems "Romantic Songs" (1899), a collection of lyrical prose "The Hour After Midnight" (1899), "Posthumously Published Recordings and Poems of Hermann Lauscher" (1901), " Poems" (1902). Starting with the story "Peter Kamentsind" (1904), Hesse became a regular contributor to the famous S. Fischer publishing house, which in itself meant success. Yesterday's restless loser sees himself as a recognized, respectable, wealthy writer. In the same 1904, he marries and, in fulfillment of an old Russoist-Tolstoy dream, leaves all the cities in the world for the sake of the village of Gaienhofen on the shore lake constance. At first he rents a peasant house, then - oh, the triumph of yesterday's tramp! - builds his house. His own house, his own life, determined by him: a little rural labor and quiet mental work. One after another, sons are born, one after another, books are published, anticipated by readers in advance. There seems to be peace between this restless Hermann Hesse and reality. How long?

The period preceding "Peter Kamentsind" can be considered as the prehistory of Hesse's work. The writer began under the sign of the neo-romantic aestheticism of the end of the century. His first sketches in verse and prose rarely go further than fixing the fugitive psychological states and moods of an individual, somewhat but moderately occupied with himself. Only in the fictitious diary of Hermann Lauscher does Hesse sometimes rise to the confessional ruthlessness of introspection so characteristic of his mature works.

What, however, was achieved by the writer almost immediately was an impeccable sense of prosaic rhythm, musical transparency of syntax, unobtrusiveness of alliterations and assonances, natural nobility of "verbal gesture". Such are the inalienable features of Hesse's prose. In this connection, let us say in advance a few words about the stable relation of his poetry to his prose. Hesse's poems had to get better and better, so that the most perfect poems were written by him in old age, but in essence his poetry always lived by the power of his prose, serving only a more frank and obvious revelation of the properties of lyricism and rhythm inherent in it, prose. In Hesse, poetry is short with prose, as is usual for writers of the second half of the 19th century, for example, for the Swiss Konrad Ferdinand Meyer, but not at all typical for poets of the 20th century. It can be argued that Hesse's poems lack the exclusively poetic "magic of the word", which is conceivable only in poetry, there is a lack of "absoluteness", "absoluteness" in relation to the word; it is, as it were, the same prose, only raised to a new degree of its high quality.

The story "Peter Kamentsind" is an important step forward for the early Hesse, if only because it is a story, a work of plot, the hero of which is living his life, and not just moving from mood to mood. Hesse for the first time assimilates the epic energy of his samples (primarily Gottfried Keller), he with a firm hand draws the contour of the biography of the peasant son Kamentsind, who comes from the love torments of youth to the tranquility of maturity, from disappointment in the bustle of cities to a return to rural silence, from egocentrism to the experience of compassionate love , finally, from dreams to a tart, mournful and healthy sense of reality. This biography has one feature, to some extent inherent in the biographies of all the later heroes of Hesse (and the further, the more): it looks like a parable, which is by no means accidental. Starting with "Peter Kamentsind", the writer moves from aestheticism and self-expression to moral and philosophical searches and to moral and philosophical preaching. Let us assume that Hesse in time will go far from the spirit of Tolstoyism, peeping through in his first story; but all of his subsequent work will be directly, obviously, frankly oriented towards the question of “the most important thing”, about the meaning of life (for the depiction of the meaninglessness of life in “Steppenwolf” or in the book “Crisis” is nothing more than an attempt to approach the problem “ contrary", and the Hessian "immoralism" of the 1920s - component his moralism). One can admire the consistency with which Hesse subordinated his inspiration to lofty humanistic goals, one can perhaps grieve at the indiscretion of his preaching and the amateurishness of his philosophizing, but Hesse was like that, and no power in the world could have made him different. In the late period of creativity, the writer was more than once ready to despair of his literary skill and the path, but he never despaired of his human duty - stubbornly, without being embarrassed by failures, to search for the lost integrity of spiritual life and to tell about the results of searches for the benefit of all who seek. What is almost absent in his sermon is doctrinairism, and questions in it prevail over ready-made answers.

Hesse's next story is "Under the Wheel" (1906); this is an attempt to pay off the nightmare of youthful years - the school system of Kaiser's Germany, an attempt to approach the problem of pedagogy from the standpoint of a "personal advocate", as the writer would call himself many years later. The hero of the story is the gifted and fragile boy Hans Giebenrath, who, in fulfillment of the will of his father, a rude and heartless philistine, puts his impressionable soul into the empty pursuit of school success, into the hysteria of exams and the illusory triumphs of good grades, until he breaks down from this unnatural life. His father is forced to take him out of school and give him as an apprentice; the way out of the ambitious vanity and familiarization with the life of the people at first had a beneficial effect on him, but the nervous breakdown that turned the first awakening of the emotions of falling in love into a hopeless catastrophe, and the panic fear of the prospect of "falling behind", "falling behind" and "falling under the wheel" went irreparably far. Whether suicide, or an attack of physical weakness - the author leaves this unclear - leads to an end, and the dark water of the river carries away the fragile body of Hans Giebenrath (Hesse's heroes usually find death in the water element, like Klein, like Joseph Knecht). If we add that the school that makes up the scene of the story is the Maulbronn Seminary, then the autobiographical nature of the story will be quite obvious. Of course, it cannot be exaggerated: Hesse's parents were the exact opposite of Giebenrath the father, and Hesse himself in his youth was little like the meek and unrequited Hans (there is another character in the story - a rebellious young poet, not without reason bearing in his name "Hermann Geilner" initials of Hermann Hesse). In this regard, we note that the main and most real conflict of the writer's youth - falling out of the circle of domestic religiosity - never becomes the subject of direct depiction in his stories, novels and novels: there were things that he could not touch even after decades. The best thing about the story is the great pictures folk life and samples of popular speech, anticipating "Knulp". Her weakness is a somewhat sentimental attitude towards the hero; in its atmosphere there is something of the mindset of a "misunderstood" young man, poisoning his heart with dreams of how he will die and how then everyone will feel sorry for him.

A touch of sentimentality is not alien to the novel Gertrude (1910), marked by the influence of the prose of Stifter and other elegiac novelists of the 19th century (not without the influence of Turgenev). At the center of the novel is the image of the composer Kuhn, a concentrated melancholic, whose physical inferiority only emphasizes and makes visual the distance between him and the world. With sad reflection, he sums up his life, which appears before him as a chain of refusals from happiness and an equal place among people. Even more clearly than in the story "Under the Wheel", a technique is revealed that is characteristic of Hesse's entire work: a set of self-portrait features is distributed between a pair of contrasting characters, so that the writer's spiritual self-portrait is realized precisely in the dialectic of their contrast, dispute, confrontation. Next to Kun is the singer Muot - a daring, sensual, passionate person who knows how to achieve his own, but is incurably poisoned by inner anxiety. Kuna and Muota are united by the main thing: they are both people of art, as romantic thinking imagines them, that is, deeply lonely people. It is their loneliness that makes them suitable for transferring onto them the conflicts and problems of the author himself. If Kuhn Hesse entrusts his introspection, his craving for asceticism, his hope for clarifying the tragedy of life by an effort of the spirit that gives strength to the weak, then Muot also embodies the beginning of rebellion inherent in Hesse, stormy internal discord. From each of them the path leads to a long line of characters from later books: from Kuhn to Siddhartha, Narcissus, Joseph Knecht, from Muot to Harry Haller, Goldmund, Plinio Designori.

In the early 10s, Hesse experiences the first bouts of disappointment in his life, in the Gaienhofen idyll, in an attempt to make a truce with social norms, in the family and in writing. It seems to him that he betrayed his fate as a vagabond and wanderer, having built a house, founding a family, hiding from himself abysses and failures, but also the special possibilities of harmony inherent in his life - only to her and no other. “Blessed is the possessor and the settled, blessed is the faithful, blessed is the virtuous! he wrote then. - I can love him, I can honor him, I can envy him. But I wasted half my life in trying to imitate his virtue. I tried to be what I am not.” Internal anxiety drives Hesse, a convinced homebody and provincial who was extremely reluctant to leave his native Swabian-Swiss lands, on a long journey (1911): his eyes see the palm trees of Ceylon, the virgin forests of Sumatra, the bustle of Malay cities, his impressionable imagination is stocked up for life with pictures oriental nature, life and spirituality, but the restlessness that owns it is not redundant. Hesse's doubts about the artist's right to family happiness and domestic well-being were expressed in his last pre-war novel (Roskhalde, 1914). Then personal sorrows and discord were resolutely relegated to the background, although they were exacerbated, as if confirmed in their ominous sense by the great misfortune of the peoples - the world war.

The experience of the writer's adolescence and youth was repeated again in a hundredfold enhanced form: the whole world, the cozy, beloved and revered world of European civilization, traditional morality, the unquestioned ideal of humanity and the equally indisputable cult of the fatherland - this whole world turned out to be illusory. Pre-war comfort was dead, Europe went wild. Dear professors, writers, pastors of Germany met the war with enthusiasm, as a welcome renewal. Writers such as Gerhart Hauptmann, scholars such as Max Planck, Ernst Haeckel, Wilhelm Ostwald addressed the German people with the “Declaration of the 93s”, which affirmed the unity German culture and German militarism. Even Thomas Mann succumbed to the “hops of fate” for several years. And now Hesse, Hesse's apolitical dreamer, finds himself alone against everyone, at first not even noticing that this happened. On November 3, 1914, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung newspaper published Hesse's article "O friends, enough of these sounds!" (the title is a quotation, it repeats the exclamation that precedes the finale of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony). The position expressed in this article is characteristic of Hesse's individualistic humanism. While grieving for the war, the writer protests, in fact, not against the war as such; what he protests against, and, moreover, with rare clarity and purity of moral emotion, is against the lie that accompanies war. Lies cause him sincere, direct, impulsive bewilderment. What actually happened? Didn’t everyone agree yesterday that culture and ethics are independent of the topic of the day, that truth is elevated high above the discords and unions of states, that “people of the spirit” serve a supra-national, all-European and world cause? Hesse does not appeal to politicians and generals, but not to the masses, not to a man in the street, he addresses professional ministers of culture, accusing them of apostasy, demanding inexorable loyalty to the ideal of spiritual freedom. How dare they succumb to general hypnosis, make their thought dependent on the political situation, renounce the precepts of Goethe and Herder? The article can be called naive, it is indeed naive, but its naivete is its strength, the directness of the question posed in it: isn't German culture ready to betray itself? This question was asked almost twenty years before Hitler came to power ... Hesse's speech attracted, by the way, the sympathetic attention of Romain Rolland and gave impetus to the rapprochement of both writers, which ended in their long-term friendship. Another article, which continued the line of the first, brought upon Hesse the unbridled persecution of "patriotic circles." An anonymous pamphlet, reprinted in 1915 by twenty (!) German newspapers, called him the "Knight of a sad image", "a renegade without a fatherland", "a traitor to the people and nationality." “Old friends informed me,” Hesse later recalled, “that they had nurtured a snake in their hearts and that this heart would continue to beat for the Kaiser and for our state, but not for such a degenerate as me. Abusive letters from unknown persons came in many, and booksellers informed me that an author with such reprehensible views did not exist for them ”(“ A Brief Biography ”). Hesse was neither a tribune nor a left-wing politician, he was a reserved, old-fashioned man, accustomed to traditional loyalty, to respectable silence around his name, and newspaper attacks meant for him the need for a painful breaking of life skills. Meanwhile, the ring of loneliness closed around him: in 1916 his father died, in 1918 his wife went crazy. The work of organizing the supply of books to prisoners of war, which the writer led in neutral Switzerland, exhausted his strength. During a severe nervous breakdown, he first turned to the help of psychoanalysis, which gave him impressions that led far away from the idyllic conservatism of the pre-war years.

Life was over, life had to be started anew. But before that, it was necessary to sum up. The cycle of stories about Knulp is the result of the past period of Hesse's work. It is symbolic that he appeared during the war, in 1915. His hero is a vagabond, an unlucky wanderer, fanned by the melancholic poetry of Schubert's "Winter Road" and the gentle humor of old folk songs, a man without a home and shelter, without a family and business, preserving in the world of adults the secret of eternal childhood, "childish folly and children's laughter", stubbornly refusing to take his place in the prudent world of prudent masters. Freezing on the way under the flakes of snowfall, he sees his whole life at a glance, feels it justified, and himself - forgiven, comforted and free, talks face to face with God, and this is not at all the god of theology, not the god of the church, which requires a person to the answer, this is the god of a fairy tale, the god of children's fantasy, a child's dream. Knulp falls asleep in his last sleep, as in a warm, cozy cradle. The homeless man returned home.

The outward appearance of the stories about Knulp is characterized by that old-fashioned, if you like, rustic, but rather sympathetic unpretentiousness, excluding strain and tension, which is so characteristic of Hesse's early work and which is almost impossible to find in his later things. However, the internal setting of these stories reveals a certain complexity, even bifurcation, consisting in the fact that the author at the same time, as it were, moves towards his hero, uniting and even identifying himself with him in an act of a certain life choice, but at the same time parting and saying goodbye to him forever. Behind self-identification is the final rejection of complacently ponderous "burgher" stability, of home and comfort, of taking seriously any kind of unambiguous prescriptions and the coming to the determination of a vagabond to accept his schismatics simply and without complaints. This self-identification goes quite far with Hess: in one of the lyrical poems of the same time, he refers to Knulp as his comrade and double, dreaming about how they fall asleep, holding hands and looking at the moon, smiling at them, like their graves. the crosses will stand next to the road, under the rain and snow... But Hesse also leaves Knulp, who is already visible to the reader through the "magical distance". Among the heroes of Hesse, Knulp is the last one who still retained the people's modesty and gaiety, even something of patriarchal humility, and a stock of ingenuous purity, not wasted in the most dissolute wanderings. The character of one of Bunin's stories says about himself that he has "a soul of another age"; this could be said about his soul and Knulp. Another Hessian tramp, Goldmund, will make his way among the external environment of the Middle Ages, but it is not he, but the ingenuous Knulp who has not yet broken his connection with the thousand-year tradition of wanderers and vagantes, cheerful beggars and wandering violinists. The fate of the writer, however, led him to depict the psychology of the twentieth-century intellectual, much less chaste, much more pathetic and torn than the soul of Knulp, and the former simple-heartedness, which became a spiritual anachronism, had to recede for him and his readers into the realm of comforting memories. The writer does not choose his topics - the topics choose him, sometimes against his will; Hesse had never felt this so clearly as at that vague, turning point, when Europe came to the end of the World War, and he to his fortieth birthday. An old proverb, to which he took pleasure in referring, states that a Schwab gains intelligence by the age of forty. To gain mind in this case meant to be born again.

An experienced, well-known poet and novelist turns into a beginner. In 1919, his book was published, and it seems that it does not belong to the former Hesse, which is expressed purely outwardly by the absence of his name on the title page. The book does not appeal to the former readers of Hesse, not to his peers, but through their heads - to the youth; the writer speaks to young men who have gone through front-line hell, not in the tone of an elder, he feels himself to be their comrade, suffers from their illnesses, gets drunk on their madness, hopes for their hopes. The book is vitally connected with the crisis situation that arose after an unprecedented war, after the fall of the Kaiser regime and the collapse of old Germany. It has a tense, even agitated, ecstatic, if you like, and indeed youthful intonation: it has a lot of genuine passion and very little maturity, little experience and poise. This book is the novel Demian, which appeared under the pseudonym Emil Sinclair (for Hesse, this name was associated with the holy memory of Hölderlin, whose most faithful friend was the rebel Isaac Sinclair). On June 6, 1919, T. Mann wrote in one letter: “Recently I had a strong impression of a literary nature -“ Demian, The Story of One Youth ”by Emil Sinclair ... I was very shocked and am trying to find out something about the author, his age and etc. If you have time, read the novel! In my opinion, this is something quite extraordinary ... "

The novel is truly “extraordinary”. It is very difficult to talk about him. Purely literary, it can hardly be called luck: the style is grandiloquent, the syntax is nervously pathetic, exclamation marks are given too much role, the images are vague and abstract, the characters resemble dream characters rather than real people of flesh and blood. Literature in the novel is completely subordinated to philosophy and placed at its service, but the philosophy developed in the novel does not come to any tangible results, to any clear conclusions; moreover, no other work of Hesse contains so many dubious, dangerously ambiguous or downright absurd judgments. What is the place where the mysterious superman Demian persuades Sinclair not to stop before killing in the name of the self-liberation of a self-willed personality, or the fantasies developed by Sinclair and Pistorius in the spirit of the ancient Gnostics about "a god who is both god and devil"! Nevertheless, the book, which not without reason excited the experienced and slightly jaded T. Mann, is a significant book. It is significant for its furious sincerity, its piercing, unrestrained frankness, its tragic tension. Her tone is set by the words that were sent to her instead of the epigraph: “After all, I didn’t want anything else but to embody what was torn from me by itself. Why was it so difficult?" And a little lower, in the introduction: “My story is not comforting, it is not sweet and not harmonious, as fictional stories are, it smacks of nonsense and confusion, madness and dreams, like the life of all people who no longer want to deceive themselves ...” Demian was a necessary step on Hesse's path from decent epigonism to contemporary issues. Without "Demian" there would be neither the dark depths of "Steppenwolf", nor the light and transparent depths of "The Bead Game".

The writer now lived a completely different life. Instead of old friends - militantly old-fashioned writers and nationalists of a provincial fold like Emil Strauss and Ludwig Fink - he has new friends who would have recently surprised himself. One of his closest friends is the frantic Hugh Ball, who combined a fierce opponent of the war, a Dadaist who teased the bourgeois public with earnest seriousness, and a convinced, but not quite orthodox Catholic. (In 1927, the year of Ball's death, a book he wrote about Hess appeared.)

The visionary psychoanalyst Josef Lang, a student of Carl Gustav Jung (depicted in Demian under the name of Pistorius and in Pilgrimage to the Land of the East under the name of Longus), travels with Hesse through the dark regions of the subconscious. In 1921, Hesse became for some time a patient of Jung himself, the founder of a whole trend in psychoanalysis, which took Freud's assessment of the role of the unconscious, but rejected Freud's reduction of the unconscious to the sexual.

Jung's shadow falls more than once on Hesse's books, beginning with Demian. The writer was impressed by many things in psychoanalysis (for example, the call for a mercilessly close look inside oneself) and especially in Jung (for example, the idea of ​​mental life as a pulsation of complementary opposites or ancient mythological symbols as eternal spiritual realities). But Hesse argued with Jung. In a letter to Jung dated December 1934, he protests against Jung's denial of "sublimation" (the spiritualization of instincts), which was a false ideal for the psychologist, orienting the individual towards the perverse realization of his wishes. In the eyes of Hesse, the concept of sublimation is incomparably wider than Freud's problems and contains all the ascetic pathos of culture, creative self-discipline: without asceticism, without the "sublimation" of nature and its transformation into spirituality, for example, Bach's music would be unthinkable, and if a psychoanalyst undertakes to return the artist to his untransformed spontaneity, "I would have preferred that there was no psychoanalysis, and instead we had Bach." And yet, psychoanalysis retained its significance for Hesse - the almost symbolic significance of the threshold over which it is necessary to cross in order to cut off one's old Swabian past from oneself. Provincial comfort has been replaced by the air of world literature.

The stories "Klein and Wagner" and "The Last Summer of Klingsor" (1920) continue the line of "Demian". “Klein and Wagner” is a story about a man who, in order to become like everyone else, to squeeze into the narrow framework of a philistine existence and live the life of an impeccable official, cut off his criminal possibilities, but also his spiritual impulses, cut himself off from below and from above , which is why he became truly “Klein” (in German “small”). He is enraged by the crime of some schoolteacher Wagner, who for no apparent reason killed his loved ones and then committed suicide; Klein is downright shaking, cursing this villain, because he feels him in himself. But Wagner is also a composer whose music gave Klein romantic delights in his youth. Klein's delusional fantasy combines both Wagners into a single image, symbolizing all of Klein's unrealized possibilities, everything creepy or lofty that he could and did not become. Violence over the soul avenges itself with madness. The forgotten suddenly comes back to life, but absurdly, distorted, becomes a sign of nonsense. With government money and a fake passport (almost a ritual gesture of self-desecration), Klein flees to Italy, wanders aimlessly, experiences causeless delights and causeless horrors, then falls ill with fear that in a dark attack he will kill the woman who has come down with him, and hurries to kill himself so as not to kill anyone another.

I would like to call this story prophetic: is the history of Hitlerism not the history of millions of Kleins, in the desire to compensate for the lack of festivity among the philistine everyday life, seduced by the vile "holiday" of madness and crime? Only they did not have the sensitive conscience of the hero Hesse, who nevertheless managed at the last minute to prefer his death to someone else's. For this, the writer gives him dying enlightenment. Leaning smoothly from the edge of the boat into the waters of the lake in order to sink into them forever, Klein in a few seconds manages to feel the ecstatic restoration of the wholeness of the world, which indicates to the reader the possibility of victory over nonsense (and to that extent corresponds to the theme of "immortals" in "Steppenwolf"). It is easy to see that this victory is a specifically artistic victory: Klein sees the wholeness of the world not in the way that a person of action or, say, a person of strict philosophical thought, but in the way the artist can see it. Therefore, “Klein and Wagner” is continued in “The Last Summer of Klingsor”, whose hero is devoured by a premonition of death, intoxicated by a heightened sense of life before death, who perceives his work as a feast during the plague, a painter with Van Gogh’s personality traits: in him, Klein’s dying delight becomes deed, deed, work. Prose " last summer Klingsor" is closest to the nervous, hyperbolic style of the expressionists.

The story "Siddharta" (1922) is written much more evenly, harmoniously - "tempered". This is a preliminary attempt to achieve a clarified harmony, a wise balance, to depict enlightenment not as an instant ecstasy on the verge of death, but as a norm for life. In Indian legend. Siddhartha is the name of Buddha: Hesse turns the bearer of this name into a double and contemporary of Buddha, who even meets Buddha on his way and admires the authenticity of his spiritual appearance, but refuses to accept Buddhism as a ready-made teaching, as a dogma, separated from the personality of its creator. After many wanderings and disappointments, Siddhartha finds spiritual peace in a modest, inconspicuous service to people and in the contemplation of the unity of nature. World voices like noises and bursts great river, finally merge for him into a harmonious polyphony, are composed into the sacred word "om" - a symbol of integrity. “Looking through the world, interpreting the world, despising the world - let the great sages do it. But I am looking for one thing: to have the strength to love the world, not to despise it, not to hate either it or myself, but look at it, and at myself, and at everything that exists with love, with admiration, with reverence. This is the result of Siddhartha's life, and it is close to the ideal of "reverence for life", which Albert Schweitzer, the same age as Hesse, spoke about. Among the disturbing, dissonant works of Hesse of the 1920s, only Siddharta looks like a harbinger of that senile wisdom that will illuminate the writer in the following decades with an oblique sunset beam. “Anxiety,” Stefan Zweig wrote about Siddharth, “comes here to a kind of calm; here it is as if a stage has been reached from which one can look around the whole world. And yet it is felt: this is not the last step.

Of course, the fundamental attitude towards ambiguity, towards the vacillating openness of each statement can itself be assessed in two ways: its symbol - a magnet with two poles - is truly a double-edged sword. There are cases when a person is required to say either “yes” or “no”, and everything beyond this is “from the evil one”! Suppose, in the face of one, but the most main problem, on which the Germans of his generation were tested, Hesse found the strength for complete unambiguity: to the spirit of war and national malice, herd admiration for power, technocratic-police attempts to turn a person into an object of manipulation, and above all to Hitlerism, he answered with a simple and clear “no”, from which no false dialectics can make a "yes". However, in other cases, one could also complain about him for subtle evasiveness, for dissolving the final choice in the polyphony of opposing voices, for his readiness to forever remain a man with double thoughts. And yet, in principle, bipolarity was for Hesse a lot of healthy and liberating. We see in the panorama of his resort notes how a person seeks to get out of the circle of his egocentrism, realizing that this circle is a vicious circle of despair, how a romantic, without ceasing to be a romantic, seeks to supplement his pathetic challenge to the world with conciliatory humor. The wooden self-identity of concepts, which is equally characteristic of that antiquity, which is just a relic, and of that novelty, which is just a fashion, is opposed by a mobile dialectical point of view on things.

The middle period of Hesse's work comes to its climax in the novel Steppenwolf (1927). restless atmosphere postwar years, the fall in the rate of respectability that followed the fall in exchange rates, rampant fornication and speculation, the frenzy of jazz fever, longing in the soul of the son of old Europe, who fell out of the system of burgher moral norms and seeks a different spiritual support, attempts to treat the internal split of the personality either with Mozart's music or with psychoanalysis Jung, finally, the cruel loneliness of an independent mind in the world of educated philistines, who, in fact, are already ready for the role of pillars of the coming Hitler regime - all this was included in the polyphonic structure of the novel, which was bound by iron through logic.

As you know, Bernard Shaw divided his plays into "pleasant" and "unpleasant". If Hesse had subjected his novels to a similar division, Steppenwolf would have ranked first among the "unpleasant". The reader of Hesse, who loves the quiet elegiacism of his early prose or the strict spiritual beauty of The Glass Bead Game, can experience a real shock from the breakthroughs of tragic cynicism, from the carnival variegation of images and flashy sharpness of colors, from the frightening unrestraint of the satirical grotesque. Then, half a century ago, all this should have been perceived much more sharply than today. Old connoisseurs of "Peter Kamenzind" had to ask each other: "How, is this our Hesse?" - "Alas, he is the most." The novel is meant to be shocking. There is plenty of disappointing in it, and perhaps the worst of all is the double meaning of its central images and symbols. The dubious Term, wearing a mask of debauchery and vulgarity, turns out to be the guide of Haller's soul, his muse, his good Beatrice. Frivolous jazz player Pablo is mysteriously identical to Mozart. The bohemian lightness of morals is perceived as a reflection of the eternal laughter of the Immortals.

The reader finishes reading the book to the end, closes it in thought or slams it angrily, but does not know what he should ultimately think about all this. What's happened " magic theater» - the spiritual space of freedom and the music that heals the aching spirit, or a mocking celebration of madness? And what to say about the symbol of the Wolf, which determined the title of the book? Of course, its meaning has a high and noble side: the Wolf is the will, the Wolf is untamed and indomitable, this is not a tame dog wagging its tail and biting a stranger at the behest of the owner. Om and not one of those wolves that run in a pack and howl in unison with the pack. As the opposite of the conformist type, the Steppenwolf is not jokingly fit for ideals. “We howled with the wolves, which we should have torn apart,” said the liberal German writer Rudolf Hagelstange about the years of fascism. “It would be better for all of us if we howled with Steppenwolf.” But, on the other hand, the blackness of the SS uniforms is such a background against which anything can seem light. Whatever you say, but the Wolf is a predator, and what to do with dark madness, Haller's hypochondriacal fury, his manic desire to shed the blood of his beloved? Of course, the Wolf is not all of Harry Haller (whose initials coincide with those of Hermann Hesse for good reason); however, it is precisely the combination in one soul of the Wolf and the burgher-idealist that is not only tragicomic, but also leads to the brink of a split personality.

"Steppenwolf": here both words are ambiguous, radiate light and darkness at the same time. For a Russian person, the steppe is native, and the very word "steppe", which sounds in folk songs, is familiar from childhood. The Swabian native, who grew up in the land of neat, tidy, toy burgher towns, flaunting between mountains and hills, has a different perception. For him, the word “steppe” is exotic, and the very image of the steppe is a symbol of an alien, empty expanse, “outer darkness”, menacingly approaching the inhabited world. The steppe wolf is, as it were, a wolf squared: the wolf is a steppe wolf, because the steppe is also a wolf. For Hesse, the expanse of the steppe was also associated with the Karamazovs, whom he pointed out back in 1921 as a prototype of the future for the European burgher. “A man is broad, too broad, I would narrow it down,” says Mitya Karamazov in Dostoevsky. These words can be repeated, referring to the soul of Harry Haller, the soul of a romantic who has entered the last, final stage of the history of romanticism. Be that as it may, Hesse exhorted the reader to remember that "above the Steppenwolf and his dubious life rises another, higher, imperishable world", that "the story of the Steppenwolf depicts an illness, but not one that leads to death, not the end, but the reverse of this is recovery. At the proper aesthetic level, which Hesse saw as a symbol and reflection of the moral and vital, the novel is not chaos at all: it is built, in the words of the writer himself, "like a fugue." The image of disintegration by no means leads to the disintegration of the image.

When Hesse reproduced the central conflict of the "Steppenwolf" against the backdrop of slender medieval scenery, with the harmonizing participation of an emphatically symmetrical structure, arose new novel- "Narcissus and Goldmund" (1930). To each his own - Narcissus, as the forerunner of the Castalian ascetics from the Glass Bead Game, must distill his thoughts in monastic seclusion, achieving their crystalline clarity, but the same duty, the same law leads Goldmund through the "wolf" life of a tramp and fornicator, through guilt and trouble for artistic knowledge of the wholeness of the world: both are absolutely right, both go their own way, and each of the antagonists substantiates and justifies its opposite. Narcissus himself sends Goldmund out of the monastery into the wide world, and Goldmund “from the depths” of his passions sees the spiritual beauty and purity of Narcissus best of all. The sharpness of the disturbing questions that make up the content of The Steppenwolf is somewhat blunted here. Hesse himself was somewhat disappointed in his excessively and out of time "beautiful" novel. "The German reads it," he complained, "finds him cute and continues to sabotage the republic, to do sentimental political stupidities, to live his former false, unworthy, impermissible life."

The writer's worst forebodings soon came true, prompting him to move permanently to Switzerland in 1912 and to renounce German citizenship in 1923: the "sentimental political stupidities" of the German philistine prepared the way for Hitler. Hesse once again, as during the First World War, becomes the object of newspaper attacks. “He is betraying modern German literature to the enemies of Germany,” proclaimed the pro-Nazi Neue Literature. “For the sake of the Jews and the Bolsheviks, from culture, he spreads false ideas that harm his homeland.”

The name of Hesse disappeared from the entire German press, - stated in 1937 the Swabian poet E. Bleich, who sent comic rhymes to Hesse instead of the forbidden official congratulations on his 60th birthday.

In the face of the dark barbarism that took away the writer's homeland, Hesse gathers all his spiritual strength in order to reveal the meaning of culture, as he understood it. Thus begins the last period of Hesse's work, which produced his most mature and brightest works. The complaint of the misunderstood romantic youth, so often heard in his books, is forever silent. It is replaced by the cheerfulness of classical music. “Whether it is the grace of a minuet in Handel or Couperin, or sensuality sublimated to a gentle gesture, like in many Italians or Mozart, or a quiet, concentrated readiness for death, like in Bach, it is invariably a kind of resistance, a kind of fearlessness, a kind of chivalry, and in all this there is an echo of superhuman laughter, of immortal clarity,” we read in The Glass Bead Game. Thus, the words “Mozart was waiting for me”, closing the madness of “Steppenwolf”, were justified.

The introduction to this "Mozartian" period is the story "Pilgrimage to the Land of the East" (1932). It already has the most important features. late creativity Hesse. Firstly, it is the extraordinary transparency and spirituality of the figurative system, which makes one recall the second part of Goethe's Faust (for example, the classic Walpurgis Night and the episode of Helen), and if one reads inattentively, it is taken for abstraction. The place of action is "not a country or some geographical concept, but the homeland of the soul and its youth, that which is everywhere and nowhere, the identity of all times." Among the characters in Pilgrimage to the Land of the East are Hesse himself (identified as the "musician G. G.") and his contemporary, the famous expressionist painter Paul Klee, but also the German romantic writers of the beginning 19th century along with their characters, Tristram Shandy from Stern's novel of the same name, etc. Secondly, this is the unceasing mobility of point of view already postulated in The Resort, in which almost every subsequent phrase gives the subject of the image in a slightly different semantic perspective than the previous one. The story depicts a certain spiritual community, which, as it is assumed at the beginning, has crashed, disintegrated and forgotten, and only its former member G. G. keeps his memory and intends to write his history. However, the point of view shifts imperceptibly, and it becomes clear that all these years spent by H. G. in reprehensible despondency, the brotherhood continued its path. In the end, the desperate but honest member of the brotherhood will have to find out that he, too, at a deeper level of his being, remained faithful to his vow and that everything he experienced is a test provided for by the charter of the brotherhood. But the secret Master of the community of pilgrims turns out to be Leo - an inconspicuous servant who carries someone else's burden, lives only for others and completely dissolves in this service.

The result of the experience of the late Hesse, the fruit of ten years of work - "The Glass Bead Game" (completed in 1942). This is a philosophical utopia, the action of which is played out in the distant future, when mankind managed to recognize the bitterness of the fruits of all-pervading selfish lies, predatory egoism and advertising falsification of spiritual values, and having recognized it, created a community of guardians of the truth - the Castalian Order. Members of the Order refuse not only from the family, from property , from participation in politics, but also from their own artistic creativity, so as not to stir up the strict objectivity of spiritual contemplation with passion and self-will. In order to correctly understand the place of the ideal of contemplation in Hesse's work, it is useful to remember the socio-critical aspects of this ideal. “We have seen enough in recent decades,” Hesse notes in a letter from the 1940s, “what the neglect of contemplation in the name of inexorable action leads to: to the deification of dynamism, and, on occasion, even worse, to the praise of a “dangerous life”, in short - to Adolf and Benito. (As you know, “dangerous life” is a phrase from the ideological vocabulary of the Italian fascists.) In other words, contemplation, which is desirable for Hesse, is in principle opposed not to social action, but to bourgeois efficiency and fascist “activism”. Moreover, Hesse, with sad irony, was aware of the weaknesses of that human type who lives in contemplation and to which he himself belonged.

Primordial and naive creativity, as just said, has become forbidden for members of the Order; it is replaced by the mysterious "bead game" - "a game with all the meanings and values ​​of culture", with which the knowledgeable person plays, "as in the heyday of painting, the artist played with the colors of his palette." The idea of ​​the final unity of the intellectual and the artistic, which was already characteristic of the German Romantics, is by no means alien to the practice of literature and art of our century: examples include the ironic play with linguistic material in Thomas Mann's The Chosen One or Stravinsky's "neoclassical" music, which makes the object of play the great musical eras of the past. The ideal of the Game was in a rather transparent relationship with the sad reality of fascistized Europe: culture, to begin with, was perceived as the exact opposite of everything that found its completion in the mechanism of Hitler's propaganda. The lie did not present itself for what it really is, on the contrary, culture honestly exposed its game essence and the conventionality of its rules. The lie is filled with false seriousness - the "game" is easy, the lie is self-serving - the "game" is an end in itself. Demagogy and violence do not know restraining beginnings - the "game" must certainly be an honest game, which is the closer to the essence of the spiritual, the stricter, more developed, more immutable its rules.

The Game is unable to do one thing: it cannot replace either genuine, primordial creativity, much less life itself with all its troubles and tragedies. The artist Hesse gave in his romance not only the utopia of an absolutized Game, but at the same time a profound critique of this utopia. At the center of the novel "The Glass Bead Game" is the life path of the infallible Master of the Game, Joseph Knecht, who, having reached the limits of formal and content perfection in the "games of the spirit", feels painful dissatisfaction, becomes a rebel and leaves Castalia for the wide world to serve the concrete and imperfect to a person.

Spiritual forms exist for the sake of man, and not man - for these forms. After all, every value of culture exists in order to help someone climb even higher a rung on a ladder that has no end. In this, Hesse saw the purpose of his own books. Let the one who has risen push the ladder with his foot! Living, passing into the blood, in musical rhythm measured prose, the feeling of a non-stop path as the destination of a person, in relation to which everything “ready”, everything frozen is only a tool - this is the humanistic result of Hermann Hesse’s reflections:

The stairs are getting steeper,
We can't find peace on any of them;
We are molded by God's hand
For long wanderings, not for inert laziness.
It's dangerous to get too addicted
To a long-established routine;
Only those who are able to say goodbye to the past,
It will save the initial freedom in itself.

Notes

1. From the German Kitsch - bad taste, reading.
2. From the poems of Joseph Knecht. — Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game. Translation by S. Averintsev.

Biography

Hermann Hesse (1877 - 1962) - German-Swiss writer, Nobel Prize winner.

Born July 2, 1877 in Calw (Württemberg, Germany) in the family of a German missionary priest. Religious upbringing and the spirit of the family had a profound influence on the formation of Hesse's worldview. However, he did not follow the theological path.

1892 - Hesse drops out of his studies at the theological seminary in Maulbronn. He is going through a nervous crisis, which results in a suicide attempt and a stay in a psychiatric hospital. After that, Hesse a short time works as an apprentice mechanic, sells books, and then turns to literary creativity.

1899 - Hesse publishes his first - unnoticed - collection of poems "Romantic Songs" and writes a large number of reviews.

At the end of the same year, he publishes The Remaining Letters and Poems of Hermann Lauscher, a work in the spirit of confession. This was the first time that Hesse spoke on behalf of a fictitious publisher - a technique that he subsequently actively used and developed.

1904 - the first story "Peter Kamenzind" (Peter Camenzind) This is the story of the spiritual formation of a young man from a Swiss village, who, carried away by romantic dreams, goes on a journey, but does not find the embodiment of his ideals. Disappointed in the big world, he returns to his native village to a simple life and nature. Having gone through bitter and tragic disappointments, Peter comes to the affirmation of naturalness and humanity as enduring life values.

In the same year, Hesse marries the Swiss Maria Bernoulli. The young family moves to Geinhofen, a remote place on the Bodensee. The period that followed was very fruitful. Basically, Hesse writes novels and short stories with an element of autobiography.

1906 - The story "Under the Wheel" (Unterm Rad) is published. This work is largely based on the material of Hesse's school years: a sensitive and subtle schoolboy dies from a collision with the world and inert pedagogy.

1912 - Hesse moves to Switzerland. The works written during this period are characterized by an interest in psychoanalysis. In addition, they feel the strong influence of F. Nietzsche.

1914-1917 - During the First World War, which Hesse described as "bloody nonsense", he works in the German prisoner of war service. The writer is going through a severe crisis, which coincides in time with the separation from his mentally ill wife (divorced in 1918).

1915 - The Knulp series of short stories is published.

1919 - Under the pseudonym Emile Sinclair, the novel Demian (Demian), written in 1917, is published. The theme here is the attempt of a lonely person, sensitive to the world around him, to find the path to happiness and inner satisfaction.

1920 - Siddhartha is published. Indian Poem, which focuses on the fundamental questions of religion and the recognition of the need for humanism and love.

1922 - a collection of poems "Poems" (Gedichte) is published.

1924 - Hesse becomes a Swiss citizen. In the same year he married the Swiss singer Ruth Wenger (divorced in 1927).

1927 - the novel "The Steppenwolf" (Der Steppenwolf) is published, in which the figure of the protagonist is drawn by means of psychoanalytic and expressionist imagery, combining polar aspirations for civilization and barbarism. This is one of the first works that opens a line of so-called intellectual novels about the life of the human spirit, without which it is impossible to imagine German-language literature of the 20th century. (“Doctor Faustus” by T. Mann, “Death of Virgil” by G. Broch, prose by M. Frisch).

1929 - Hesse achieves the loudest recognition from the public with the story "Narcissus and Holmund" (Narziss und Goldmund). The subject of the narrative was the polarity of spiritual and worldly life, which was a theme typical of that time. In the same year, a collection of poems "Consolation of the Night" (Trost der Nacht) was published and work began on the novel "The Glass Bead Game".

1931 - Hesse marries for the third time - this time to Ninon Dolbin, an Austrian, an art historian by profession - and moves to Montagnola (Tessin canton).

1932 - the story "Pilgrimage to the Land of the East" (Die Morgenlandfahrt), written under the impression of Hesse's trip to India.

1946 - Hesse is awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for "an inspirational work in which the classical ideals of humanism appear, as well as for a brilliant style." In the same year he was awarded the Goethe Prize.

1955 - Hesse is awarded the Peace Prize established by German booksellers.

1957 - A group of enthusiasts establishes the personal Hermann Hesse Prize.

Biography

HESSE (Hesse), Herman

Nobel Prize in Literature, 1946

The German novelist, poet, critic and publicist Hermann Hesse was born into a family of Pietist missionaries and publishers of theological literature in Calw, Württemberg. The writer's mother, Maria (Gundert) Hesse, was a philologist and missionary, she lived in India for many years, married her father G., already being a widow and having two sons. Johannes Hesse, the writer's father, was once also engaged in missionary work in India.

In 1880, the family moved to Basel, where Father G. taught at a missionary school until 1886, when the Hesses returned to Calw. Although G. childhood dream of becoming a poet, his parents hoped that he would follow the family tradition, and prepared him for a career as a theologian. Fulfilling their desire, in 1890 he entered the Latin School in Göppingen, and the following year he transferred to the Protestant seminary in Maulbronn. “I was a diligent but not very capable boy,” G. recalled, “and it cost me a lot of work to fulfill all the seminary requirements.” But no matter how hard G. tried, he did not turn out to be a pietist, and after an unsuccessful attempt to escape, the boy was expelled from the seminary. Studied G. and in other schools - but just as unsuccessfully.

For some time the young man worked in his father's publishing house, and then changed several professions: he was an apprentice, an apprentice bookseller, a watchmaker, and, finally, in 1895 he got a job as a bookseller in the university city of Tübingen. Here he had the opportunity to read a lot (especially the young man was fond of Goethe and the German romantics) and continue his self-education. Entering in 1899 in the literary society "Little Circle" ("Le Petit Cenacle"), G. published his first books: a volume of poems "Romantic Songs" ("Romantische Lieder") and a collection of short stories and poems in prose "An Hour After midnight" ("Eine Stunde hinter Mitternacht"). In the same year, he began working as a bookseller in Basel.

G.'s first novel, "The Posthumous Writings and Poems of Hermann Lauscher" ("Hinterlassene Schriften und Gedichte von Hermann Lauscher") appeared in 1901, but literary success came to the writer only three years later, when his second novel "Peter Kamenzind" was released ( "Peter Camenzind"). After that, G. left his job, went to the countryside and began to live solely on the income from his works. In 1904 he married Maria Bernouil; the couple had three children.

"Peter Kamentsind", like other novels of the writer, is autobiographical. Here G. for the first time touches on his favorite topic, which was subsequently repeated in many of his works: the desire of the individual for self-perfection and integrity. In 1906, he wrote the story "Under the Wheel" ("Unterm Rad"), which was inspired by memories of studying at the seminary and which explores the problems of a creative person in bourgeois society. During these years, G. wrote many essays and essays in various periodicals and until 1912, Mr.. works as co-editor of the magazine "March" ("Marz"). His novel "Gertrude" ("Gertrud") appeared in 1910, and the next year G. travels to India, on his return from where he publishes a collection of stories, essays and poems "From India" ("Aus Indien", 1913). In 1914, the novel Rosshalde was published.

In 1912, G. and his family finally settled in Switzerland and in 1923 received Swiss citizenship. Being a pacifist, G. opposed the aggressive nationalism of his homeland, which led to a drop in the writer's popularity in Germany and personal insults against him. However, during the First World War, Mr.. supports a charitable organization to help prisoners of war in Bern and publishes a newspaper, as well as a series of books for German soldiers. G. was of the opinion that war is the inevitable outcome of the spiritual crisis of European civilization and that the writer should contribute to the birth of a new world.

In 1916, due to the hardships of the war years, the constant illnesses of his son Martin and his mentally ill wife, and also because of the death of his father, the writer suffered a severe nervous breakdown, from which he was treated by psychoanalysis by a student of Carl Jung. Influenced by Jung's theories, G. writes the novel Demian (Demian, 1919), which he publishes under the pseudonym Emil Sinclair. "Demian" gained great popularity among young people who returned from the war and tried to establish a life in post-war Germany. Thomas Mann considered this book "no less bold than James Joyce's Ulysses and André Gide's The Counterfeiters: Demian conveyed the spirit of the times, evoking a sense of gratitude among a whole generation of young people who saw in the novel an expression of their own inner life and problems, arising in their environment. Torn between domestic foundations and the dangerous world of sensual experiences, the hero of the novel is faced with the duality of his own nature. This theme found its further expression in G.'s later works, where the contradiction between nature and spirit, body and consciousness is revealed.

In 1919, Mr.. G. leaves his family and moved to Montagnola, in the south of Switzerland. And in 1923, a year after the publication of Siddhartha, the writer officially divorced his wife. The setting of Siddharta is India during the time of Gautama Buddha. This story reflected G.'s journey through India, as well as the writer's long-standing interest in Eastern religions. In 1924, Mr.. G. married Ruth Wenger, but this marriage lasted only three years.

In the novel "The Steppenwolf" ("Der Steppenwolf"), the next significant work of the writer, G. continues to develop the theme of Faustian dualism on the example of his hero, the restless artist Harry Haller, who is looking for the meaning of life. According to modern literary scholar Ernst Rose, The Steppenwolf was the first German novel to penetrate the depths of the subconscious in search of spiritual wholeness. In "Narcissus and Goldmund" ("Narziss und Goldmund", 1930), where the action takes place in medieval Germany, life is opposed to the spirit, love of life is opposed to asceticism.

In 1931, G. marries for the third time - this time to Ninon Dolbin - and in the same year begins work on his masterpiece "The Glass Bead Game" ("Das Glasperlenspiel"), which was published in 1943. This utopian novel is a biography of Joseph Knecht, "Master of the Glass Bead Game", an intellectual pursuit that was carried out by the elite of the highly spiritual country of Castalia at the beginning of the 25th century. In this, the main book of G. repeats the main themes of the writer's early novels. According to the American literary critic Theodore Tsiolkovsky, the novel "The Glass Bead Game" proves that G. "prefers ... responsible action to thoughtless rebellion. The Glass Bead Game is not a telescope to the distant future, but a mirror that reflects with disturbing sharpness the paradigm of today's reality."

In 1946, Mr.. G. was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for inspirational work, in which the classical ideals of humanism are increasingly evident, as well as for a brilliant style." In his speech, the representative of the Swedish Academy Anders Esterling said that G. awarded the award "for the poetic achievements of a man of goodness - a man who in a tragic era managed to defend true humanism." Mr.. was unable to attend the ceremony, and on behalf of the Swedish minister Henry Valloton, who in his response speech quoted Sigurd Klurman, president of the Royal Swedish Academy: "G. urges us: forward, rise higher! Conquer yourself! After all, to be human means to suffer from an incurable duality, it means to be torn between good and evil.”

After receiving the Nobel Prize, G. did not write any more major works. His essays, letters, new translations of novels continued to appear. In recent years, the writer lived without a break in Switzerland, where he died in 1962 at the age of 85, in his sleep, from a cerebral hemorrhage.

In addition to the Nobel Prize G. was awarded the Zurich Literary Prize Gottfried Keller, the Frankfurt Goethe Prize, the Peace Prize of the West German Association of Book Publishers and Booksellers, and was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Bern. In 1926, G. was elected to the Prussian Academy of Writers, but four years later, disappointed by the political events taking place in Germany, he left the academy.

Although G.'s work was highly valued by such prominent writers as Mann, Gide, Eliot, by the time he was awarded the Nobel Prize, he was known mainly only in German-speaking European countries. Over the past 25 years, G.'s books have been translated into many languages ​​of the world, new monographs have appeared and critical articles about his work - today G. is considered one of the greatest writers of the XX century. According to T. Tsiolkovsky, G., like “any great artist of his generation ... refers to the central problem of the early 20th century: the destruction of traditional reality in all spheres of life. G. was able to show to what extent the new is traditional in its thoughts and form; his work is a kind of bridge between romanticism and existentialism.”

In the 60s...70s. the glory of G. goes beyond the elite circles, the modern youth culture. Some critics reacted ironically to this, believing that young people made G. their prophet, not particularly delving into the essence of his work. The popularity of the writer among the youth of the United States, where the cult of G was created, especially increased. Meanwhile, the writer's work became the subject of a scrupulous analysis of many literary scholars and critics, primarily George Steiner and Jeffrey Sammons. “It is one thing to seek unity,” Sammons wrote, “another thing to finally establish oneself in it and consider all kinds of violations of harmony as insignificant and trivial ...” By the beginning of the 80s. G.'s cult began to subside, and critics' interest in the novelist waned. Despite this, G. still occupies one of the central places in the literature of the XX century.

Nobel Prize Laureates: Encyclopedia: Per. from English - M .: Progress, 1992.

© The H.W. Wilson Company, 1987.

© Translation into Russian with additions, Progress Publishing House, 1992.

Hermann Hesse was born on July 2, 1877, into a family of Pietist missionaries and publishers of theological literature. From childhood, the boy dreamed of becoming a poet, but his parents insisted on a career as a theologian. In 1890, the young man entered the Latin School in Göttingen. In 1891 he moved to the Protestant seminary in Maulbronn, but he was soon expelled from there.

Hesse had to change many professions. He was an apprentice, a bookseller's apprentice. The young man read a lot and willingly. He was particularly attracted to the works of Goethe and German romantics.

Portrait of Hermann Hesse. Artist E. Würtenberger, 1905

In 1899, Hesse became a member of the Little Circle Literary Society. By this time he had already tried to write poetry and short stories. The first novel, The Posthumous Writings and Poems of Hermann Lauscher, was published in 1901. But success came to the writer three years later, after the release of the second novel, Peter Kamentsind. After that, literary activity became for Hesse not a hobby, but the main source of livelihood. He began to live on the income from his works. In 1904, Hermann Hesse married Maria Bernouilly, who became the mother of his three children.

"Peter Kamentsind" is largely autobiographical. Hesse speaks of the individual's desire for self-improvement and wholeness. In 1906, the story "Under the Wheel" was created, where the writer talks about the problems of a creative person. During this period, many essays and essays came out from Hesse's pen. In 1910, the novel "Gertrude" was published, in 1913 - a collection of stories, essays and poems "From India", in 1914 - the novel "Roskhalde".

Literary Nobel. Hermann Hesse

In 1923 Hesse and his family became Swedish citizens. The writer openly spoke out against the aggressive nationalism of Germany, which caused discontent among many compatriots. During First World War Hesse supported a charitable organization for helping prisoners of war in Bern.

In 1916, Hesse had to endure several blows of fate: the frequent illnesses of his son Martin, the mental illness of his wife, and the death of his father. All this caused a severe nervous breakdown, from which the writer was treated by the method psychoanalysis one of the students of the famous Carl Jung. At this time, the novel Demian (1919) was created, published under the pseudonym Emile Sinclair. In 1923, the writer divorced his wife, in 1924 he married again - to Ruth Wenger. In 1931 he married for the third time - to Ninon Dolbin.

In 1946, Hermann Hesse was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for his inspirational work, in which the classical ideals of humanism are increasingly evident, as well as for his brilliant style."

Hesse was also awarded the Zurich Gottfried Keller Literary Prize, the Frankfurt Goethe Prize, the Peace Prize of the West German Association of Book Publishers and Booksellers, and an honorary doctorate from the University of Bern.

Hermann Hesse (GermanHermann Hesse; July 2, 1877, Calw, Germany - August 9, 1962, Montagnola, Switzerland)- Swiss novelist, poet, critic, essayist and artist German descent, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature (1946). Considered one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. Hesse's work has become a kind of "bridge between romanticism and existentialism."

Hermann Hesse was born into a family of missionaries and publishers of theological literature in Calw, Württemberg. The writer's mother was a philologist and missionary, she lived in India for many years. The writer's father, at one time also engaged in missionary work in India.

In 1880 the family moved to Basel, where Father Hesse taught at a missionary school until 1886, when the Hesses returned to Calw. Although Hesse dreamed of becoming a poet since childhood, his parents hoped that he would follow the family tradition and prepared him for a career in theology. In 1890, he entered the Latin School in Göppingen, and the following year, having passed the exam brilliantly, he transferred to the Protestant seminary in Maulbronn. March 7, 1892 Hesse flees the Maulbronn Seminary for no apparent reason. After a very cold night spent in the open field, the fugitive is picked up by a gendarme, who is taken back to the seminary, where, as a punishment, the teenager is put in a punishment cell for eight hours. After that, staying in the seminary for Hesse becomes unbearable and, as a result, his father takes him from the institution. Parents tried to assign Hesse to a number of educational institutions, but nothing came of it, and as a result, Hesse began an independent life.

For some time the young man worked as an apprentice in a mechanical workshop, and in 1895 he got a job as an apprentice bookseller, and then as an assistant to a bookseller in Tübingen. Here he had the opportunity to read a lot (especially the young man was fond of Goethe and the German romantics) and continue his self-education. In 1899, Hesse published his first books: a volume of poems "Romantic Songs" and a collection of short stories and prose poems "The Hour After Midnight". In the same year, he began working as a bookseller in Basel.

Hesse's first novel, The Posthumous Writings and Poems of Hermann Lauscher, appeared in 1901, but literary success came to the writer only three years later, when his second novel, Peter Kamenzind, was published. After that, Hesse left his job, went to the countryside and began to live solely on the income from his works. In 1904 he married Maria Bernouil; the couple had three children.

During these years, Hesse wrote many essays and essays in various periodicals and until 1912 worked as co-editor of the March magazine. In 1911, Hesse traveled to India, on his return from where he published a collection of stories, essays and poems "From India".

In 1912, Hesse and his family finally settled in Switzerland, but the writer does not find peace: his wife suffers from a mental illness, and a war begins in the world. Being a pacifist, Hesse opposed aggressive German nationalism, which led to a drop in the writer's popularity in Germany and personal insults against him. In 1916, due to the hardships of the war years, the constant illnesses of his son Martin and his mentally ill wife, and also because of the death of his father, the writer suffered a severe nervous breakdown, from which he was treated by psychoanalysis by a student of Carl Jung. The experience gained had a huge impact not only on life, but also on the work of the writer.

In 1919, Hesse left his family and moved to Montagnola, in the south of Switzerland. The writer's wife is already in a psychiatric hospital by this time, some of the children are sent to a boarding school, and some are left with friends. The 42-year-old writer seems to be starting his life anew, which is emphasized by the use of a pseudonym for the novel Demian, published in 1919. In 1924, Hesse marries Ruth Wenger, but this marriage lasted only three years. In 1931, Hesse marries for the third time (to Ninon Dolbin) and in the same year begins work on his most famous novel: The Glass Bead Game, which was published in 1943. In addition to literary work, Hesse is fond of painting (since 20 -x) and draws a lot.

In 1939-1945 Hesse's works were included in Germany's list of undesirable books. Individual works are even subject to a publication ban; the publication of the novel "The Glass Bead Game" was banned in 1942 by the Ministry of Propaganda.

In 1946, Hesse was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for his inspirational work, in which the classical ideals of humanism are increasingly evident, as well as for his brilliant style."

After receiving the Nobel Prize, Hesse did not write another major work. His essays, letters, new translations of novels continued to appear. In recent years, the writer lived without a break in Switzerland, where he died in 1962 at the age of 85, in his sleep, from a cerebral hemorrhage.

Writer's Awards

Nobel Prize in Literature (1946)

Honorary doctorate from the University of Bern (1947)

Wilhelm Raabe Prize (1950)

Peace Prize of the Exchange Association of the German Book Trade (1955)

HESSE, HERMANN(Hesse, Herman) (1877-1962) - German writer, poet, critic, publicist. Winner of the 1946 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Born July 2, 1877 in the town of Calw, Württemberg, Germany, in a family of Pietist missionaries and publishers of theological literature.

In 1890 he entered the Latin school in Geppining, then transferred to the Protestant seminary in Maulbronn - his parents hoped that his son would become a theologian. After an escape attempt, he was expelled from the seminary. Changed several schools.

In one of his youthful letters, Hesse admitted that he did not find himself in religious service, and, given the choice, he would prefer to become a poet.

After school, he worked at his father's publishing house, was an apprentice, a bookseller's apprentice, and a watchmaker. In 1895-1898 he was an assistant to a bookseller at the University of Tübingen. In 1899 he moved to Basel, worked as a bookseller and wrote. He joined the society of young writers "Little Circle" (Le Petit Cenacle).

First published poetry collection romantic songs(1899) did not win the approval of his pious mother due to its secular content. Like the first, the second collection of short stories and prose poems Hour after midnight(1899) was sustained in the traditions of classical German romanticism with the motives of confession, loneliness, the search for harmony with nature; later, in poetry, faith in the power of the human spirit sounded more and more clearly.

In 1901 and 1903 he traveled to Italy. Met writers and publishers. In 1901 the story was published Posthumous writings and poems by Hermann Lauscher, after reading which, the publisher Samuel Fischer offered Hesse cooperation. Tale Peter Kamencind(1904) brought the author his first success, including financial success, and the S.Fisher publishing house has since then constantly published his works.

Hero Peter Kamencind- a whole personality, and remains so in all his hobbies and searches. The main theme of creativity emerges - "the path to oneself" (Hesse's phrase) of personality in this world.

In 1904 he married the daughter of the famous mathematician Maria Bernoulli. Leaves work in a bookstore, the couple rent a house in an abandoned mountain village on Lake Baden and move there, intending to devote themselves literary work and communication with nature.

In 1906 a psychological story was published Under the wheels inspired by the memories of his studies and the suicide of his seminarian brother. Hesse believed that the rigid Prussian system of education deprives children of the natural joys of communication with nature and loved ones. Due to its sharp critical orientation, the book was published in Germany only in 1951.

In 1904-1912, he collaborated with many periodicals: Simplicissimus, Rhineland, Neue Rundschau, etc. He wrote essays, essays, in 1907-1912 he was co-editor of the March magazine, which opposed itself to the pan-German publication Weltpolitik. Collections of novels published This side(1907),Neighbours(1908),detours(1912), novel Gertrude(1910) - about the difficulties of becoming a gifted musician, his attempts to find peace of mind.

In September 1911, at the expense of his publisher, Hesse traveled to India, intending to visit his mother's birthplace. But the journey did not last long - upon arrival in southern India, he felt ill and returned. Nevertheless, the "countries of the East" continued to awaken his imagination and inspired the creation Siddhartha(1921),Pilgrimages to the Land of the East(1932). Based on the direct impressions of the trip, a collection was released From India ( 1913).

In 1914, the family, which already had two sons, moved to Bern, where a third son was born in 1914, but this did not ease the growing estrangement between the spouses. In the novel Roshalde(1914), Describing the disintegration of a bourgeois family, Hesse wonders if an artist or a thinker should get married at all. In the story Three stories from the life of Knulp(1915) appears the image of a lonely wanderer, a vagabond, who opposes himself to the burgher routine in the name of personal freedom.

During the First World War (Hesse was not subject to conscription for health reasons) he collaborated with the French Embassy in Bern - he supported a charitable organization. He published a newspaper, a series of books for German soldiers. Actively corresponded with Romain Rolland, who came to Bern. As a pacifist, Hesse opposed the aggressive nationalism of his homeland, which led to a decline in his popularity in Germany and personal insults against him.

After a severe emotional breakdown associated with the hardships of the war years, the death of his father, worries about the mental illness of his wife (schizophrenia) and the illness of his son, in 1916 he took a course of psychoanalysis with Dr. Lang, a student of Jung. Later, having become interested in the ideas of analytical psychology, he “took sessions” with Jung for several months.

In 1919 he left his family (1919) and went to the south of Switzerland to a village on the shores of Lake Lugano.

A novel was published under the pseudonym Emile Sinclair Demian(1919), which gained great popularity among young people who returned from the war. Poetically described meetings with significant people (friend and second "I" of the hero - Demian, Eve - the personification of eternal femininity, organist Pistorius - the bearer of knowledge, Kromer - a manipulator and extortionist), symbolizing images-archetypes of the psyche, help the young man to free himself from the influence of the family and recognize your individuality. The end of the novel is filled with a deep conviction that, despite all the trials, a person has considerable inner strength.

Klingsor's Last Summer(1920) - a collection of three short stories, was called by Hesse "a look into chaos." In the story Siddhartha(1922), on the basis of the ancient Indian legend of Gautam Buddha, the path of "individuation" is recreated, achieved through overcoming the contradictions between the flesh and the spirit, through the dissolution of one's own "I" in the unconscious and gaining unity with the existent. It reflects the writer's longstanding interest in Eastern religions and attempts to synthesize Eastern and Western thinking.

In 1925-1932 he spent every winter in Zurich, regularly visited Baden - a story was written based on resort life resort visitor(1925).

The novel was published in 1927 steppe wolf. The restless artist Harry Haller, torn apart by Faustian passions, in search of the meaning of life and spiritual wholeness, penetrates into the depths of his subconscious. The hero splits into a man and a wolf wandering in the jungle big city. The atmosphere of inner loneliness and loss, contradictions of the animal and spiritual nature of man is recreated.

In 1926, Hesse was elected to the Prussian Academy of Writers, from which he left four years later, disappointed with the political events taking place in Germany.

The action of the story Narcissus and Goldmund(1930) takes place in medieval Germany. The plot is based on the spiritual interaction of Narcissus, who embodies abstract thinking, and the naive and spontaneous artist Goldmund. The problem is the duality of being, the contradiction of spiritual and material, asceticism and love of life, paternal and maternal, male and female.

In 1931 he began work on his masterpiece, the novel Bead game.

In the story Pilgrimage to the Land of the East(1932), reminiscent of a romantic fairy tale full of symbols and reminiscences, describes the magical image of the Brotherhood - a secret society of like-minded people striving to reach the heights of the spirit and penetrate the mystery of being.

Novel Bead game was published in Switzerland in 1943 at the height of World War II. In the center is a metaphor of culture as a game, "game of beads". We are talking about the re-creation of culture on the basis of the already existing achievements of mankind. The image of Castalia of the 25th century and the glass beads game are the prototypes of an ideal state and the place of spiritual culture in it. The requirements of the self-discipline of the order of "bead players" include responsibility, concentration, improving one's ability to communicate intra- and interculturally and transfer the skills of one's art to students. The problem of the “correct correlation” of worldly existence and asceticism, relations between the state and the church, etc. is posed.

The fate of culture is considered in the novel through the prism of the autobiography of the "Master of the Glass Bead Game" Josef Knecht. In the context of the book's intention, the themes of previous novels are repeated - apprenticeship, friendship of like-minded people, searching for oneself in the world of culture, the ability to find harmony between opposites, etc. The novel also absorbed the most important life impressions of Hesse - the features of the brotherhood of the community of his Pietist parents, his studies at the seminary, his development as a writer and master, etc.

The 1946 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Hesse "for his inspired work, in which the classical ideals of humanism are increasingly evident, as well as for his brilliant style", "for the poetic achievements of a man of goodness - a man who, in a tragic era, managed to defend true humanism."

After Bead Games major works in the work of Hesse did not appear. He wrote essays, letters, memoirs about meetings with friends - Thomas Mann, Stefan Zweig, Theodor Heiss, etc., translated. He was fond of painting - painted in watercolor, conducted extensive correspondence.

In recent years, he lived in Switzerland without a break. He died in Montagnol on August 9, 1962 in his sleep from a cerebral hemorrhage; buried in San Abbondino.

He was awarded the Zurich Literary Prize Gottfried Keller, the Frankfurt Goethe Prize, the Peace Prize of the West German Association of Book Publishers and Booksellers, etc.; was an honorary doctor of the University of Bern.

Before the release of the novel Bead game was known mainly to German-speaking readers and a narrow circle of literary connoisseurs in other countries. In the 1960s and 1970s, his popularity went beyond the elite circles - Bead game was recognized as a "cult" work among the youth. The novel was popular among hippies in the United States, where, under the leadership of Timothy Leary, a community called Castalia was created for those who were interested in experiments to "expand" consciousness.

Hesse's books have been translated into many languages ​​of the world, including Russian, and his writings are very popular in Russia.

Editions: Hesse G. Bead game. M., Fiction, 1969; Demian. St. Petersburg, Azbuka, 2003; Peter Kamencind. St. Petersburg, Amphora, 1999.

Irina Ermakova

(1877-1962) German writer, critic, essayist

Hermann Hesse was born in the small German town of Calw. The writer's father came from an ancient Estonian family of missionary priests, whose representatives lived in Germany from the middle of the 18th century. For a number of years he lived in India, and at an advanced age he returned to Germany and settled in the house of his father, also a famous missionary and publisher of theological literature. Herman's mother, Maria Gundert, received a philological education and was also engaged in missionary work. After being widowed, she returned to Germany with two children and soon married Father Herman.

When the boy was three years old, the family moved to Basel, where his father got a job as a teacher in a missionary school. Herman learned to read and write early. Already in the second grade, Hermann Hesse tried to write poetry, but his parents did not encourage such activities, because they wanted their son to become a theologian.

When the boy was thirteen years old, Hesse entered a closed Latin school at the Cistercian monastery in the small town of Geppingham. At first, Herman became interested in studying, but soon the separation from home caused him a nervous breakdown. With great difficulty he completed the year course, and although he brilliantly passed all the exams, after the first year of study, his father took his son from the monastery. Hesse would later describe his studies at the monastery in his novel The Glass Bead Game (1930-1936).

To continue his education, Hermann Hesse entered the Protestant seminary in Maulbronn (a suburb of Basel). It had a freer regime, and the boy could visit his parents. He becomes the best student, studies Latin and even receives an award for translating Ovid. But still life away from home again led to nervous breakdowns. His father took him home, but relations with his parents became complicated, and the boy was sent to a boarding school for children with mental disabilities, where Herman tried to commit suicide, after which he ended up in a psychiatric hospital.

After undergoing treatment, Hesse returned to parental home, and then, on his own initiative, he entered the city gymnasium, where one of the teachers became his spiritual mentor. Gradually, interest in studies returned to Herman, he even passed part of the required exams, but nevertheless in October 1893 he was expelled from the graduation class.

Over the next six months, Herman was at home, reading a lot, helping his father in publishing. Then he first realized his true calling - to be a writer. He asks his father to give him the opportunity to live on his own in order to prepare for literary work. But the father flatly refused his son, and Herman had to be apprenticed to a friend of their family, a well-known in the city master of tower clocks and measuring instruments G. Perrot. In this house, the young man found understanding and found peace of mind. A few years later, Perrault will become the prototype of one of the characters in the novel The Glass Bead Game. As a sign of gratitude, Hesse will even keep the name of the hero of the novel.

A year later, on the advice of Perrault, Hermann Hesse left the workshop and began working as an apprentice in the shop of the Tübingen bookseller A. Heckenhauer. He spent all his time in the shop, selling non-fiction books, buying from publishers, talking to customers, most of whom were professors and students from the local university. Soon Hesse passed the required exams for the gymnasium course and entered the University of Tübingen as a free student. He attended lectures on the history of art, literature, and theology.

A year later, Herman passed the exam and became a certified bookseller. But he did not leave the firm of Heckenhauer and spent several hours every day at the bookshelf. At this time, he begins to publish, first publishing small reviews of book novelties in local newspapers and magazines.

In Tübingen, Hermann Hesse became a member of the local literary society, at the meeting of which he read his poems and stories. In 1899, he published his first books at his own expense - a volume of poems "Romantic Songs" and a collection of short stories "An Hour After Midnight". In them, he imitates the German romantics of the early 19th century.

Hesse understood that for further creative growth he needed to communicate with professionals, so he moved to Basel, where he entered the largest second-hand book company in the city, P. Reich." The aspiring writer is still doing a lot of self-education, and free time gives to creativity. Hesse wrote in one of his letters to his father: "I am selling the most valuable books and I am going to write such that no one has written yet."

In 1901, Herman published his first major work, Hermann Lauscher, in which he created his own art world, built on images borrowed from German myths and legends. Criticism did not appreciate the novel, its release went almost unnoticed, but the very fact of its publication was important to Hesse. Less than a year later, he released his second novel - "Peter Kamentsind", which was published by the largest German publishing house S. Fischer. The writer told the story of a gifted poet who overcomes many obstacles on the way to happiness and fame. Critics praised this work, and Fischer entered into a long-term agreement with Hesse for the priority right to release all his works. S. Fischer, and subsequently his successor P. Zurkamp, ​​would become the only German publishers of Hesse's books.

One after another, several editions of the novel are published, European popularity comes to Hermann Hesse. The contract with the publisher allowed the writer to gain financial independence. He left his job in a second-hand bookshop, married his friend M. Bernoulli, a distant relative of the famous mathematician and physicist D. Bernoulli.

Shortly after the wedding, the couple moved to the small village of Heienhoffen on Lake Bodensee. Hesse was engaged in peasant labor and at the same time plunged into work on a new work - autobiographical story"Under the Wheel", and also continued to act as a critic and reviewer. The writer tries his hand at various genres: he writes literary tales, historical and biographical novels.

The popularity of Hermann Hesse is growing, the largest German literary magazines turn to him with requests for articles and reviews of new products. Soon Hesse began publishing his own literary magazine.

One after another, the writer publishes three short stories in which he tells the story of the wanderings and inner rushings of the tramp Knulp. After the release of his works, he traveled to India. He reflected his impressions of the trip in collections of essays and poems. Returning to his homeland, he found the revelry of military hysteria and fiercely opposed the war. In turn, a real propaganda campaign was launched against him. In protest, the writer moved to Switzerland with his family and renounced German citizenship.

Hermann Hesse settled in Bern, and when the First World War, he organized a charitable foundation for helping prisoners of war, for which he raised funds, published books and anti-war newspapers.

In 1916, a streak of failures began in the life of Hermann Hesse: the eldest of three sons died of a severe form of meningitis, the writer's wife ended up in a mental hospital, and to top it all, the writer learned about the death of his father. Hesse had a nervous breakdown, for several months he ended up in a private hospital with the famous psychologist K. Jung, which helped him regain his self-confidence.

Then Hesse begins to think about a new novel called Demian (1919). In it, he told the dramatic story of a young man who returned from the war and tried to find his place in civilian life. The novel returned Hesse's popularity in his native country and became a reference book for post-war youth.

In 1919, Hermann Hesse divorced his wife because her illness was incurable, and moved to the resort town of Montagnola in southern Switzerland. A friend gave the writer a house, and he again begins to publish, writes the novel Siddhartha, in which he tries to comprehend modernity from the standpoint of a Buddhist pilgrim.

After some time, Hesse married a second time, but this marriage lasted only about two years. The couple broke up, and the writer goes headlong into work on a new great work - the novel "Steppenwolf". In it, he tells the story of the artist G. Haller, who travels in a strange, fantastic world and gradually finds his place. To show the duality of the hero, the writer endows him with the features of a man and a wolf.

Gradually, Hermann Hesse restored contacts with Germany. He was elected a member of the Prussian Academy, he began to lecture at German universities. During one of his trips to Zurich, Hesse accidentally met his old acquaintance, art critic Nika Dolbin, whom he later married.

The couple settled in Montagnola, where Hesse's friend, philanthropist G. Bodmer, built a house for him with a large library. The writer lived in this house with his wife until the end of his life.

After the Nazis came to power, in 1933, in protest, Hermann Hesse left the Prussian Academy. He practically ceased to engage in journalism, although he did not stop anti-fascist speeches. In Germany, Hesse's books were burned in the squares, and his publisher P. Zurkamp ended up in a concentration camp.

The writer publishes the novel "Pilgrimage to the Land of the East" and begins work on his main work - the novel "The Glass Bead Game", which was published in 1943. The action of the work takes place at the beginning of the 25th century in the fabulous country of Castalia. Hesse tells the story of a kind of knightly order, whose representatives are engaged in a mysterious game of beads, compiling and solving puzzles. The protagonist of the novel I. Knecht goes from a student to the Grand Master of the order. Although there is not the slightest hint of modernity in the novel, readers easily recognized in the characters the largest representatives of German culture - Thomas Mann, Johann Goethe, Wolfgang Mozart and many others. The first part of the novel, sent by the author to the publisher in 1934, was immediately put on the list of banned books by the Nazi authorities.

In 1946, Hermann Hesse was awarded the Nobel Prize "for inspirational creativity and brilliant style." At the end of the forties, he also received the most prestigious awards in Germany - the I. Goethe and G. Keller literary prizes. Books writers are translated into different languages. In 1955, Hermann Hesse receives the German Bookselling Prize, which honors the most readable works written in German.

The writer is also elected a member of various academies, scientific communities, but Hesse is removed from the popularity that has fallen upon him. He rarely leaves his home, writing memoirs and short essays. Together with his wife, he puts his huge archive in order and publishes several volumes of correspondence with the largest figures of the 20th century.

In the summer of 1962, the writer died in his sleep from a stroke. After the death of Hermann Hesse, his widow organized an international center for the memory of the writer in the house, which employs researchers from around the world.