“Little Tsakhes, nicknamed Zinnober,” an artistic analysis of Hoffmann’s short story. History of foreign literature of the 19th - early 20th centuries Little Tsakhes analysis

Federal Agency for Education

State Educational Institution of Higher Professional Education "Ural State Technical University - UPI named after the first president B.N. Yeltsin"

Physics and Technology Faculty

Department of Foreign Languages

Specialty "Translation and Translation Studies"

Allow for protection

head Department Zh.A. Khramushina

Ph.D. ped. Sciences, Associate Professor

"___" _____________ 2010

COURSE WORK

Irony in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s fairy tale “Little Tsakhes, nicknamed Zinnober”

Explanatory note

Supervisor

Candidate of Philology

teacher of the Department of Foreign Languages Alisa Sergeevna Porshneva

group FT 191001 Sinitsina Polina Andreevna

Ekaterinburg

Introduction 3

Chapter 1. The concept of “irony”. 4

1.1. Irony in the Romantic Period. 5

Chapter 2. Irony about heroes. eleven

2.1. Little Tsakhes. eleven

2.2 Enthusiast – Balthazar. 13

2.3 Candida. 14

2.4 Mosch Terpin. 15

2.5 Officials and Prince Paphnutius. 16

So, the people ruling in the principality absolutely do not deserve this, which Hoffmann actively ironizes. Every official is portrayed as a complete fool and lazy.

2.6 Results. 16

Chapter 3. Irony about the situation. 18

3.1 Irony using the example of some situations. 18

3.2 Results 25

Conclusion. 26

Bibliography. 27

Introduction

This work is devoted to the analysis of romantic irony in the work of E. T. A. Hoffmann “Little Tsakhes, nicknamed Zinnober.” Object

course research are various manifestations of irony, characteristic of romanticism, in the fairy tale by E. T. A. Hoffmann “Little Tsakhes, nicknamed Zinnober.” Relevance

research is a manifestation of irony in various aspects of the tale. Purpose

This work is to understand how irony works in Hoffmann’s fairy tale, and to realize that it is manifested in the example of different situations and heroes of this fairy tale.

Achieving the goal involves solving the following tasks:

Understand what irony is in general;

To identify the role of irony for Hoffmann taken individually, using the example of his fairy tale “Little Tsakhes, nicknamed Zinnober.”

Work structure. The course work consists of an introduction, three chapters and a conclusion. The first chapter introduces the concept of “irony” and provides some research on this topic; the second chapter traces the irony about the heroes using the example of some of them; the third shows some situations in which the author uses such a technique as romantic irony.

Chapter 1. The concept of “irony”.

Old Greek εἰρωνεία - “pretense”) - a trope in which the true meaning is hidden or contradicts (contrasted) with the obvious meaning.

Irony creates the feeling that the subject of discussion is not what it seems.

According to Aristotle, irony is “a statement containing ridicule of someone who really thinks so.”

Irony is the use of words in a negative sense, directly opposite to the literal one.

Irony is a category of aesthetics and originates from the tradition of ancient rhetoric. It was ancient irony that gave birth to the European ironic tradition of modern times, which received special development starting from the last third of the 19th century. Irony, as a means of comic presentation of material, is a powerful tool for the formation of a literary style, built on contrasting the literal meaning of words and statements with their true meaning. The elementary model of the ironic style is the structural-expressive principle of various speech techniques that help give the content an opposite or ideologically-emotionally revealing meaning through its hidden context. In particular, to remove the pretentiousness and pomp of the narrative, the method of self-irony is used, which makes it possible to convey the author’s attitude to the literal description of the plot point. As a veiled demonstration of a negative position, the method of irony is used, pseudo-affirmation is used to destroy any attribute of social consciousness, and pseudo-negation is used to confirm real truths. The ironic technique of superiority often becomes the dominant way of ridiculing the characters of a literary work through an outwardly neutral presentation of their characteristics, and the technique of ironic condescension is used by authors to make a pessimistic assessment of the significance of the characters. In an effective ironic way of short forms, a genre of humor and connotation clause, designed for a quick reaction of the reader or viewer.

More severe, uncompromising forms of irony can be considered sarcasm and grotesque.

Direct irony is a way to belittle, give a negative or funny character to the phenomenon being described.

Socratic irony is a form of self-irony, constructed in such a way that the object to which it is addressed, as it were, independently comes to natural logical conclusions and finds the hidden meaning of the ironic statement, following the premises of the “not knowing the truth” subject.

worldview is a state of mind that allows one not to take popular statements and stereotypes on faith, and not to take various “generally accepted values” too seriously. 1

1.1. Irony in the Romantic Period.

The principle of romantic irony was of paramount importance for the aesthetics of romanticism - it became the starting point for the creation of a new, “universal romantic art.”

Unable to change anything in reality, the imperfection of which they perceived with great acuteness, the romantics felt a deep contradiction between their aspirations and capabilities. Romantic irony was supposed to help overcome it by an act of consciousness.

“There are ancient and new works of poetry, permeated throughout their entire being with the spirit of irony. The spirit of genuine transcendental buffoonery lives in them. There is a mood within us that looks at all things from a height, infinitely rising above everything conditioned, including our own art, virtue, and genius,” says Friedrich Schlegel in one of his fragments. 1 The effect of romantic irony no longer has limits; its meaning becomes absolute. With such a visible resolution of the contradiction, the tragic nature of the perception of life, of course, is not removed, but from a certain moment it is recognized as ambivalent: a tragic feeling coming from reality, and an ironic, introduced, philosophical one. This fundamental duality determined the originality of all “romantic-ironic” literature. The universal purpose and ambivalence as the main properties of romantic irony were emphasized in his works by K. V. F. Zolger. According to Zolger, “irony is not a single random mood of the artist, but the inner essence of every art in general.” 2 “... Truly humorous,” he says in another place, “is never only funny, but always carries a tinge of some kind of sadness, while the tragic necessarily has some kind of comic sound.” 3

Humor introduces some new emotional content into the things and phenomena surrounding a person - the person’s very attitude towards them. And then, having received new spiritual power over the world, a person reconciles with it. Thus, romantic irony becomes a means of understanding life and mastering it. 4 The romantics were the first to understand that what is objectively funny can be at the same time a true tragedy, because life itself proved this to them. Since the old values were losing their meaning, and the new ones had not yet established themselves, both seemed doubtful. Increasingly, irony became the worldview - the expression of skepticism in the form of a comic. Such irony is always consonant with the comedy of “the last phase of the world-historical form,” and it is thanks to it that humanity “happyly partes with its past” whenever possible. The more acute the contradictions in a society, the more clearly the spirit of irony manifests itself in it. Romantic irony is directly related to the artist’s dissatisfaction with the world around him; she is characterized by “overcoming” reality with laughter, an ironic belittlement of the latter.

“The most striking and characteristic figure of German romanticism was Hoffmann, the greatest humorist and satirist, a wonderful master of fairy tales and fantastic short stories.” 2 It was in the fairy tale that the interaction of romantic irony and satire, characteristic of Hoffmann, manifested itself with the greatest completeness and brightness. The fairy tale “Little Tsakhes” is especially indicative in this regard.

One of the features of Hoffmann's irony in this tale is that the contradiction between the appearance and essence of the title character arises and is realized only in the society that creates this appearance. This contradiction is of a social nature and is not inherent in the very image of Tsakhes, whose spiritual ugliness is fully consistent with physical ugliness. The comedy of incongruity arises only when society, endowing Zinnober with all sorts of talents and all kinds of virtues, gradually inflates his fame.

This society itself was initially predisposed to the prosperity of Zinnober: his “strange mysterious gift” and the amazing effect of this gift are far from unusual and not new to Kerepes. Here people are not valued according to their true qualities, awards are given not according to work and not according to real merit. Peasant woman Lisa (Tsakhes's mother) and her husband work until they sweat, and can barely satisfy their hunger; they refuse to place the maiden Rosengrunschen in a shelter for noble maidens due to the fact that she cannot trace her family tree to thirty-two ancestors; The valet of Prince Paphnutius becomes a minister because he promptly lends his master, who had forgotten his wallet, six ducats and so on.

Hoffmann is ridiculed not by the “stepson of nature” of little Tsakhes, the stupid and helpless chosen one of the fairy, but by the environment conducive to the prosperity of Zinnober, the society that tends to take a freak for a handsome man, mediocrity for talent, absolute stupidity for wisdom, a subhuman for “decoration.” fatherland." 1

However, at the same time, Hoffman, satirically and very accurately showing the symptoms of the “disease of the century,” evades rational explanations of its causes. In “Little Tsakhes” there are several assumptions about the source of the Zinnobers, each of which still remains an unsaid (and unprovable) hypothesis. These are: the power of money, human madness, various manifestations of magical powers. This is how a specific parallelism of versions arises, associated with romantic irony. N. Ya. Berkovsky wrote: “In a purely cognitive sense, irony meant that the particular way of mastering the world that is practiced in this work is recognized by the author himself as inconclusive, but going beyond its limits is also just subjective and hypothetical.” 2

For the author, as for the reader, the gift of the fairy Rosabelverde to the little freak is “... a very conditional root cause of the absurdities that happen in the story.” 3 But the fairy tale genre chosen by Hoffman justified this conditional ironic assumption, since “the reflection of social processes in a fairy tale is very complex and has neither a “naturalistic” nor a “symbolic”, but a generalized typifying character.” 1 This “generalized typifying character” manifests itself in the picture of the world depicted by the writer.

The moral way of mastering the world is not simple reflection, but a way of orientation in the social environment. The Romantics, masterfully using the technique of irony, tried to solve the problem of the coincidence or discrepancy of the “mask” with the actual content of the structure of the moral consciousness of the individual. This is where the problem of the double arises in literature (short stories by E.-T. Hoffmann, stories by N.V. Gogol, etc.).

Romanticism, as a major historical era, thus develops and consolidates an ideologically, morally, and psychologically defined idea of man as a social subject. The new situation at the beginning of the 19th century led to a turn of attention to man, his actions and inner world. Problems of the individual, her initiative, creativity and destiny become the center of spiritual life, expressing themselves in their own way in morality, philosophy, art, and religion. 2

An ironic attitude towards reality leads the writer to satire. The ugly principality of Barsanuf represents the whole of post-Napoleonic Germany, celebrating, as Hegel put it, “the triumph of mediocrity.” And Hoffmann’s contemporary Germany, its socio-political life, having fallen into the field of romantic irony, is exposed to the forces of the comic. Irony gives birth to satire, and, in turn, satire more clearly reveals romantic irony. Irony allows the author to see life as a multifaceted and multi-valued phenomenon, and outlines trends towards an “objective” depiction of life. 3

It seems that it was Hoffmann, who had an exceptional ability to see everything funny and gloomy in life, who, by the very nature of his talent, was called upon to reproduce in images and pictures the entire pathetic tragicomedy of the German feudal-absolutist state, in the thirty-six dungeons of which the German people languished and suffered. 1

Chapter 2. Irony about heroes.

2.1. Little Tsakhes.

Little Tsakhes is perhaps the hero most susceptible to the author's irony in the fairy tale. The ugly dwarf turns out to be even uglier and more arrogant on the inside. In none of the situations cited by Hoffmann did he admit that the fairy had cast a spell on him. He sometimes himself believes that he deserves all the honors bestowed upon him, which speaks of his deepest, exorbitant stupidity.

The image of Tsakhes-Zinnober is characterized by a puppet-like quality. Already by his appearance, Tsakhes looks more like some kind of outlandish doll, a terrible ugly toy, than like a person. His movements are comical because of their primitive mechanicalness and frivolity in manners. Tsakhes sometimes jumps, sometimes hobbles, sometimes meows or makes incomprehensible sounds similar to slurping.

But little Tsakhes is a puppet in the grand scheme of things. He is permanently under the influence of Rosabelverde’s “strange mysterious gift,” which acts automatically and sometimes not in favor of the freak, if we recall the scene in the prince’s zoological office, where foreigners, admiring a certain monkey, offer Zinnober sweets: “God knows how it happened, but only strangers continued to accept

him for the most beautiful, rare monkey they have ever

happened to see him, and they definitely wanted to treat him with Lombard nuts, which they pulled out of their pockets. Zinnober became so furious that he could not rest, and his legs gave way. The valet, who was called, was forced to pick him up and carry him into the carriage.” 1

Zinnober's gift received from above is distant from its bearer; Tsakhes, like people who have suffered from witchcraft spells, is only the object of his blind action.

It has become a tradition in literary criticism to interpret the conflict and the idea of a fairy tale based on the image of the main character. Numerous attempts have been made to present Tsakhes as a “god of monetary circulation” 1, a werewolf possessing the mysterious power of “animal magnetism” 2, a “bureaucratic demon” 3, the embodiment of Hoffmann’s own experiences of the discrepancy between appearance and essence, being and success 4 and so on.

However, such attempts were not recognized. In essence, they were rationalistic; the interpretation of the image of Tsakhes and the related themes and ideas of the fairy tale encounter resistance from the very nature of the romantic grotesque, which, in turn, was formed thanks to the author’s irony. The contradiction that Kharik wrote about 5, for example, is undoubtedly present in the image of the character, but it is not the basis of the content of the tale. Rather, this contradiction that takes place in the work is the basis of its comedy.

Tsakhes is completely inactive. Everything turns out by itself, due to the action of some unidentified, but clearly unjust law of human social life. Tsakhes only willingly accepts what floats into his hands. According to Rosabelverde, his fault is that an inner voice did not awaken in his soul that would say: “You are not who they take you for, but strive to become equal to those on whose wings you, weak, wingless, fly up.” . 6

Thus, Hoffmann's irony captures Tsakhes entirely. A weak freak who can’t even put together a few words doesn’t even depend on himself. All he has is the magic spell of the fairy Rosabelverde, which he received only out of pity. Tsakhes does not have the opportunity to do anything on his own, but the character seems to himself and those around him to be a significant figure.

2.2 Enthusiast – Balthazar.

For romantic writers, enthusiasts are the main guardians of goodness and beauty. But they are a highly strange phenomenon from the point of view of the surrounding world, that traditional social hierarchy, where the significance of each is determined only by the place he occupies in this system. The enthusiast is alien to everything that has weight in this society - money, titles, name, career, honor - everything that is connected with common sense and benefit. The enthusiast is by nature a tragic figure; he is doomed to misunderstanding, loneliness and isolation.

Hoffmann's hero Balthasar is endowed with precisely these qualities and such a fate. An educated young man from a good, intelligent family, he lives in his own romantic world. Balthazar is in love with the daughter of Professor Alpanus, dotes on her, although he has no reason for this, which is emphasized by the author, again, using irony, in the description of the “beautiful” Candida. Yes, she is pretty, but between the lines we read that this girl is not worthy of a student’s mad love.

The romanticism of Balthasar is clearly exaggerated by Hoffmann. As befits a romantic hero, he is a creative person, understands the language of nature and is in love. However, Hoffman presents the object of his love with such a characterization that Balthasar looks very ironic.

Balthasar is similar to the main character of The Golden Pot, Anselm; They are united by enthusiasm, opposition to philistine everyday life, aspiration to the realm of the ideal, but at the same time they are different from it. For Balthasar there is no longer any exit to poetic Atlantis. Prosper Alpanus's gift turns him at the end of the story into a prosperous owner. Balthazar does not achieve the realization of any romantic dream, but receives only philistine peace and quiet as a reward.

Also, the episode with Balthazar's solitude does not show him from his best side. The hero is offended by everyone who helped him expose the “insidious” Zinnober; he withdraws into himself and complains about his life.

Thus, it turns out that Hoffman does not idealize his romantic hero at all. Based on this, we can conclude that the writer does not identify philistines as people with a “minus” sign, but uses irony to show the imperfections of the enthusiast.

2.3 Candida.

“Candida had radiant, heart-piercing eyes and slightly swollen scarlet lips, and she - everyone is forced to agree with this - was a written beauty. I don’t remember whether her beautiful hair should be called blond or brown, which she knew how to style so intricately, braiding it into wondrous braids - I only remember very well its strange feature: the longer you look at it, the darker and darker it becomes. She was a tall, slender, easy-to-move girl, the epitome of grace and friendliness, especially when surrounded by lively company; with so many charms, she was very willingly forgiven for the fact that her arms and legs could, perhaps, be smaller and more graceful.” 1

That is, even the narrator, who must describe everything exactly, does not even remember the color of Candida’s “beautiful hair.” This cannot be explained by anything other than romantic irony. The author claims that Candida is a real beauty, without knowing such an important detail as the color of her hair. Despite the grace and friendliness of the girl who appears in the presence of society, her limbs, according to the narrator, are not small at all. This arrangement of things is nothing more than the appearance, again, of irony.

“Moreover, Candida read Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, Schiller’s poems and Fouquet’s The Magic Ring and managed to forget almost everything that was said there; she played the piano quite well and even sang along sometimes; danced the latest gavottes and French quadrilles and, in a very legible and delicate handwriting, wrote down the laundry assigned for washing. And if you really need to find faults with this sweet girl, then, perhaps, you could disapprove of her rude voice, the fact that she pulled her clothes too tightly, took too long to rejoice at her new hat and ate too much cake at tea.” 1

Again, Hoffmann is ironic about his hero. Naturally, no one could love Candida because of her beautiful handwriting, because she sang or danced along, or because she read a couple of books. Such an ironic attitude towards her is a reflection of the fact that everyone sees Candida as an ideal girl. As we see, society often deceives itself and does not notice that it elevates the unworthy, because all its advantages are feigned, designed only to make a good impression on others. They are not supported by anything, and this is what Hoffmann’s irony helps us see.

2.4 Mosch Terpin.

Philistinism from science is represented in the fairy tale by the comic figure of natural history professor Mosch Terpin. Unlike the student-enthusiast Balthasar, who jealously guards the fairy-tale world of nature and poetry from the invasion of everyday life alien to the true beauty, Mosch Terpin acts as a bearer of the utilitarian and rude attitude towards nature that Hoffmann hated, as a representative of the mechanization of life. He is not of the nature of the “enlightened” philistines who grew abundantly in the soil of German squalor. Mosch Terpin had an illogical answer to every question, as if pulled from a drawer. Zinnober appoints him general director of all natural science affairs in the principality, thanks to which he gets the opportunity, without leaving his office, to study all types of birds and fried animals, and to carry out research for his treatise on why wine has a different taste than water in the princely wine cellar. In addition, his duties included editing all solar and lunar eclipses, as well as scientifically proving to the princely tenants that if hail destroyed their crops, then they themselves were to blame.

So, the figure of Mosch Terpin is thoroughly saturated with irony. He is a respected person in the principality who is obliged to explain everything to everyone, although all his explanations are illogical and absurd.

2.5 Officials and Prince Paphnutius.

Puppetry and subordination in the tale are fully represented by such heroes as Prince Paphnutius and his assistants from the ministry. In fact, they do nothing for the benefit of the principality. They are always busy with unimportant things like dinner parties or sewing new suits.

Prince Paphnutius himself received such a high position only due to the fact that he lent a small amount to his predecessor Demetrius, which is also significant: ranks in the principality are distributed not based on actions and merits, but by chance.

“Prince Barsanuf, one of the successors of the great Paphnutius, dearly loved his minister, for he had an answer ready for every question; during the hours appointed for rest, he played skittles with the prince, knew a lot about money transactions and danced the gavotte incomparably.” 1 Such skills do not indicate the professionalism of officials, but their unwillingness to do anything for the benefit of the state.

So, the people ruling in the principality absolutely do not deserve this, which Hoffmann actively ironizes. Every official is portrayed as a complete fool and lazy.

2.6 Results.

All the heroes of the fairy tale are subject to Hoffmann's irony. Each of them is shown in its own way, but, nevertheless, the author is ironic over each, even over the “favorite” of the romantics - the enthusiast. This suggests that Hoffmann, unlike his predecessor, does not idealize romantic heroes, but believes that not a single philistine is to blame for being born this way.

Here, irony helps to look at the characters from the other side, identify their shortcomings and, if possible, accept the hidden point of view of the author.

Chapter 3. The irony of the situation.

3.1 Irony using the example of some situations.

First of all, it is worth noting that in the work “Little Tsakhes, nicknamed Zinnober,” Hoffmann depicts two worlds - the real and the fantastic, as Gulyaev writes, “he pits reality, devoid of beauty, against the world of his romantic dream.” 1 The heroes of the story, on the one hand, are ordinary people - students, officials, professors, court nobles. And if something strange sometimes happens to them, they are ready to find a plausible explanation for it. The fairy-tale side of the work is associated with the images of the fairy Razabelverde and the magician Prosper Alpanus. However, magical heroes have to adapt to real conditions and hide under the masks of a canoness of a shelter for noble maidens and a doctor. This situation is already imbued with undisguised and omnipresent Hoffmannian irony. It was this technique that became the “calling card” of the writer. After the publication of his story “Little Tsakhes, nicknamed Zinnober,” the romantic writer Chamisso called him “our indisputable first humorist” 2.

Student Balthazar is an “enthusiast”, a romantic hero-dreamer, dissatisfied with the philistine society around him, with the scholasticism of university lectures, and finds oblivion and relaxation only in solitude in the lap of nature. He is a poet by nature, he writes poems about the nightingale, putting into stable poetic images a passion for the beautiful Candida. It is not so important whether Balthazar’s creations are talented or not, but what is important is that he has a poetic worldview. 3 Balthazar is a poet, he sees the people around him as they really are, witchcraft cannot make him deceive himself and see Tsakhes as a worthy person. That is why he is a true romantic hero, because he enters into a duel with a scoundrel who steals everything that comes into his field of vision.

In connection with this image of the hero, Hoffmann, using the irony characteristic of the romantics, skillfully plays out the following situation: disappointed in everything around him, Balthazar went into the forest and despaired.

“In complete despair from everything that his friend wrote to him, Balthasar ran away

into the thicket of the forest and began to complain loudly.

Hope! - he exclaimed. - And I still have to hope when every

hope disappeared when all the stars faded and the night was dark and dark

embraces me, inconsolable? Unlucky fate! I'm defeated by dark forces

destructively invading my life! Madman, I had my hopes up

Prosper Alpanus, who with his infernal art lured me and removed me from

Kerepes, making sure that the blows I dealt to the image in the mirror

actually fell on Zinnober's back. Ah, Candida! Whenever

Only I could forget this heavenly child! But the spark of love burns within me

stronger and hotter than before.

Everywhere I see a lovely image

beloved, who, with a tender smile, stretches out her arms to me in longing.

I know! You love me, beautiful, sweetest Candida, and that is mine

inconsolable, mortal torment that I am unable to save you from the dishonest

the spell that has entangled you! Treacherous Prosper! What did I do to you, what did you

Are you fooling me so cruelly?

It became dark: all the colors of the forest were mixed in a thick gray haze.” 1

This situation conveys Hoffmann's irony over his hero. The blinded Balthazar did not appreciate one bit what the magician had done for him. He finally remembered his immense love for Candida, an “educated” girl who had read only a couple of books and was particularly beautiful, although no one could even remember the color of her hair. So, Balthazar is a truly romantic hero: having found himself in a difficult situation for the first time and imagining himself as a hermit, he went into the forest.

Here we recall an earlier romantic writer, Ludwig Tieck, who often uses the motif of hermitage and solitude. For example, in the short story “Blond Ecbert,” the main character goes on an unplanned trip after the death of his wife and the murder of a friend, committed by himself. Moreover, he is pushed into such solitude by the gradually coming madness: in every man Ecbert saw his murdered friend Walter. Directly during his hermitage, Ecbert meets an old woman who, in her youth, was deceived by his wife, also becoming a kind of hermit. The old woman opens the hero’s eyes to many things: it turns out that she was both Walter and the knight Ecbert met during the journey, and was connected with his father, and Ecbert’s dead wife was his sister. As you can see, Tick presents the idea of solitude without any irony. The circumstances that forced Ecbert to become a hermit are much more serious than those that caused Balthazar to go into the forest.

“In “Little Tsakhes” the story of a vile freak is also funny, with the help of magic spells received from a fairy he bewitched an entire state and became its first minister - but the idea that formed its basis is rather terrible: a nonentity seizes power by appropriating merits that he cannot belong, and a blinded, stupid society, which has lost all value criteria, no longer simply mistakes “an icicle, a rag for an important person,” but also, in some kind of perverted self-beating, creates an idol out of a half-wit.” 1

Tsakhes uses magic spells, which, although he himself was not invented and put into practice, as something taken for granted - he uses them as soon as possible. He turns up his nose, believing that there is actually a reason to treat him well. But both he himself and the inhabitants of the small state were deceived by none other than the fairy Rosabelverde. Of course, she was not driven by malice, but by the desire to help the little freak and his mother, the peasant woman Lisa. Who gave her the right to mislead society and the dwarf himself? Naturally, she had no right to do this, that is, the fairy used her skills to the detriment of the principality and its inhabitants. After all, who knows what could happen to a state that had such a stupid, arrogant, uneducated minister.

So, Rosabelverde was motivated only by good intentions and pity for the dwarf. This situation is also an example of Hoffmann's irony. The arrogant fairy, who was left to live in the principality with difficulty, abuses the abilities given to her from above. And no one gave her the right to control other people’s destinies, either from above or from anywhere else. But, again, she treats the freak Tsakhes with maternal awe and care, but Tsakhes himself does not appreciate this. Thus, a woman endowed with a magical gift managed to jeopardize the well-being of an entire state in order to help her “baby.” But the author’s irony doesn’t end there: Rosabelverde maintains her charms and every ninth day she combs Tsakhes with a magic comb, that is, she can’t come to her senses and helps the “kid” continue to fool officials and everyone around him.

Indeed, in general, the situation that society accepted a previously unknown insignificant freak, seeing in him a charming young man, and even elevated him, is indicative. Here the author is ironic about any society as a whole. Sometimes we ourselves create idols, and then follow them like a mindless herd. In politics there are enough examples of such ascension of not entirely worthy people - this is what happened in Hoffmann’s fairy tale. More precisely, the situation shown in the fairy tale is a projection onto everyday life, and it is in everyday life that we often do not think about such things. And it is irony that helps people understand the situation they are in, look at themselves from the outside, realize everything, and improve.

A similar worship of a false idol is present in N.V. Gogol’s play “The Inspector General.” 1 In the comedy they mistook “an icicle, a rag for an important person.” The ugly, insignificant Tsakhes is also mistaken for an important person: “... everyone took him for a handsome, stately man and an excellent horseman” 2, they extol him as “the smartest, most learned, most handsome gentleman student among all those present” 3; He was lavished with exorbitant praise as a most excellent poet. He is the smartest and most skillful official in the office, “... the same one who composes reports in such a beautiful style and rewrites reports in such an elegant handwriting...” 4. From all sides one hears: “What talent! What zeal!”; “What dignity, what greatness in actions!”; “What a creation! So much thought! How much imagination!” The “Divine” Zinnober is mistaken for an “inspired composer”, he is a minister! And Professor Mosch Terpin declares: “He will marry my daughter, he will become my son-in-law, through him I will enter into favor with our glorious prince...” 5 Here we remember Gogol’s mayor with his attitude towards Khlestakov.

As N. Ya. Berkovsky noted, “in its super-insignificance, Tsakhes is, as it were, a premonition of our Ivan Aleksandrovich Khlestakov: when in the afternoon he begins to boast to the district society, then this is a scene of some kind of Tsakhism; if you like, like Tsakhes, Ivan Alexandrovich fills all high positions in his stories and is the author of all famous works.” 6

Further, Hoffmann plays on the ritual of appointing Zinnober as minister. The tiny principality cannot pursue any independent policy. Hoffmann takes every opportunity to ridicule the meager nature of activity in the dwarf German states; So, the State Council at Barsanuf met for seven days on end to attach the order ribbon to the ugly figure of Tsakhes. Members of the chapter of orders, in order not to overload their brains, were forbidden to think a week before the historical meeting, and during it in the palace “everyone walked around in thick felt shoes and explained themselves by signs.” Even if you look at the situation itself when Zinnober was made minister, you can see that the main attraction in it is irony. In it, the system of appointing officials, their initiation, the prince himself, Zinnober, as well as all the yes-ying officials present are also subject to irony. It is also noteworthy how, after much deliberation, the commission only makes a decision to invite a tailor, who is then put on almost the same ribbon as Zinnober’s. Zinnober himself, again, does not even know how to read, which once again indicates the lack of education and unadaptedness of officials to life.

In “Little Tsakhes” the entire system of feudal statehood is subjected to romantic irony: its spiritual and material life, pitiful attempts at reforms with great claims, the system of ranks, the chapter of orders. Such irony is aimed at ridiculing the philistine world and the philistine hero, as well as ridiculing romantic enthusiasm and the romantic hero himself.

A powerful means of criticism by laughter is the romantic grotesque, which to a certain extent was “... a reaction to those elements of classicism and the Enlightenment that gave rise to the limitations and one-sided seriousness of these movements: to narrow rational rationalism, to state and formal-logical authoritarianism, to the desire for readiness, completeness and unambiguity, to the didacticism and utilitarianism of the Enlightenment, to naive or official optimism, etc.” 1

The very introduction of education into the country has a clearly expressed ironic background: the prince simply one fine day announces to the residents that education has been introduced. He orders that notices about this be posted (and printed in capital letters), forests be cut down, the river made navigable, potatoes raised, rural schools improved, acacias and poplars planted, young people taught to sing morning and evening prayers in two voices, highways laid, and smallpox inoculated. 1 The prince also believes that it is necessary to expel from the state all people of a dangerous way of thinking, who are deaf to the voice of reason and seduce the people into various foolishness. How all these measures could contribute to real enlightenment is unclear.

Irony haunts Hoffmann's heroes until the very end, even until the happy ending. Alpanus, having arranged the successful reunion of Balthazar with his beloved, gives them a wedding gift - a “country house”, on the plot of which excellent cabbage grows, in the magic kitchen the pots never boil over, the porcelain in the dining room does not break, and the carpets in the living room do not get dirty. “An ideal which, having been brought to life, by Hoffmann’s crafty will, turns into a completely philistine comfort, thereby which the hero shunned and fled; this is after the nightingales, after the scarlet rose - ideal cuisine and excellent cabbage!” 2 Here, please, are the kitchen paraphernalia in the story.

“Remaining true to the principles of the romantic genre, the writer, unnoticed by himself, makes significant adjustments to it.” 3 And indeed, we can see that the narrative includes elements of real life - the author places the action of the fairy tale in recognizable everyday circumstances (German names of most of the characters; food supplies are typical of Germany: pumpernickel, Rheinwein, Leipzig larks). Depicting a fabulous dwarf state, Hoffmann reproduces the order of many German states. So, for example, when listing the most important educational actions, this list includes in this list what was actually done in Prussia on the orders of King Frederick II.

The main conflict for every romantic - the discord between dream and reality, poetry and truth - takes on a hopelessly tragic character in Hoffmann, but the romantic writer, on the one hand, masks, and on the other, emphasizes the whole tragedy of the situations described in his short story, with the help of irony.

3.2 Results

Hoffmann's irony, about which much has already been said and written, exists in his short story “Little Tsakhes, nicknamed Zinnober,” on the border of the magical and philistine worlds, that is, in the zone of their contact. The dual world characteristic of the romantics is present in many writers; in Hoffmann it is skillfully played out with the help of irony. On the one hand, the author is ironic about the incidents that happened to Tsakhes, who was under the influence of magic spells, and on the other hand, about what happens to Balthazar and the rest of the heroes who are not under the influence of Rosabelverde’s magic.

Conclusion.

Romantic irony is a universal way to look at ourselves and at various situations from the outside. With the help of his fairy tale “Little Zaches, nicknamed Zinnober,” Hoffmann ironizes about the small German states in which unrest occurred, similar to those depicted in the fairy-tale world and in the principality of Barsanuf.

Having analyzed the fairy tale, we see that Hoffman is ironic about various situations for a reason: he draws the reader’s attention to what happens to him in real life. Having ridiculed such things, the reader may wonder if the same thing is happening to him, and may begin to relate more easily to similar situations in his real life.

Thus, it can be seen that romantic irony is very useful for every reader. Having presented social problems in the form of a fairy tale, Hoffman does not say anything openly, but we guess that his fairy-tale irony is actually an irony over real life.

Bibliography.

Hoffman E. T. A. Little Tsakhes, nicknamed Zinnober. – Moscow, 1956. – 158 p.

Osinovskaya I. Ironic wandering. Ironist as satyr and god / I. A. Osinovskaya. - M.: Sovremennik, 2007. – 563 p.

The artistic world of E. T. A. Hoffmann. – M.: Nauka, 1982. – 295 p.

Solger K. W. F. Vorlesungen über Asthetik. Berlin, 1829.

Mirimsky I.V. Hoffman. – In the book: History of German literature. M.: Education, 1966. – 420 p.

Berkovsky N. German romantic story. – M, L., 1935.

Botnikova A. B. E. T. A. Hoffman and Russian literature - Voronezh, 1982. - 246 p.

Meletinsky E. M. Hero of a fairy tale. – Moscow, 1958.

Stepanova N.N. Romanticism as a cultural-historical type: experience of interdisciplinary research. St. Petersburg

, 2001. – 389 p.

Mirimsky I.V. Little Tsakhes, nicknamed Zinnober / Preface. – M., 1956.

Berkovsky N. Ya. Romanticism in Germany. – L., 1973.

Thalmann M. Das Marschen und die Moderne. – Stuttgart, 1961.

Harich W. E. T. A. Hoffmann. Das Leben eines Kunstlers.

– Berlin, .

Gulyaev N.A. and others. History of German literature: a textbook for faculty students. and Institutes of Foreign Languages - M., 1975.

Goffman E.T.A. Collected works.

In 6 volumes. T.1./ A. Karelsky. - M.: Khudozh.lit., 1991.

Pronin V.A. History of German literature: textbook. manual - M., 2007.

Gogol N.V. Inspector. – M., 1984.

Botnikova A. B. On the genre specificity of the German romantic fairy tale / A. B. Botnikova // Interaction of genre and method in foreign languages. lit. 18-20 centuries – Voronezh, 1982.

1 Osinovskaya I. Ironic wandering. Ironist as satyr and god - Moscow, 2007. - p. 84-104

1 The artistic world of E. T. A. Hoffmann. – Moscow, 1982. – p. 219. 2 Solger K. W. F. Vorlesungen über Asthetik. Berlin, 1829, S.245.

3 Ibid. – p.217. 2 See: Botnikova A.B. On the genre specificity of the German romantic fairy tale. – Voronezh, 1982. Fairy tale >> Literature and Russian language Genre characteristics (lyric poem, story, fairy tale and a critical article, again a poem, a novel... Irony is also present in the story “The Undertaker”. The plot is reminiscent of romantic works in the spirit

Hoffman

. But...

Physics and Technology Faculty

Department of Foreign Languages

Federal Agency for Education

Allow for protection

head Department Zh.A. Khramushina

Ph.D. ped. Sciences, Associate Professor

"___" _____________ 2010

COURSE WORK

State Educational Institution of Higher Professional Education "Ural State Technical University - UPI named after the first president B.N. Yeltsin"

Explanatory note

Supervisor

Candidate of Philology

Specialty "Translation and Translation Studies"

Irony in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s fairy tale “Little Tsakhes, nicknamed Zinnober”

Bibliography. 27

teacher of the Department of Foreign Languages Alisa Sergeevna Porshneva

This work is devoted to the analysis of romantic irony in the work of E. T. A. Hoffmann “Little Tsakhes, nicknamed Zinnober.” group FT 191001 Sinitsina Polina Andreevna

course research are various manifestations of irony, characteristic of romanticism, in the fairy tale by E. T. A. Hoffmann “Little Tsakhes, nicknamed Zinnober.” This work is devoted to the analysis of romantic irony in the work of E. T. A. Hoffmann “Little Tsakhes, nicknamed Zinnober.”

of this work lies in the fact that it explores a genre such as a fairy tale; This work can be read by both children and adults. Everyone can learn useful moments played out in a fairy tale using irony. course research are various manifestations of irony, characteristic of romanticism, in the fairy tale by E. T. A. Hoffmann “Little Tsakhes, nicknamed Zinnober.”

research is a manifestation of irony in various aspects of the tale. of this work lies in the fact that it explores a genre such as a fairy tale; This work can be read by both children and adults. Everyone can learn useful moments played out in a fairy tale using irony.

research is a manifestation of irony in various aspects of the tale.

Achieving the goal involves solving the following tasks:

This work is to understand how irony works in Hoffmann’s fairy tale, and to realize that it is manifested in the example of different situations and heroes of this fairy tale.

To identify the role of irony for Hoffmann taken individually, using the example of his fairy tale “Little Tsakhes, nicknamed Zinnober.”

Chapter 1. The concept of "irony".

Irony (from ancient Greek εἰρωνεία - “pretense”) is a trope in which the true meaning is hidden or contradicts (contrasted) with the explicit meaning.

Irony creates the feeling that the subject of discussion is not what it seems.

According to Aristotle's definition, irony is “a statement containing ridicule of someone who really thinks so.”

Irony is the use of words in a negative sense, directly opposite to the literal one.

Irony is a category of aesthetics and originates from the tradition of ancient rhetoric. It was ancient irony that gave birth to the European ironic tradition of modern times, which received special development starting from the last third of the 19th century. Irony, as a means of comic presentation of material, is a powerful tool for the formation of a literary style, built on contrasting the literal meaning of words and statements with their true meaning. The elementary model of the ironic style is the structural-expressive principle of various speech techniques that help give the content an opposite or ideologically-emotionally revealing meaning through its hidden context. In particular, to remove the pretentiousness or pomposity of the narrative, the method of self-irony is used, which makes it possible to convey the author’s attitude to the literal description of the plot point. As a veiled demonstration of a negative position, the method of irony is used, pseudo-affirmation is used to destroy any attribute of public consciousness, and pseudo-negation is used to confirm actual truths. The ironic technique of superiority often becomes the dominant way of ridiculing the characters of a literary work through an outwardly neutral presentation of their characteristics, and the technique of ironic condescension is used by authors to make a pessimistic assessment of the significance of the characters. An effective ironic way of short forms of the humor genre is a connotation clause, designed for a quick reaction of the reader or viewer.

More severe, uncompromising forms of irony can be considered sarcasm and grotesque.

Direct irony is a way to belittle, give a negative or funny character to the phenomenon being described.

An ironic worldview is a state of mind that allows one not to take common statements and stereotypes on faith, and not to take various “generally accepted values” too seriously.

1.1. Irony in the Romantic Period.

The principle of romantic irony was of paramount importance for the aesthetics of romanticism - it became the starting point for the creation of a new, “universal romantic art.”

“There are ancient and new works of poetry, permeated throughout their entire being with the spirit of irony. The spirit of genuine transcendental buffoonery lives in them. There is a mood within us that looks at all things from a height, infinitely rising above everything conditioned, including our own art, virtue, and genius,” says Friedrich Schlegel in one of his fragments. The effect of romantic irony no longer has limits; its meaning becomes absolute. With such a visible resolution of the contradiction, the tragic nature of the perception of life, of course, is not removed, but from a certain moment it is recognized as ambivalent: a tragic feeling coming from reality, and an ironic, introduced, philosophical one. This fundamental duality determined the originality of all “romantic-ironic” literature. The universal purpose and ambivalence as the main properties of romantic irony were emphasized in his works by K. V. F. Zolger. According to Zolger, “irony is not a single random mood of the artist, but the inner essence of every art in general.” “... The truly humorous,” he says in another place, “is never only funny, but always carries a tinge of some kind of sadness, while the tragic necessarily has some kind of comic sound.”

Humor introduces some new emotional content into the things and phenomena surrounding a person - the person’s very attitude towards them. And then, having received new spiritual power over the world, a person reconciles with it. Thus, romantic irony becomes a means of understanding life and mastering it. The romantics were the first to understand that what is objectively funny can be at the same time a true tragedy, because life itself proved it to them. Since the old values were losing their meaning, and the new ones had not yet established themselves, both seemed doubtful. Increasingly, irony became the worldview - the expression of skepticism in the form of a comic. Such irony is always consonant with the comedy of “the last phase of the world-historical form,” and it is thanks to it that humanity “happyly partes with its past” whenever possible. The more acute the contradictions in a society, the more clearly the spirit of irony manifests itself in it. Romantic irony is directly related to the artist’s dissatisfaction with the world around him; she is characterized by “overcoming” reality with laughter, an ironic belittlement of the latter.

“The most striking and characteristic figure of German romanticism was Hoffmann, the greatest humorist and satirist, a wonderful master of fairy tales and fantastic short stories.” It was in the fairy tale that the interaction of romantic irony and satire, characteristic of Hoffmann, manifested itself with the greatest completeness and brightness. The fairy tale “Little Tsakhes” is especially indicative in this regard.

The main character of this work by Hoffmann is endowed with a “strange mysterious gift”, “by virtue of which everything wonderful that anyone else thinks, says or does in his presence will be attributed to him, and he, in the company of beautiful, sensible and intelligent people, will be recognized handsome, sensible and intelligent, and in general will always be considered the most perfect of the kind with which he comes into contact.” This plot (“a strange, mysterious gift”) controls the remaining components of the tale, defines and transforms them, ensuring the integrity of its structure. Ultimately, it is the ambiguity of the nature of this “magic gift” that gives rise to that special form of satire in the fairy tale, where the lack of a rational explanation for the cause of the conflict corresponds to the sharpest criticism of the social order.

Karelian State Pedagogical University

Department of Literature

Course test

"History of foreign literature of the era of romanticism"

"Little Tsakhes, nicknamed Zinnober"

Performed:

3rd year student of FF OZO

I.M. Zaitseva

Teacher:

N.G. Shilova

Petrozavodsk, 2005

Introduction

Ernst Theodor Hoffmann (1776-1822), the greatest humorist and satirist, master of fairy tales and fantastic short stories, can rightly be called the most striking and characteristic figure of German romanticism. Hoffmann entered the history of world literature as a representative of late German romanticism. The basic principles of this trend had already been formulated and developed by the Jena and Heidelberg romantics. The nature of the conflicts underlying Hoffmann's works, their problematics and system of images, the very artistic vision of the world remain within the framework of romanticism. This includes dissatisfaction with society, social changes, and polemics with the ideas and artistic principles of the Enlightenment, and rejection of bourgeois reality. However, the main romantic conflict - the discord between dream and reality, poetry and truth - takes on a hopelessly tragic character for the writer.

Hoffman adheres to the position of Kantian dualism, which recognized the objective existence of the world of things, but considered these “things in themselves” unknowable, inaccessible to the human mind. In Hoffmann's view, the outer world fatally gravitates over the inner, spiritual world, turning life into a tragicomedy in which mysterious forces play with a person, dooming him to loneliness and suffering. The desire to reconcile these two warring principles - ideals and reality, and the consciousness of their irreconcilability, the irresistible power of life over the poetic dream gives Hoffman's work a pessimistic tone.

In accordance with this, the main theme of the writer becomes the theme of art and life, the main images are the artist and the philistine, the sovereign master of life. Hoffman sees the meaning of life and the only source of internal harmony in art, and the only positive representative of society is the artist. But art for the author is a tragedy, and the artist is a martyr on earth, who especially acutely and painfully feels the contradictions between the spiritual and material life of man.

Features of the literary fairy tale genre. Does “Little Tsakhes” meet all the parameters of the genre?

There is still no clear distinction between the genres of literary and folk tales, as well as a generally accepted definition of a literary fairy tale. The first attempt to give a definition belongs to J. Grim: the difference between a literary fairy tale and a folk tale is in the conscious authorship and inherent humorous beginning.

A similar point of view was shared in the 30-60s. 20th century Russian researchers, who noted the following features:

2.special literary style;

3.combination of fantasy with reality;

4.deep psychologism;

5.close connection with the writer’s worldview;

6.reflection of the era in which the literary fairy tale was written.

Hoffmann's fairy tale completes the development of the German romantic literary fairy tale. It reflects many problems associated not only with the aesthetics and worldview of romanticism, but also with modern reality. The fairy tale explores the layers of modern life, using “fairytale” artistic means. “Little Tsakhes” contains traditional fairy-tale elements and motifs. These include miracles, the clash of good and evil, magical objects and amulets; Hoffmann uses the traditional fairytale motif of a bewitched and kidnapped bride and the test of the heroes with gold. But the author combined fairy tale and reality, thereby violating the purity of the fairy tale genre.

Hoffmann defined the genre of “Little Tsakhes, nicknamed Zinnober” as a fairy tale, but at the same time abandoned the principle of fairy-tale harmony. This work contains a compromise between the “purity” of the fairy-tale genre and the seriousness of the worldview: both are half-hearted, relative. The author saw the fairy tale as the leading genre of romantic literature. But if in Novalis the fairy tale turns into a continuous allegory or into a dream in which everything real and earthly disappeared, then in Hoffmann’s fairy tales the basis of the fantastic is real reality.

The combination of the real with the fantastic, the real with the fictional is the main requirement of Hoffmann’s poetics. Fantastic fairy-tale moments are belittled and trivialized, they lose their intrinsic value and play a subordinate role. Skobelev A.V. defined “Little Tsakhes” not as a fairy tale, but “a story with a strongly pronounced effect of the author’s presence, which is not typical for a fairy tale;<…>a story that ironically looks back at a fairy tale, a conventionally fairy tale story that plays at a fairy tale, ironically imitating it.”

Hoffmann called the work “The Golden Pot” “a fairy tale from modern times.” All other fairy tales can also be included in this definition. In them “there is as much from a fairy tale as from the new time: the fabulous manifests itself in the sphere of bourgeois existence brought by this time. And his works<Гофмана>“They are not at all perceived as fairy tales - they are rather terrifyingly true stories about the powerful and unsolved forces that control man and life.”

Although the actions in “Little Tsakhes” unfold in a conventional country, by introducing the realities of German life, noting the characteristic features of the social psychology of the characters, the author thereby emphasizes the modernity of what is happening.

The heroes of the tale are ordinary people: students, officials, professors, court nobles. And if something strange sometimes happens to them, they are ready to find a plausible explanation for it. And the test of the enthusiastic hero’s loyalty to the wonderful world lies in the ability to see and feel this world, to believe in its existence.

The fairy-tale side of the work is associated with the images of the fairy Razabelverde and the magician Prosper Alpanus, but the nature of the presentation of the fantastic changes: the magical heroes have to adapt to real conditions and hide under the masks of the canoness of the shelter for noble maidens and the doctor. The narrator plays an “ironic game” with the narration style itself - miraculous phenomena are described in deliberately simple, everyday language, in a restrained style, and the events of the real world suddenly appear in some kind of fantastic light, the narrator’s tone becomes tense. By shifting the high romantic plane to the low everyday one, Hoffmann thereby destroys it and nullifies it.

Of particular importance is a new category for the fairy tale genre - theatricality, which enhances the comic effect in a fairy tale. Theatricality determines the principles of constructing plot situations, the nature of their presentation, the choice of background, and the characters’ expression of feelings and intentions. All these aspects emphasize the conventionality of what is happening, its artificiality.

The main romantic conflict is the clash of good and evil, the principle of dual worlds is based on this. What is the conflict of this tale? Support your ideas with examples.

Conflict is the main driver in any work. However, in Hoffmann it takes on special significance. The clash of good and evil is a universal and eternal conflict that underlies any form of understanding of the universe. In “Little Tsakhes” it is predominantly romantic, i.e. evil here is “worldly”, abstract, globally destructive, and good (the romantic hero) is especially defenseless and vulnerable. But fairy tale laws, combined with romantic irony, smooth out the severity of the conflict, making it in a sense “toy,” which does not remove the seriousness of the problem. Finally, the fairy tale requires a happy ending, and Hoffmann gives it to his characters and readers.

Formally, the conflict unfolds between Tsakhes and Balthazar, but each hero personifies a certain force that has entered into confrontation. Tsakhes-Zinnober acts as a kind of fatal force, exposing the meaningless laws of the world order, the unfair distribution of material and spiritual goods in a society that is initially predisposed to the flourishing of vices. The gift of the fairy Rosabelverde is the conditional cause of the fairy-tale conflict; Hoffmann evades a rational explanation of its origins.

The world that bows before Tsakhes is a world of philistine reality, alien to the romantic dreamer Balthasar. An enthusiastic artist seeks salvation from the cruelty and injustice of life in poetry, dreams, in merging with nature, i.e. in an ideal, fairy-tale world. In this magical world, he finds peace of mind and the help of magical powers. But magical forces also live in two worlds - magical and earthly.

The dual world is embodied not only in the fact that “true musicians” are unhappy because the philistine world does not understand them, but also because they themselves cannot find a natural connection with the real world. A world artificially constructed by art is also not a solution for a soul wounded by the disorder of human existence.

The ugly principality of Barsanuf is opposed by the world of dreamers, the poetic world of sublime feelings. The student Balthasar and the wizard Prosper Alpanus jointly disperse the obsession of Tsakhes. But this world is not removed from the general ironic element that reigns in the story.

The collision of the two worlds is resolved in the story by the crushing defeat of the philistines and the triumphant victory of the enthusiasts. But this triumph has a specific feature: it is framed by the author in an emphatically theatrical manner. In this fireworks of miracles, one can clearly feel the deliberate overkill. The director's emphasis on the happy ending is set off by another motive, already of a meaningful nature: the wedding gift of Prosper Alpanus. The idyllic picture of a rural house, “excellent cabbage,” unbreakable dishes, etc., turns into philistine, bourgeois comfort.

What is romantic grotesque? Is it possible to talk about the grotesque as the basis of the composition of a fairy tale, the principle of grouping characters? Prove it.

Based on the history of the concept, one could define the grotesque as follows: the grotesque is the highest degree of the comic, manifested:

1. in the form of excessive exaggeration, caricature distortion, which can reach the borders of the fantastic;

2. in the form of compositional contrast, a sudden shift of the serious, tragic into the plane of the funny. Such a construction is an integral, internally closed complex and is a grotesque of the pure kind - a comic grotesque;

3. but the opposite movement may occur if the comic ends with a sharp tragic breakdown - this will be a composition of grotesque humor.

It was in the romantic era that the grotesque received its theoretical justification and became the basis of an entire worldview. The sociological explanation for this is the era of economic, political and ideological collapses of the 19th century, due to which the nobility was forced to give up the dominant place to the bourgeoisie. But within the bourgeoisie itself, stratification is occurring. The “petty bourgeoisie” stands out, politically powerless and economically unstable, whose position at the moment coincides with the state of the petty declassed nobility. On this basis, the grotesque grows, being the style of the petty-bourgeois class and reflecting the perception of inferiority and instability of existence.

In his works, Hoffmann managed to express not so much the harmony of the world as the dissonance of life. The stronger Hoffmann's desire for harmony, the more acute the feeling of dissonance - discord in the human soul, discord in the relationship between man and society, man and nature. It is with the help of the grotesque that Hoffman conveys a sense of comic dissonance.

“Little Tsakhes, nicknamed Zinnober” is one of Hoffmann’s most grotesque works. “Crazy fairy tale” - that’s what the author called it. Already in the appearance of the character who gave the story its title, the idea of the grotesque seems to be embodied: “The baby’s head had grown deep into his shoulders, and his whole body, with a growth on his back and chest, a short body and long spider legs, resembled an apple planted on a fork, which has a strange face carved into it.” However, the true grotesque is revealed not in the image of Little Tsakhes, but in the world of familiar social relations. The “little monster” itself is something of an indicator of the grotesque: without its revealing influence, other social phenomena would seem to be in the order of things, but as soon as it appears, something absurd and fantastic is revealed in them. The plot of the story begins with a contrast: the beautiful fairy Rosabelverde bends over a basket with a little freak - baby Tsakhes. The plot of the story is not only contrasting, but also ironic: how many troubles happened because she gave little Tsakhes the magical gift of golden hairs.

From the background it follows: the fairy herself is in a grotesque situation. After the introduction of enlightenment, an official verdict was issued denying the existence of magic, the fairies were expelled to the country of Dzhinnistan (which was also declared non-existent). And Rosabelvelde remained in the principality under supervision, hiding under the guise of a canoness of a shelter for noble maidens. Thus, the fairy’s action could have been dictated not only by compassion.

Soon her charms began to affect the inhabitants of the “enlightened” principality. Lacking the simplest virtues of a normal human being, Tsakhes is rewarded with miraculous properties: everything ugly that comes from him is attributed to someone else, and, conversely, everything pleasant or wonderful that anyone else does is attributed to him. He begins to give the impression of a charming child, then a gifted youth, a talented poet, violinist, etc.

The golden hairs of the “tiny werewolf” will appropriate and alienate the best properties and achievements of those around him. The career of Tsakhes, who became a minister at the princely court and a holder of the Order of the Green-spotted Tiger with twenty buttons, is grotesquely presented. The higher a little freak rises on the social ladder, the more reason, enlightenment, society, and the state are questioned, if such absurdities occur in a reasonably structured society, an enlightened state. Common sense turns into nonsense, reason becomes reckless.

The golden hairs of Tsakhes contain a grotesque metonymy. Zinnober's spell begins to work when he finds himself in front of the mint: the golden hairs metonymically imply the power of money. “Reasonable” civilization is obsessed with gold, mania for hoarding and waste. The crazy magic of gold is such that natural properties, talents, and souls are put into circulation, appropriated and alienated.

Things in society obscure the essence, behind things they no longer see either man or nature, as Prosper Alpanus clearly demonstrates in the game with Fabian’s sleeves and coattails. Thereby exposing the inflated convention, the exaggerated importance of trifles, the length of a tailcoat, for example. If someone wears a tailcoat that is too long or too short, it means he is a heretic, a troublemaker, a “Rukavian,” or a conspirator, a “Faldist.” This is how sensible people reason, blinded by the cult of things.

Even the good magic that ensures a happy fairy-tale ending is not without its grotesque: from now on it will be aimed at ensuring that the pots in the house of Balthazar and Candida never boil over, and the dishes do not burn. Magic will protect furniture covers from stains, prevent porcelain dishes from breaking, and provide good weather in the meadow behind the house so that clothes dry quickly after washing. Thus, romantic grotesquery is resolved by romantic irony.

What is the moral and social meaning of the image of Tsakhes? What real world phenomena can it be associated with?

Tsakhes is the son of the poor peasant woman Lisa, frightening those around him with his appearance, an absurd freak who, until he was two and a half years old, had never learned to speak or walk well. Taking into account that Tsakhes operates in an ugly social environment, Zinnober's ugliness, emphasized throughout the entire work, can be considered symbolic, and the image of the hero - typical.

The image of Tsakhes contains both social and moral meaning. His story can be seen as one of the illustrations of the interaction of good and evil.

In the fairy's desire to eliminate the imperfections allowed by nature, there is a good beginning. Taking pity on the poor peasant woman, Rosabelverde endows her little deformed son with a wonderful gift, thanks to which everything significant and talented is attributed to Tsakhes. He is making a brilliant career. And all this was due to the fact that others, truly worthy, undeservedly experienced resentment, shame and failure in their careers or in love. The good done by the fairy turns into an inexhaustible source of evil.

Tsakhes is not active at all. Everything turns out by itself, Zinnober only willingly accepts what floats into his hands. His fault, according to the fairy, is that an inner voice did not awaken in his soul, which would say: “You are not who they take you for, but strive to become equal to those on whose wings you, weak, wingless, fly up." But the corrupting nature of undeserved admiration lies in the fact that Tsakhes easily indulged in confidence in his perfection. Having fallen from his horse, Zinnober denies this fact, claiming that he is an excellent rider, and the further, the more he feels the right not to reckon with high authorities: he boldly responds to the prince’s courtesies, arrogantly communicates with his patron fairy.

The timely intervention of a good wizard puts an end to Tsakhes's chimerical career. Having lost his magic hairs, he became what he really was - a pitiful semblance of a man. Fear of the crowd, who suddenly saw a small monster in the window of the minister’s house, forces Zinnober to seek reliable shelter in a chamber pot, where he dies, as the doctor states, “from the fear of dying.” The fact that he became a victim of undeserved dizzying success is recognized by the fairy, who realized her fatal mistake: “If you had not risen from insignificance and remained a little uncouth fool, you would have avoided a shameful death.”

The grotesque and ironic figure of Tsakhes contains the idea of the persistent danger of false greatness, which gives rise to the self-destruction of the individual through the gradual overstepping of universal human norms and rules.

The author ridicules not only the worthless and deceitful figure of Tsakhes, who absorbed much of what was hostile to the world of poetry, love, beauty, justice, goodness and happiness. The adventures of Tsakhes are not personal at all; they are determined by the structure of the state and its secret or obvious needs. One of the features of Hoffmann's satire is that the contradiction between the appearance and essence of the title character arises and is realized only in the society that creates this appearance. This contradiction is of a social nature and is not inherent in the very image of Tsakhes, whose spiritual ugliness is fully consistent with physical ugliness. The comedy of incongruity arises only when society, endowing Zinnober with all sorts of talents and all kinds of virtues, gradually inflates his fame.

In itself, this society is initially predisposed to the prosperity of Tsakhes. People are not valued according to their true qualities, awards are given not according to work and not according to real merit. Tsakhes's mother and her husband work until they sweat and can barely satisfy their hunger; they refuse to place the girl Rosengryschen in an orphanage due to the fact that she cannot provide her pedigree; The valet of Prince Paphnutius becomes a minister because he promptly lends his master, who had forgotten his wallet, six ducats, etc.

Self-interest, thirst for fame and profit, admiration for the power of money are manifested in people's behavior. Mosch Terpin dreams of marrying a freak to his daughter in order to climb the social ladder; Minister von Mondschein hopes to earn the prince’s praise by giving a certain memorial to his favorite to read, etc. Through the satirical image of Tsakhes, Hoffman exposes the distortion of the concept of personal value. The criteria of value are shifting fantastically: selfish material interests dominate in society, reputation is determined by a table of ranks.

Hoffmann subjects satirical ridicule not to the “stepson of nature” little Tsakhes, the stupid and helpless chosen one of the fairy, but to the environment conducive to the prosperity of Zinnober, the society that tends to take a freak for a handsome man, mediocrity for talent, stupidity for wisdom, a subhuman for “ decoration of the fatherland." Thus, a very serious social problem appears: mechanization and automation of social consciousness. The idea that formed the basis of the fairy tale about Tsakhes is rather scary: a nonentity seizes power by appropriating (alienating) merits that do not belong to him, and a blinded, stupid society, which has lost all value criteria, mistaking the nonentity for an important person, creates an idol out of him.

Analyze the motivic structure of the text. What characters and episodes of the fairy tale are associated with the motive of the external, superficial, unspiritual? What ideas is associated with the motive of the spiritual, truly humanistic? In what actions of the characters does it arise and how is it manifested?

“As the highest judge,” Hoffmann wrote, “I divided the entire human race into two unequal parts. One consists only of good people, but bad or not musicians at all, while the other consists of true musicians. But none of them will be condemned; on the contrary, bliss awaits everyone, only in a different way.”

In the form of a casual description of the adventures of Tsakhes, the author introduces new characters, groups them around Zinnober, reveals the moral priorities and values of the characters, thereby separating the musicians from the philistines. People are born musicians, but they become philistines. And Hoffmann punishes not congenital vices, but acquired ones. A person may or may not devote himself to serving music, but he should not devote himself to serving his wallet and stomach.

The motive of money as a sign of the new time is manifested most clearly in the general psychosis, the general blindness of the inhabitants, to which the frivolous Fabian, and the gullible Candida, and her unselfish father, Professor Mosch Terpin, and the narrow-minded Prince Barsanuf, and almost everyone else, succumb. If the student Balthasar is able to maintain a sober perception of reality, then he owes this to his poetic thinking. There is nothing of a philistine in Balthazar; he and Tsakhes are incompatible. It is natural that the brilliant Italian musician Sbiocca did not fall under the golden obsession: he lives in a pure and harmonious world of art. But for Hoffmann an artist is not a profession, but a vocation. It may be a person who is not involved in art, but gifted with the ability to see and feel. Illustrating this, the author introduces the official Pulcher among those not subject to the influence of Tsakhes, thereby proclaiming that the moral qualities of a person are fundamental, and not the position he occupies.

The true meaning of the Enlightenment is revealed in the historical digression about the prince's edict and the expulsion of all fairies. In Hoffmann's fiction, fairies are associated with the idea of the richness and diversity of life-giving nature. It is not for nothing that Balthazar explains to Pulcher that Prince Paphnutius never managed to banish the wonderful and incomprehensible from life: nature continues to delight and surprise with its charm and beauty. Nature provides criteria for the moral assessment of the aspirations of the heroes, which are inextricably linked with the humanistic ideas of the fairy tale. The fairy Rosabelverde and the magician Prosper Alpanus are two representatives of nature who live in human society. Nature spoke through the magician, and with it, creative life, with all its play. Prosper Alpanus extends his power down to the smallest detail. At first he only tests his power, and later through it he establishes the order of things forever.

When Minister Andres suggests to the prince the idea of expelling the fairies, he says that they spread their poison “under the name of poetry.” This detail is significant: for Hoffmann, the fantastic and the poetic are two sides of one detail. Both are opposed to a dry and insipid worldview.

The metaphysical way of thinking generated by the Enlightenment lies in the images of the famous scientists Ptolemy Philadelphus and especially the professor of natural science Mosch Terpin, the bearer of a utilitarian, crudely rational attitude towards nature. He made the great discovery that “darkness comes from lack of light” and “enclosed all nature in a small elegant compendium”; subjected “censorship and revisions to solar and lunar eclipses,” studied rare breeds of roasted game, and carried out studies in the wine cellar.

Thus, the image of a charlatan and opportunist emerges, replacing science with “charming tricks”, thinking not about the truth, but about his own stomach. His entire life is built on deception, so it is not surprising that he sacredly honors the grandiose deception of Tsakhes and even tries to benefit from it for himself. These kind of priests of science are worthy citizens of the principality of Pafnutia, where metaphysical thinking is elevated to the rank of an unshakable basis of the state structure.

The figure of the court physician is also comical, who with his intricate explanations of the cause of Zinnober’s death completely confuses those listening. His tirades, with a predominance of Latin terms and abstruse expressions, are witty parodies of “learned” conversations and treatises.

Satirical images of the smartest and most noble people of the enlightened principality continue with the image of Baron Pretextatus von Mondschein. His excellent education consists of the correct use of cases and the writing of his name in French letters. As Minister of Foreign Affairs, he sometimes even handled state affairs himself; he pretended to be the author of the memorial composed by the official Andrian, and thus appropriated for himself the work and glory of others.

Student Balthazar is one of the few positive characters in the fairy tale. He represents an “enthusiast,” a romantic dreamer hero, dissatisfied with the philistine society around him, with the scholasticism of university lectures, and finds oblivion and relaxation only in solitude in the lap of nature. Speaking about his frequent escape from the city to a shady grove, the author literally sings a hymn to the enchanting and healing nature. Unlike Mosch Terpin, Balthasar jealously protects the world of nature and poetry from the invasion of the bourgeois everyday life, which is alien to the true beauty. The city is uncomfortable for him and he finds true bliss alone with nature, which every time saves him from death and gives him hope. Balthazar's savior, the magician Prosper Alpanus, also appears from nature.

The only reason why Balthazar returned to the society of ordinary people he hated was his love for Mosch Terpin’s daughter, Candida, an ordinary socialite, a pretty little bourgeois woman in whom there is nothing of the romantic ideal woman. After reading a couple of poems, she forgot their content, “played the piano tolerably and even sometimes sang along; danced the latest gavottes and French quadrilles and, in a very legible and delicate handwriting, wrote down the linen assigned for washing.” It can be assumed that Candida’s youth and inexperience did not allow the traits characteristic of her father to develop. Therefore, there is nothing surprising in her blindness by Tsakhes. She marries Balthazar, but not because she was able to recognize and appreciate his high spiritual qualities, but because he turned out to be a good match in the everyday bourgeois sense.

Having created the image of an ordinary secular beauty and forced the hero to fall in love with her, Hoffmann, on the one hand, complemented the string of satirical characters with this image, and on the other, almost completely destroyed the romance of the image of the “enthusiast” himself. Having come into contact with ordinary people through Candida, Balthazar makes a concession to their tastes and etiquette; he also has to adapt to the secular customs that reign in the house of Mosch Terpin.

Heroes do not find their ideal in Wonderland. The poetic Balthazar finds his happiness with the noisy, cheerful, homely Candida. And the greatest miracle that a good wizard can bestow on a young couple is pots where food does not burn or boil over. Balthasar and his beloved remain to exist safely in a miserable and unkind world. Both in “Little Tsakhes” and in all the fantastic stories created by Hoffmann in the last five years of his life, it is clearly felt that next to the happy fairy-tale ending there is a sad truth lurking.

Literature

1. Berkovsky N. Ya, Romanticism in Germany.-L., 1973.

2. Karelsky A.V. From hero to man: Two centuries of Western European literature.-M., 1990.

3. Savchenko S. The mastery of Hoffmann the satirist in the story “Little Tsakhes” // Scientific notes of the philological faculty (Kyrgyz University).-Issue 12. – 1964.-P.211-229.

Cumulative tale within a culture

“Little Tsakhes, nicknamed Zinnober” - a story by E.T.A. Hoffman. Written in 1819. As Hoffman's friends testify, the writer was interested in the opportunity to portray “a disgusting, stupid freak who does everything differently from people.” Later, this idea expanded: Tsakhes not only “does everything differently from people,” but, thanks to a magical gift, his absurd actions are perceived as completely reasonable and even wonderful, and, in addition, he has the ability to take credit for the merits of others. The poet reads poetry, and Tsakhes says that he wrote it, and everyone believes it; the freak appropriates to himself all the good and smart deeds of others and becomes the ruler in the principality of Kerepes, caricatured by the author.

Hoffmann borrowed the unusual names of the characters surrounding Tsakhes from a book by an 18th-century physician. Johann Georg Zimmermann "On Loneliness". The pedigree of the freak Tsakhes, a dwarf with a large head and short legs, “like a radish,” is even richer: researchers name first of all the magical little man Alraun, who often appeared on the pages of works of romantic literature. It is also important that Alraun, like Tsakhes, personifies the evil, destructive principle.

The fairy tale-story “Little Tsakhes, nicknamed Zinnober” by Hoffmann is built according to all the canons of romantic history: there is a wizard and a fairy, a dreamy poet in love and his friend, the poet’s beautiful beloved, there are stupid and funny courtiers and false scientists. In Hoffmann's story, satirical features are also noticeable, but the narrative in its ironic coloring clearly does not boil down to ridicule of small princely courts, the absurd desire for the French version of absolutism in the dwarf monarchies of fragmented Germany. Tsakhes is not handsome, but he seems handsome, stupid, but he seems gifted with a brilliant mind, not talented, but everyone sees him as a poet, angry and greedy, but seems to be a wise and rightful ruler. As a result, the consequence of the fairy’s good, humane act turns out to be evil. Only the poet is not subject to it, which is consistent with the romantic tradition. His eyes are open, but he is powerless before evil: they don’t hear him, they laugh at him when Tsakhes steals his poems and seduces his bride. In the finale, the freak is exposed and dies, but the poet Balthazar also finds not sublime, not earthly happiness, but Biedermeier comfort, with pots, a vegetable garden and other household chores - all this in addition, like a gift from a wizard, to the bride he finally received. This Biedermeier coloring is often not noticed, because the ending of Hoffmann’s “Little Zaches, nicknamed Zinnober” is in most cases interpreted as the victory of good over evil. This is true, but the newfound happiness in the form in which it is shown does not evoke sympathy from the romantic Hoffmann. If at Balthazar's wedding magical trees grow out of the ground and unearthly music sounds, then it all ends in a magical kitchen where the soup never boils over.

In the 20th century, a number of works appeared where Tsakhes was identified with Hoffmann himself because of an incident that once occurred: Hoffmann appropriated someone else’s hunting prey. This episode could have served as some kind of impetus for the idea, but the meaning of the story is incomparably larger and deeper. The image of Tsakhes is one of the insights of E.T.A. Hoffman, it contains a prediction of the collision of later times: dictator - power - a crowd obsessed with mass psychosis.

The image and character of Tsakhes
At the center of the work is the story of a disgusting freak, endowed with the magical gift of taking credit for the merits of those around him. Thanks to his three golden hairs, this insignificant creature enjoys universal respect, arousing admiration, and even becomes an all-powerful minister. Tsakhes is disgusting, and the author spares no expense in instilling this in the reader. Comparing it either to a stump of a gnarled tree or to a forked radish. Tsakhes grumbles, meows, bites, scratches. He is both scary and funny. He is terrible because he is absurdly trying to be known as an excellent horseman and a virtuoso cellist, and he is terrible because, despite his imaginary talents, he has clear and undeniable power.

Details of the work
This tale was created in the second period of Hoffmann's work. For the last eight years of his life he lives in Berlin, serving in the state court. The unsuitability of existing judicial science brought him into conflict with the Prussian state machine, and changes occur in his work: he moves on to social criticism of reality and attacks the social order of Germany. His satire becomes sharper, more politically charged. This is the tragedy of Hoffmann's fate and his high destiny. This can be understood using the details of this work. Firstly, the grotesque-fantastic image of Tsakhes: in it he expressed his rejection of reality. In addition, in a fairy-tale form, the author reflected a world where life’s blessings and honor are awarded not according to work, not according to intelligence and not according to merit. The fairy tale takes place in a fairy-tale kingdom, where wizards and fairies exist on equal terms with people - in this Hoffmann depicted the real existence of small German principalities. The image of Balthazar is the opposite image of Chakhesu; he is a writer of a bright ideal. The insignificant essence of the little freak who took his bride and glory is revealed to him alone.

The essence of the finale of the work
At the end of the tale, Balthazar crowns his victory over Tsakhes by marrying the beautiful Kandina and receives as a gift from his patron a house with magnificent furniture, a kitchen where the food never boils over, and a garden where lettuce and asparagus ripen earlier than others. The ridicule extends not only to the hero himself, but also to fairy-tale fiction itself. Doubt arises about the possibility and necessity of escaping from actual reality into broad romantic dreams.