G hesse. Hesse, Hermann - short biography
Herman Hesse) was born on July 2, 1877 in the town of Calw in the state of Württemberg in Germany into a family of Pietist missionaries and publishers of theological literature.
In 1890 he entered the Latin school in Goppening, then transferred to the Protestant seminary in Maulbronn because parents hoped that their son would become a theologian, but after an escape attempt he was expelled from the seminary. Changed several schools.
After graduating from school, Hesse got a job at his father's publishing house, then became an apprentice and even a watchmaker. Between 1895 and 1898 he worked as an assistant bookseller at the university in Tübingen, and in 1899 he moved to Basel, again working as a bookseller. Here Hesse began writing and joined the society of aspiring writers “The Little Circle” (Le Petit Cenacle).
The first published collection of poetry, Romantic Songs (1899), did not meet with the approval of his pious mother due to its secular content. Like the first, the second collection of short stories and prose poems, “An Hour After Midnight” (1899), was in the tradition of classical German romanticism.
In 1901, Hesse traveled to Italy, where he met writers and publishers. In the same year, the story “Posthumous Writings and Poems of Hermann Lauscher” was published, after reading which, publisher Samuel Fischer offered Hesse cooperation. The story “Peter Camenzind” (1904) brought the author his first success, including financial success, and Fischer’s publishing house has since continuously published his works.
In 1904, Hermann Hesse married the daughter of the famous mathematician Maria Bernoulli, after which he left his job in a bookstore and the couple moved to a house in an abandoned mountain village on Lake Baden, intending to devote themselves to literary work and communication with nature.
In 1906, the psychological story “Under the Wheels” was published, inspired by memories of the studies and suicide of a seminarian brother. Hesse believed that the rigid Prussian education system deprived children of the natural joys of communication with nature and loved ones. Due to the acute critical focus, the book was published in Germany only in 1951.
From 1904 to 1912, Hesse collaborated with many periodicals (such as Simplicissimus, Rhineland, Neue Rundschau), wrote essays, and in the period from 1907 to 1912 he was co-editor of the magazine March, which opposed itself to the publication "Veltpolitik". At the same time, collections of his short stories “On this side” (1907), “Neighbors” (1908), “Detours” (1912), as well as the novel “Gertrude” (1910) were published.
In September 1911, at the expense of his publisher, Hesse made a trip to India, intending to visit the birthplace of his mother. But the journey did not last long - having arrived in southern India, he felt ill and returned. Nevertheless, the “countries of the East” continued to awaken his imagination and inspired the creation of “Siddhartha” (1921), “Pilgrimage to the Land of the East” (1932), as well as the collection “From India” (1913).
In 1914, the family, which already had two sons, moved to Bern, where the third son was born in the same year, but this did not ease the growing estrangement between the spouses. In the novel “Roschald” (1914), describing the collapse of the bourgeois family, Hesse asks the question whether an artist or a thinker needs to marry at all. In the story “Three Stories from the Life of Knulp” (1915), the image of a lonely wanderer, a vagabond, appears, who opposes himself to the burgher routine in the name of personal freedom.
During the First World War, Hesse, who was not subject to conscription for health reasons, collaborated with the French embassy in Bern, and also published a newspaper and a series of books for German soldiers. 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 his wife’s mental illness (schizophrenia) and his son’s illness, in 1916 Hesse underwent a course of psychoanalysis with Dr. Lang. Later, having become interested in the ideas of analytical psychology, he “took sessions” with Jung for several months.
In 1919, the writer left his family and went to the south of Switzerland to a village on the shore of Lake Lugano.
Under the pseudonym Emil Sinclair, the novel “Demian” (1919) was published, which gained great popularity among young people returning from the war.
In the period from 1925 to 1932, Hesse spent every winter in Zurich and regularly visited Baden - the story “Resortnik” (1925) was written based on resort life.
In 1926, Hesse was elected to the Prussian Academy of Writers, from which he left four years later, disappointed by the political events taking place in Germany. In 1927 his novel “Steppenwolf” was published, and in 1930 his story “Narcissus and Goldmund”. In 1931, Hesse began work on his masterpiece, the novel The Glass Bead Game, published in Switzerland in 1943 at the height of World War II.
In 1946, Hesse was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “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 good - a man who, in a tragic era, managed to defend true humanism "
After The Glass Bead Game, no major works appeared in the writer’s oeuvre. Hesse wrote essays, letters, memoirs about meetings with friends (Thomas Mann, Stefan Zweig, Theodor Heiss, etc.), translated, was fond of painting, and carried on extensive correspondence. In recent years he lived in Switzerland without a break.
Hesse died in his sleep from a cerebral hemorrhage on August 9, 1962 and was buried in San Abbondino.
The writer was awarded the Zurich Gottfried Keller Literary Prize, the Frankfurt Goethe Prize, the Peace Prize of the West German Association of Book Publishers and Booksellers; was an honorary doctor from the University of Bern.
Hermann Hesse (German)Hermann Hesse; July 2, 1877, Calw, Germany - August 9, 1962, Montagnola, Switzerland)- Swiss novelist, poet, critic, publicist and artist of German origin, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature (1946). Considered one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. Hesse's work became 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 was also engaged in missionary work in India at one time.
In 1880 the family moved to Basel, where Hesse's father 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 as a theologian. In 1890, he entered the Latin School in Goppingen, and the next year, having passed the exam brilliantly, he moved to the Protestant seminary in Maulbronn. On March 7, 1892, Hesse fled from the Maulbronn Seminary for no apparent reason. After spending a very cold night in an open field, the fugitive is picked up by a gendarme and taken back to the seminary, where as punishment the teenager is put in a punishment cell for eight hours. After this, Hesse’s stay at the seminary becomes unbearable and his father eventually takes him away from the institution. Parents tried to place Hesse in 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 a bookseller's apprentice, and then as an assistant to a bookseller in Tübingen. Here he had the opportunity to read a lot (the young man was especially fond of Goethe and the German romantics) and continue his self-education. In 1899, Hesse published his first books: a volume of poetry “Romantic Songs” and a collection of short stories and prose poems “An Hour After Midnight”. That same year he began working as a bookseller in Basel.
Hesse’s first novel, “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 Camenzind” was published. After this, Hesse left his job, went to the village and began to live solely on the income from his works. In 1904 he married Marie Bernouilly; the couple had three children.
During these years, Hesse wrote many essays and essays for various periodicals and until 1912 he worked as co-editor of the magazine March. In 1911, Hesse traveled to India, and upon returning from there he published a collection of stories, essays and poems “From India”.
In 1912, Hesse and his family finally settled in Switzerland, but the writer found no peace: his wife suffered from mental illness, and war began in the world. Being a pacifist, Hesse opposed aggressive German nationalism, which led to a decline in the writer's popularity in Germany and personal insults against him. In 1916, due to the hardships of the war years, the constant illness of his son Martin and his mentally ill wife, as well as the death of his father, the writer had a severe nervous breakdown, for which he was treated by psychoanalysis with a student of Carl Jung. The experience gained had a huge impact not only on the life, but also on the writer’s work.
In 1919, Hesse left his family and moved to Montagnola, in southern Switzerland. By this time, the writer’s wife was already in a psychiatric hospital, some of the children were sent to a boarding school, and some were left with friends. The 42-year-old writer seems to be starting life anew, which is emphasized by the use of a pseudonym for the novel “Demian” published in 1919. In 1924, Hesse married Ruth Wenger, but this marriage lasted only three years. In 1931, Hesse married for the third time (to Ninon Dolbin) and in the same year began work on his most famous novel: “The Glass Bead Game,” which was published in 1943. In addition to literary work, Hesse is interested in painting (from the age of 20 -x) and draws a lot.
In 1939-1945, Hesse's works were included in the list of unwanted books in Germany. Certain 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 inspired work, in which the classical ideals of humanism are increasingly evident, and for his brilliant style.”
After receiving the Nobel Prize, Hesse did not write another major work. His essays, letters, and new translations of novels continued to appear. In recent years, the writer lived constantly in Switzerland, where he died in 1962 at the age of 85, in his sleep, from a cerebral hemorrhage.
Writer's Awards
Nobel Prize for Literature (1946)
Honorary Doctor of the University of Bern (1947)
Wilhelm Raabe Prize (1950)
Peace Prize of the German Book Trade Association (1955)
I was born at the end of the New Age, shortly before the first signs of the return of the Middle Ages, under the sign of Sagittarius, in the beneficial rays of Jupiter. My birth took place in the early evening on a warm July day, and the temperature of this hour is the one that I loved and unconsciously sought all my life and the absence of which I perceived as deprivation. I could never live in cold countries, and all the voluntary journeys of my life were directed to the south.
Hermann Hesse, Nobel laureate in 1946, is one of the most widely read authors of the 20th century. He called his entire work “a protracted attempt to tell the story of his spiritual development,” “a biography of the soul.” One of the main themes of the writer’s work is the fate of the artist in a society hostile to him, the place of true art in the world.
Hesse was the second child in the family of a German missionary priest. He spent his childhood in the company of three sisters and two cousins. Religious upbringing and heredity had a profound influence on the formation of Hesse's worldview. And yet he did not follow the theological path. After escaping from the theological seminary in Maulbronn (1892), repeated nervous crises, attempted suicide and stays in hospitals, he briefly worked as a mechanic and then sold books.
In 1899, Hesse released his first, unnoticed, collection of poems, Romantic Songs, and wrote a large number of reviews. At the end of his first Basel year he published 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 later actively used and developed. In his neo-romantic novel of education "Peter Camenzind" (1904), Hesse developed the type of his future books - the seeking outsider. This is the story of the spiritual formation of a young man from a Swiss village who, carried away by romantic dreams, goes on wanderings, but does not find the embodiment of his ideals.
Disillusioned with the big world, he returns to his native village to 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 - the year of his first professional success - Hesse, who now devoted himself entirely to literary creativity, married the Swiss Maria Bernoulli. The young family moved to Gainhofen, a remote place on Constance. The period that followed turned out to be very fruitful. Hesse mainly wrote novels and short stories with an element of autobiography. Thus, the novel “Under the Wheels” (1906) is largely based on material from Hesse’s school years: a sensitive and subtle schoolboy dies from a collision with the world and inert pedagogy.
During the First World War, which Hesse described as a “bloody nonsense,” he worked for the German prisoner-of-war service. The writer experienced a severe crisis, which coincided with the separation from his mentally ill wife (divorce in 1918). After a long course of therapy, Hesse completed the novel “Demian” in 1917, published under the pseudonym “Emile Sinclair”, a document of self-analysis and further internal liberation of the writer. In 1918, the story “Klingsor’s Last Summer” was written. In 1920, Siddhartha was published. An Indian Poem”, which centers on fundamental issues of religion and recognition of the need for humanism and love. In 1924, Hesse became a Swiss citizen. After his marriage to the Swiss singer Ruth Wenger (1924; divorced in 1927) and a course of psychotherapy, the novel Steppenwolf (1927) was published, which became something of a bestseller.
This is one of the first works that open the 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. “The Death of Virgil” by G. Broch, prose by M. Frisch). The book is largely autobiographical. However, it would be a mistake to consider the hero of the novel, Harry Haller, as Hesse’s double. Haller, Steppenwolf, as he calls himself, is a restless, desperate artist, tormented by loneliness in the world around him, who does not find a common language with him. The novel covers about three weeks of Haller's life. Steppenwolf lives in a small town for some time, and then disappears, leaving behind “Notes”, which make up most of the novel. From the “Notes” the image of a talented person is crystallized, unable to find his place in the world, a person living with the thought of suicide, for whom every day becomes torment.
In 1930, Hesse achieved his greatest recognition among the public with the story Narcissus and Holmund. The subject of the story was the polarity of spiritual and worldly life, which was a theme typical of that time. In 1931, Hesse married for the third time - this time to Ninon Dolbin, an Austrian, an art historian by profession - and moved to Montagnola (canton of Tessin).
In the same year, Hesse began work on the novel “The Glass Bead Game” (published in 1943), which seemed to summarize all of his work and raised the question of the harmony of spiritual and worldly life to an unprecedented height.
In this novel, Hesse tries to solve a problem that has always troubled him - how to combine the existence of art with the existence of an inhuman civilization, how to save the high world of artistic creativity from the destructive influence of the so-called mass culture. The history of the fantastic country of Castalia and the biography of Joseph Knecht - the “master of the game” - are supposedly written by a Castalian historian living in an uncertain future. The country of Castalia was founded by selected highly educated people who see their goal in preserving the spiritual values of humanity. Practicality of life is alien to them; they enjoy pure science, high art, a complex and wise game of beads, a game “with all the semantic values of our era.” The actual nature of this game remains vague. The life of Knecht - the “master of the game” - is the story of his ascent to the Castalian heights and his departure from Castalia. Knecht begins to understand the danger of the Castalians' alienation from the lives of other people. “I crave reality,” he says. The writer comes to the conclusion that the attempt to place art outside of society turns art into a purposeless, pointless game. The symbolism of the novel, many names and terms from various areas of culture require great erudition from the reader to understand the full depth of the content of Hesse’s book.
In 1946, Hesse was awarded the Nobel Prize for his contribution to world literature. That same year he was awarded the Goethe Prize. In 1955, he was awarded the Peace Prize, established by German booksellers, and a year later a group of enthusiasts established the Hermann Hesse Prize.
Hesse died at the age of 85 in 1962 in Montagnola.
Hesse was born into a family of missionaries. In 1881, he became a student at a local missionary school and later at a Christian boarding school. Hesse was a versatile and talented boy: he played various musical instruments, drew well, and began trying to prove himself as a writer. Hesse's very first literary work was the fairy tale "Two Brothers", written for his younger sister in 1887.
In 1886, the Hesse family returned to Calw, and in 1890 he began studying at the Göppingen Latin School and a year later entered the seminary at the Maulbronn monastery. Six months after the start of his studies, the writer left Maulbronn and went to Bad Boll. His studies at the Cannstadt gymnasium, where he entered in 1892, did not end in success.<р>In 1899 Hesse published his first book. The book "Romantic Songs" consisted of poems written by the poet before 1898. Immediately after the book, a collection of short stories, An Hour After Midnight, was published.
In the spring of 1901, Hesse went on a trip to Italy.
Hesse's first novel, Peter Camenzind, was awarded the Bauernfeld Literary Prize in 1905.
In 1904, Hesse married Maria Bernoulli. In 1906, the autobiographical novel “Under the Wheel” was published, and in 1909, the novel “Gertrude”. After his divorce from Maria in February 1919, the writer left for Bern.
In 1924, Herman married for the second time; Ruth Wenger became his chosen one. Their marriage lasted three years.
At the beginning of 1926, Hesse began work on the novel Steppenwolf, which later became one of the writer's most important works.
On November 14, 1931, Herman married for the third time. In 1946 he became a Nobel Prize laureate.
In 1962, Hesse's health rapidly deteriorated and leukemia developed. On August 9, 1962, Hermann Hesse died.
The literary fate of Hermann Hesse is unusual. It was unusual during his lifetime and remained unusual after his death. In fact, how did generations of readers see him?
At first everything was simple. After the twenty-six-year-old author’s novel “Peter Camenzind” 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 depicter of provincial life in the spiritual experiences of a self-absorbed dreamer who leads its own battle with this 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 topic. It seemed that this is how he would write novel after novel from decade to decade - perhaps better, ever more subtle, but hardly in a different way...
However, already in 1914, there were eyes that saw something else. The famous writer and leftist publicist Kurt Tucholsky wrote then 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 pupa lies in a cocoon, and no one can tell in advance what kind of butterfly it 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 testimony to the formation of a new type of person - was not without reason published under a pseudonym, and it was not without reason that readers accepted it as the confession of a young genius who was able to express the feelings of his peers that were 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 a 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 herald and interpreter of the pan-European crisis.
What did readers in the late 30s and early 40s think of him? In truth, he has almost no readers left. Even before 1933, admirers of his early novels in letters to him vied with each other to renounce him and hasten 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 severed. Nazi critics either politely or 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 must have seemed unnecessary, like a jewelry miracle among the trenches. Few knew and loved him; Among these few was, in particular, Thomas Mann.
Less than three years later, everything turned upside down. An “unnecessary” book turns out to be a vital 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 veneration, moreover, an object of a sentimental cult, inevitably creating its own meaningless cliches. Hesse is glorified as a benevolent and wise singer of “love for man,” “love for nature,” “love for God.”
There was a generational change, and everything turned upside down again. The annoyingly looming figure of a respectable classicist 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 in it not politics, but literature, was rather a nuisance for us. Entertaining fiction writer, moralist, life teacher - wherever it goes! But he catapulted himself from “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 rather as an example of difficult and mysterious “intellectual” literature, but the criteria for “highbrow” changed so rapidly that Hesse was thrown by the toe of his boot into the pit of kitsch [i] . From now on it is “too simple.”
Everything seemed to be decided, the rulers of the thoughts of 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 accustomed 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 indeed 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” into Japanese appeared. But America! In the year of the writer’s death, The New York Times noted that Hesse’s novels were “generally inaccessible” to American readers. And suddenly the wheel of Fortune turned. Events occur that, as always, any critic can easily explain in hindsight, but which at first were shockingly unexpected: Hesse is the most “read” European writer in the USA! The American book market absorbs millions of copies of his books! An everyday detail: young rebels in their “communes” pass from hand to hand one tattered, dirty, well-read book - this is a translation of “Siddhartha”, or “Steppenwolf”, or the same “The Glass Bead Game”. Even though the West German literary-critical Areopagus authoritatively ruled that Hesse has nothing to say to a man of the industrial era, the unceremonious youth of the most industrial country in the world ignores this verdict and reaches out to the “archaic” works of the belated romantic Hesse, as to the words of their contemporary and comrade. One cannot help but find such a surprise remarkable. Of course, this time too the matter is not without a fair dose of nonsense. The new cult of Hesse is much louder than the old one, it is developing in an atmosphere of advertising boom and fashion hysteria. Savvy owners name their cafes after Hessian novels, so New Yorkers, for example, can grab a bite to eat at The Glass Bead Game. The sensational pop ensemble is called Steppenwolf and performs in costumes of characters from this novel. However, it appears that the interest of American youth in Hesse also includes more serious aspects. From the writer one learns not only dreamy introversion—deepening into oneself—which is thoroughly vulgarized in the minds of the average American, but above all two things: hatred of practicality and 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 with the reference to the bad taste of the American reader. However, from time to time, one or another critic notifies the public that he has re-read “The Glass Bead Game” or another novel by Hesse and, along with archaicism, stylization and overdue romance, to his amazement, has found some sense in the book. Even Hesse’s sociological ideas were, it turns out, not so meaningless! The Wheel of Fortune continues to spin, and no one can say when it will stop moving. 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's look again at the reflection 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 elderly sage and teacher of life, in whom others were quick to see a spiritual bankrupt; the old-fashioned master of “well-tempered” German prose and the idol of the long-haired youths of America - how, one wonders, can one bring together such diverse faces 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 patriarchal life, bypassed by political and economic development, but which 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 person, an eccentric and an original, immersed in his thoughts, original and intractable. Swabia experienced the heyday of Pietism in the 18th century - a mystical movement that intricately combined a culture of introspection, original ideas and insights, echoes of popular heresy in the spirit of Jacob Boehm and a protest against callous Lutheran orthodoxy - with the most tragicomic sectarian narrowness. Bengel, Etinger, Zinzendorf, all these thoughtful dreamers, original seekers of truth, lovers of truth and one-minded people - colorful characters of Swabian antiquity, and the writer maintained a true love for them all his life; the memory of them runs through his books - from the figure of the wise shoemaker Master Flyg from the story “Under the Wheel” to individual motifs appearing in “The Glass Bead Game” and dominant in the unfinished “Fourth Life of Joseph Knecht.”
The atmosphere of the parental home matched 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 they were forced to return to Europe, but continued to live in the interests of the mission. They were old-fashioned, narrow-minded, but pure and convinced people; their son could, over time, 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. Hermann Hesse spent his childhood in a different world. “It was a world of German and Protestant coinage,” he later recalled, “but open to worldwide contacts and prospects, and it was a whole, unified, intact, healthy world, a world without failures and ghostly curtains, a humane and Christian world, in of which the forest and the stream, the roe deer and the fox, the neighbor and the aunts formed as necessary and organic a part as Christmas and Easter, Latin and Greek, like Goethe, Matthias Claudius and Eichendorff.”
Such was the world, as cozy as his father’s home, from which Hesse left, like the prodigal son of the parable, to which he struggled to return and from which he left again and again, until it became absolutely clear that this lost paradise no longer existed.
The future writer's adolescence and youth were filled with acute internal anxiety, which sometimes took convulsive, painful forms. One can recall the words of Alexander Blok about the generations that experienced maturity 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, failures in life, falls, etc.; at the cost, finally, of the loss of those infinitely high properties that at one time shone like the best diamonds in the human crown (such as humane qualities, virtues, impeccable honesty, high morality, etc.).” The teenager Hermann Hesse lost the faith of his parents and responded with frantic stubbornness to the meek stubbornness with which they imposed their commandments on him, enthusiastically suffered and sadly enjoyed his incomprehensibility, his loneliness and “damnation.” (Note that not only then, but also in his mature years, at the age of fifty, “the rib and the demon,” Hesse curiously retained something of the ideas of a boy from a pious family - ideas that allow a person who has been sitting too long in a tavern to undertake an escapade to a restaurant or dancing with an unfamiliar woman, not without pride, feel like the chosen one of the Prince of Darkness; the reader will feel this more than once even in the smart 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” go back to the same years. The first spiritual storm erupted within the ancient walls of the Gothic Abbey of Maulbronn, 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 Overcast Chapel, where under the pointed arches 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, from generation to generation, cultivate their spirit among noble old stones, had an indelible impact on the imagination of fourteen-year-old Hesse; Artistically transformed memories of Maulbronn can be traced back to the later novels - Narcissus and Goldmund and The Glass Bead Game. At first, the teenager enthusiastically studied ancient Greek and Hebrew, gave recitations, played music, but turned out to be unsuitable for the role of an obedient seminarian; one fine day, unexpectedly for himself, he fled “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 adapt socially, incurring suspicion of mental inferiority, refused to accept any ready-made and destined path in life, did not study anywhere, although he diligently engaged in extensive literary and philosophical self-education according to his own plan. In order to somehow earn a living, he went to training at a tower clock factory, then practiced for some time in antique and bookstores in Tübingen and Basel. Meanwhile, his articles and reviews appeared in print, then his first books: a collection of poems “Romantic Songs” (1899), a collection of lyrical prose “An Hour After Midnight” (1899), “Posthumously Published Notes and Poems of Hermann Lauscher” (1901), “ Poems" (1902). Starting with the story “Peter Camenzind” (1904), Hesse became a regular author of the famous publishing house S. Fischer, 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 a long-standing Rousseauian-Tolstoyian dream, leaves all the cities in the world for the village of Gaienhofen on the shores of Lake Constance. At first he rents a peasant house, then - oh, the triumph of yesterday's tramp! - builds his own house. His own home, his own life, determined by himself: a little rural labor and quiet mental work. One after another, sons are born, one after another, books are published, which were expected by readers in advance. It seems that there is peace between this restless Hermann Hesse and reality. For how long?
The period preceding "Peter Kamenzind" can be considered as the prehistory of Hesse's work. The writer began under the sign of neo-romantic aestheticism of the “end of the century.” His first sketches in poetry and prose rarely go further than recording the fugitive psychological states and moods of an individual, somewhat but moderately preoccupied with himself. Only in the fictitious diary of Hermann Lauscher does Hesse sometimes rise to the confessional mercilessness of self-analysis so characteristic of his mature works.
What, however, the writer achieved almost immediately was an impeccable sense of prosaic rhythm, musical transparency of syntax, unobtrusiveness of alliteration and assonance, and the natural nobility of the “verbal gesture.” These are the inalienable features of Hesse's prose. In this regard, let us say a few words in advance about the stable relationship of his poetry to his prose. Hesse’s poems were to become better and better, so that the most perfect poems were written by him in his old age, but in its essence his poetry always lived by the power of his prose, serving only a more frank and obvious revelation of the inherent properties of lyricism and rhythmicity in prose. Hesse's poetry is short with prose, as is usual for writers of the second half of the 19th century, for example, for the Swiss Conrad 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”, conceivable only in poetry, lack “unconditionality”, “absoluteness” in relation to the word; it’s like the same prose, only elevated to a new level of its high quality.
The story “Peter Camenzind” is an important step forward for the early Hesse simply because it is a story, a plot-based work, the hero of which experiences his life, and not just moves from mood to mood. Hesse for the first time assimilates the epic energy of his models (primarily Gottfried Keller), with a firm hand he draws out the outline of the biography of the peasant son Kamenzind, who comes from the love torment of youth to the calm 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 that is, to one degree or another, inherent in the biographies of all Hesse’s later heroes (and the further, the more so): it looks like a parable, which is by no means accidental. Starting with “Peter Kamenzind”, the writer moves from aestheticism and self-expression to moral and philosophical searches and to moral and philosophical preaching. Let us assume that Hesse will eventually move far away from the spirit of Tolstoyism visible in his first story; but all of his subsequent work will be directly, clearly, openly focused on the question of “the most important thing,” 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 “ by contradiction,” and Hessian “immoralism” of the 20s is an integral part of his moralism). One can admire the consistency with which Hesse subordinated his inspiration to lofty humanistic goals, one can perhaps be annoyed by the immodesty of his preaching and the amateurism of his philosophizing, but Hesse was like that, and no force in the world could have made him different. In the late period of his creativity, the writer was more than once ready to despair in his literary skill and path, but he never despaired of his human duty - persistently, without being embarrassed by failures, to seek the lost integrity of spiritual life and talk about the results of the search for the benefit of all seekers. There is almost no doctrinaire in his sermon, and questions in it prevail over ready-made answers.
Hesse's next story is “Under the Wheel” (1906); this is an attempt to reckon with the nightmare of his youth - the school system of Kaiser Germany, an attempt to approach the problem of pedagogy from the position of a “personal advocate,” as the writer would call himself many years later. The hero of the story is a gifted and fragile boy, Hans Giebenrath, who, in fulfillment of the will of his father, a rude and heartless philistine, pours his impressionable soul into the empty pursuit of school success, into the hysteria of exams and the ghostly triumphs of good grades, until he breaks down from this unnatural life. His father is forced to take him out of school and send him as an apprentice; getting out of the ambitious bustle and joining the people's life initially has a beneficial effect on him, but the nervous breakdown that turns the first awakening of the emotions of love into a hopeless catastrophe, and the panicky fear of the prospect of “falling behind”, “sinking” and “getting under the wheel” have gone irreparably far. Either suicide, or an attack of physical weakness - the author leaves this unclear - leads to the 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 forms the setting of the story is the Maulbronn Seminary, then the autobiographical nature of the story will be completely obvious. Of course, it cannot be exaggerated: Hesse’s parents were the complete opposite of Giebenrath the father, and Hesse himself in his youth bore little resemblance to the meek and unrequited Hans (there is another character in the story - a rebellious young poet, not without reason having “Hermann Heilner” in his name 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 home 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 in the story is the magnificent pictures of folk life and samples of folk speech, anticipating “Knulp”. Her weakness is her somewhat sentimental attitude towards the hero; in its atmosphere there is something of the mentality of a “misunderstood” young man, poisoning his heart with dreams of how he will die and how everyone will then 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 impairment only emphasizes and makes clear the distance between him and the world. With sad reflection, he sums up his life, which appears before him as a chain of refusals of happiness and an equal place among people. Even more clearly than in the story “Under the Wheel,” a technique characteristic of Hesse’s entire work is revealed: 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, and confrontation. Next to Kun is the singer Muot - a daring, sensual, passionate man who knows how to achieve his goal, but is incurably poisoned by internal anxiety. Kuhn and Muota have one thing in common: 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 the conflicts and problems of the author himself onto them. If Kuhn Hesse trusts his self-absorption, his craving for asceticism, his hope for clarifying life’s tragedy through an effort of spirit that gives strength to the weak, then Muot also embodies Hesse’s inherent beginning of rebellion, violent internal discord. From each of them the path leads to a long series of characters from later books: from Kuhn to Siddhartha, Narcissus, Joseph Knecht, from Muoth to Harry Haller, Goldmund, Plinio Designori.
At the beginning of the 10s, Hesse experienced the first bouts of disappointment in his life, in the Gaienhofen idyll, in attempts to conclude a truce with social norms, in family and writing. It seems to him that he has betrayed his fate as a vagabond and wanderer by building a house, starting a family, hiding from himself abysses and failures, but also the special possibilities of harmony inherent in his life - only her and no other. “Blessed is the possessive and 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 trying to imitate his virtue. I tried to be what I am not.” Internal anxiety drives Hesse, a convinced homebody and provincial, 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 with paintings for a lifetime eastern nature, life and spirituality, but the restlessness that dominates him is not excessive. Hesse's doubts about the artist's right to family happiness and domestic well-being were expressed in his last pre-war novel (Roschald, 1914). Then personal sorrows and disorders were decisively pushed into the background, although they were aggravated, 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 intensified form: a whole world, a cozy, beloved and revered world of European civilization, traditional morality, the undisputed 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 was running wild. Respected professors, writers, and pastors in Germany greeted the war with delight, as a welcome renewal. Writers such as Gerhart Hauptmann, such scientists as Max Planck, Ernst Haeckel, Wilhelm Ostwald, addressed the German people with the “Statement of 93,” which affirmed the unity of German culture and German militarism. Even Thomas Mann succumbed to the “intoxication of fate” for several years. And so Hesse, the apolitical dreamer Hesse, finds himself alone against everyone, at first not even noticing that this has happened. On November 3, 1914, Hesse’s article “O friends, enough of these sounds!” appeared in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung newspaper. (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 mourning the war, the writer is not actually protesting against the war as such; What he protests against, and with rare clarity and purity of moral emotion, is the lies that accompany war. A lie causes him sincere, immediate, 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 raised high above the discord and alliances of states, that “people of the spirit” serve a supranational, pan-European and world cause? Hesse does not address politicians and generals, but also not the masses, not the man on the street; he addresses professional cultural ministers, accusing them of apostasy, demanding inexorable fidelity to the ideal of spiritual freedom. How dare they succumb to general hypnosis, make their thoughts dependent on the political situation, and renounce the precepts of Goethe and Herder? The article can be called naive, it is indeed naive, but in its naivety is its strength, the directness of the question posed in it: is German culture ready to change itself? This question was asked almost twenty years before Hitler came to power... Hesse’s speech attracted, among other things, the sympathetic attention of Romain Rolland and gave impetus to the rapprochement of both writers, which ended in their many years of friendship. Another article, which continued the line of the first, brought unbridled persecution of “patriotic circles” upon Hesse. An anonymous pamphlet, reprinted in 1915 by twenty (!) German newspapers, called him “The Knight of the Sad Image,” “a renegade without a fatherland,” “a traitor to the people and nationality.” “Old friends informed me,” Hesse later recalled, “that they had nursed a snake in their heart and that this heart would henceforth beat for the Kaiser and for our state, but not for such a degenerate as me. Abusive letters from unknown persons arrived in abundance, and booksellers informed me that an author with such reprehensible views did not exist for them” (“Brief Biography”). Hesse was neither a tribune nor a leftist 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 break in life habits. Meanwhile, the ring of loneliness was closing 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 carried out 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 start again. But before that it was necessary to take stock. The cycle of stories about Knulp is the result of the expired period of Hesse’s work. It is symbolic that it appeared during the war, in 1915. His hero is a tramp, an unlucky wanderer, inspired by the melancholic poetry of Schubert’s “Winterreise” and the gentle humor of old folk songs, a man without home and shelter, without family and business, preserving in the adult world the secret of eternal childhood, “children’s extravagance and children’s laughter”, stubbornly refusing to take his place in the prudent world of calculating masters. Freezing on the way under flakes of snowfall, he sees his whole life in full view, feels it justified, and himself - forgiven, comforted and free, talks face to face with God, and this is not the god of theology, not the god of the church, who demands a person to answer, this is the god of fairy tales, the god of children's imagination, children's dreams. Knulp falls asleep in his last sleep, as if in a warm, cozy cradle. The homeless man returned home.
