Е. Т. Амадеус Хофман между Цахес и Цинобър: постромантическа публичност, култура на култа и постистина
E.T. Amadeus Hoffmann between Zaches and Cinnabar: Post-Romantic Publicity, Culture, and the Cult of Post-Truth

Author(s): Dimitar Kambourov
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies, Literary Texts, Fiction, Studies of Literature, Novel, Short Story, German Literature
Published by: Национално издателство за образование и наука „Аз-буки“
Keywords: Bonaparte; Beethoven; E.T.A. Hoffmann; Little Zaches Called Cinnabar
Summary/Abstract: E.T.A. Hoffmann, in his totality of biographical facts, as well as literary, musical, and critical legacy, represents a strange and elusive phenomenon. A complicated emanation of Romanticism, he embodies the conflict between biography, normativity, creativity, and skepticism; between a strenuous life, social ambitions, artistic strivings, and philistine prudence; between reality, fantasy, reflexivity, and collective stereotypes. The perception that, with Hoffmann, Romanticism is elevated to extremes that auger the inevitability of its suicidal self-subversion – self-drowning, self-strangulation – has long been a commonplace. By rereading Little Zaches Called Cinnabar, I attempt to extend and develop this understanding in a two-pronged approach: first I examine Romanticism as a type of aesthetic revolution, which devours even its most reflexively ironic children, such as Napoleon, Beethoven, and E.T.A. Hoffmann himself, by reexamining them through the allegorical image of Zaches-Cinnabar; then I test the hypothesis that the attempt to decipher this allegory inevitably draws it into insoluble contradictions, primarily between liberalism and conservatism, which get reduced to trivial aesthetic and social clichés, structurally levelling every authentic Romantic and Modernistic impulse down to dead high classics or suicidal malformation. Thus, Little Zaches Called Cinnabar appears as an allegory of Romanticism as an authentic and therefore suicidal Modernism, which offers the alternative between the classics (Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Delibes, etc.) and obscurity, i.e. E.T.A. Hoffmann himself. Finally, I speculate over the cultural prophecy of the fairy tale.

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