It is this genre, characteristic of literature of the 18th century, that Goethe chooses for his work; the action takes place in one of the small German towns at the end of the 18th century. The novel consists of two parts - these are letters from Werther himself and additions to them under the heading “From the publisher to the reader.” Werther's letters are addressed to his friend Wilhelm, in them the author strives not so much to describe the events of his life, but to convey his feelings that arouse in him the world.

Werther, a young man from a poor family, educated, inclined towards painting and poetry, settles in a small town to be alone. He enjoys nature, communicates with ordinary people, reads his beloved Homer, draws. At a country youth ball, he meets Charlotte S. and falls madly in love with her. Lotta, as the girl’s close friends call her, is the eldest daughter of the princely ruler; there are nine children in their family. Their mother died, and Charlotte, despite her youth, managed to replace her with her brothers and sisters. She is not only visually attractive, but also has independent judgment. Already on the first day of meeting Werther and Lotte, a similarity of tastes is revealed, they easily understand each other.

From now on, the young man spends most of his time every day in the amtman's house, which is an hour's walk from the city. Together with Lotte, he visits a sick pastor and goes to look after a sick lady in the city. Every minute spent near her gives Werther pleasure. But the young man’s love is doomed to suffering from the very beginning, because Lotte has a fiancé, Albert, who has gone to get a respectable position.

Albert arrives, and although he treats Werther kindly and delicately hides the manifestations of his feelings for Lotte, the young man in love is jealous of her for him. Albert is reserved, reasonable, he considers Werther an extraordinary person and forgives him for his restless disposition. For Werther, the presence of a third person during meetings with Charlotte is difficult; he falls either into unbridled joy or into gloomy moods.

One day, in order to get a little distraction, Werther is going on horseback to the mountains and asks Albert to lend him pistols for the road. Albert agrees, but warns that they are not loaded. Werther takes one pistol and puts it to his forehead. This harmless joke turns into a serious argument between young people about a person, his passions and reason. Werther tells a story about a girl who was abandoned by her lover and threw herself into the river, because without him life for her had lost all meaning. Albert considers this act “stupid”; he condemns a person who, carried away by passions, loses the ability to reason. Werther, on the contrary, is disgusted by excessive rationality.

For his birthday, Werther receives a package as a gift from Albert: it contains a bow from Lotte’s dress, in which he saw her for the first time. The young man suffers, he understands that he needs to get down to business and leave, but he keeps putting off the moment of separation. On the eve of his departure, he comes to Lotte. They go to their favorite gazebo in the garden. Werther says nothing about the upcoming separation, but the girl, as if anticipating it, starts talking about death and what will follow. She remembers her mother, the last minutes before parting with her. Worried by her story, Werther nevertheless finds the strength to leave Lotte.

The young man leaves for another city, he becomes an official under the envoy. The envoy is picky, pedantic and stupid, but Werther made friends with Count von K. and tries to brighten up his loneliness in conversations with him. In this town, as it turns out, class prejudices are very strong, and the young man is constantly pointed out about his origin.

Werther meets the girl B., who vaguely reminds him of the incomparable Charlotte. He often talks with her about his former life, including telling her about Lotte. The surrounding society annoys Werther, and his relationship with the envoy is getting worse. The matter ends with the envoy complaining about him to the minister, who, being a delicate person, writes a letter to the young man in which he reprimands him for being excessively touchy and tries to direct his extravagant ideas in the direction where they will find the right application.

Werther temporarily comes to terms with his position, but then a “trouble” occurs that forces him to leave the service and the city. He was visiting Count von K., stayed too long, and at that time guests began to arrive. In this town, it was not customary for a low-class person to appear in noble society. Werther did not immediately realize what was happening, besides, when he saw a girl he knew, B., he started talking to her, and only when everyone began to look sideways at him, and his interlocutor could hardly carry on a conversation, the young man hastily left. The next day, gossip spread throughout the city that Count von K. had kicked Werther out of his house. Not wanting to wait until he is asked to leave the service, the young man submits his resignation and leaves.

First, Werther goes to his native place and indulges in sweet childhood memories, then he accepts the prince’s invitation and goes to his domain, but here he feels out of place. Finally, unable to bear the separation any longer, he returns to the city where Charlotte lives. During this time she became Albert's wife. Young people are happy. The appearance of Werther brings discord into their family life. Lotte sympathizes with the young man in love, but she is also unable to see his torment. Werther rushes about, he often dreams of falling asleep and never waking up, or he wants to commit a sin and then atone for it.

One day, while walking around the outskirts of the town, Werther meets the crazy Heinrich, who is collecting a bouquet of flowers for his beloved. Later he learns that Heinrich was a scribe for Lotte’s father, fell in love with a girl, and love drove him crazy. Werther feels that the image of Lotte is haunting him and he does not have the strength to put an end to his suffering. On this letter young man break off, and we learn about his further fate from the publisher.

Love for Lotte makes Werther unbearable for those around him. On the other hand, the decision to leave the world gradually becomes stronger in the young man’s soul, because he is unable to simply leave his beloved. One day he finds Lotte sorting through gifts for her family on the eve of Christmas. She turns to him with a request to come to them next time no earlier than Christmas Eve. For Werther, this means that he is deprived of the last joy in life. Nevertheless, the next day he still goes to Charlotte, and together they read an excerpt from Werther’s translation of Ossian’s songs. In a fit of unclear feelings, the young man loses control of himself and approaches Lotte, for which she asks him to leave her.

Returning home, Werther puts his affairs in order, writes Farewell letter his beloved, sends a servant with a note to Albert for pistols. At exactly midnight, a shot is heard in Werther's room. In the morning, the servant finds a young man, still breathing, on the floor, the doctor comes, but it is too late. Albert and Lotte are having a hard time with Werther's death. They bury him not far from the city, in the place that he chose for himself.

I carefully collected everything that I managed to find out about the history of the poor
Werther, I offer it to your attention and I think that you will thank me for it
grateful. You will be imbued with love and respect for his mind and heart and
you will shed tears over his fate.
And you, poor fellow, who have fallen under the same temptation, draw strength from it.
suffering, and let this book be your friend, if by the will of fate or
It’s your own fault that you won’t find a closer friend.
BOOK ONE

How happy I am that I left! Priceless friend, what is the heart?
human? I love you so much, we were inseparable, and now we are separated, and I
I'm happy! I know you will forgive me for this. After all, all my other attachments
as if they were deliberately created in order to disturb my soul. Poor thing
Leonora! And yet I have nothing to do with it! Is it my fault that passion grew in
the heart of a poor girl, while I was amused by her capricious charms
sisters! And yet - am I completely innocent here? Didn't I give her food?
hobby? Wasn’t I pleased with such sincere expressions of feelings, over
with which we often laughed, although there was nothing funny in them, was it
I... Oh, dare a person judge himself! But I'll try to improve
I promise you, my dear friend, that I will try, and I will not, in my own way
habit, to torment oneself over every minor trouble, which
fate gives us; I will enjoy the present and let the past
will remain the past. Of course, you're right, my dear, people, who knows,
why they were created this way - people would suffer much less if it weren’t for
developed the power of imagination so diligently, they would not remember endlessly
past troubles, but would live in a harmless present.
Do not refuse the courtesy of informing my mother that I have been in good faith
I fulfilled her instructions and will soon write to her about it. I visited my aunt and she
turned out to be not at all the vixen that we portray her as. This
a cheerful woman of sanguine disposition and the kindest soul. I told her
mother’s grievances regarding the delay of our share of the inheritance; aunt
gave me her reasons and arguments and named the conditions on which she agrees
give out everything and even more of what we claim. However, I don't want
now to spread the word; tell your mother that everything will be alright. I
my dear, I was once again convinced by this trivial matter that omissions and
Inveterate prejudices bring more confusion into the world than deceit and malice.
In any case, the latter are much less common.
In general, I have a great life here. Solitude is excellent
medicine for my soul in this paradise, and the young season is generous
warms my heart, which is often cold in our world.

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Preface

A great many literary critics and translators encroach on our attention and time, defining as their cultural task the discovery of as many “missed” names and unknown works as possible. Meanwhile, “culture is selection,” as Hofmannsthal’s capacious formula says. Even the ancients noted that “art is long, but life is short.” And what a shame it is to live your short life without visiting the heights of the human spirit. Moreover, there are so few of them, peaks. Akhmatova’s contemporaries say that her inseparable masterpiece books fit on one shelf. Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Goethe... This obligatory minimum of all educated person managed to double only the Russian nineteenth century, adding Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov to the list.

All these authors, our teachers, delighters, and often tormentors, are similar in one thing: they left concepts-images-types that have firmly and forever entered our consciousness. They became household names. Words such as “Odyssey”, “Beatrice”, “Don Quixote”, “Lady Macbeth” replace long descriptions for us. And they are universally accepted as a code accessible to all humanity. The most unfortunate of the Russian autocrats, Pavel, was nicknamed “Russian Hamlet.” And “Russian Faust” is, of course, Ivan Karamazov (who in turn became - sublimation of the image-type! - an easily wedged out cliché). And recently “Russian Mephistopheles” appeared. This is what the Swede Ljunggren called his book, translated from us, about Emilia Medtner, the famous Goethean cul-urologist of the early 20th century.

In this sense, Goethe, one might say, set a kind of record: for a long time, many – from Spengler and Toynbee to Berdyaev and Vyacheslav Ivanov – have called “Faustian” no less than the entire Western European civilization as a whole. During his lifetime, however, Goethe was primarily the celebrated author of The Sorrows of Young Werther. Thus, under this cover are collected two of his most famous books. If we add to them his selected lyrics and two novels, then this, in turn, will constitute that “minimum of Goethe”, which an inquisitive reader cannot do without. Our Symbolist poet Vyacheslav Ivanov generally considered Goethe’s novel “Selective Affinity” best experience this genre in world literature (a controversial but also weighty opinion), and Thomas Mann singled it out as “the most daring and profound novel about adultery created by the moral culture of the West”). And Goethe’s “Wilhelm Meister” gave birth to a whole specific genre of “educational novel”, which has since been reputed to be especially German peculiarity. Indeed, the tradition of the German-language educational novel extends from Keller's Green Heinrich and Stifter's Indian Summer through Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain and Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities to our contemporary modifications by Günther Grass and Martin Walser, and this constitutes the main ridge of the said prose. Goethe generally gave birth to a lot of things in German literature. Goethe's blood flows in her veins - to paraphrase Nabokov's maxim about Pushkin's blood of Russian literature. The roles of Goethe and Pushkin are similar in this sense. Fathers-progenitors of mythological scope and power, who left behind a mighty galaxy of heirs-geniuses with their vast and branched offspring.

Goethe discovered his phenomenal strength very early. He was born on August 28, 1749 in Frankfurt am Main into a wealthy patrician family. His family nest (now, of course, a museum) resembles a proud fortress, scattering the surrounding houses in the ancient part of the city. His father wanted him to have a good career in the public service and sent him to study law at reputable universities - first in Leipzig, then in Strasbourg. In Leipzig, our classmate was our Radishchev. In Strasbourg, he became close friends with Lenz and Klinger, writers, “stormy geniuses”, whom fate destined to end their days also in Russia. If in Leipzig Goethe only wrote poetry, then in Strasbourg he was seriously infected with literary fever from his friends. Together they formed a whole movement, named after the title of one of Klinger’s plays, Sturm and Drang.

This was a time of turning point in European literature. The bastions of classicism, which seemed so unshakable for many decades, classicism with its strict architectonics of known unities (place, time, action), with its strict inventory of styles, with its exaggerated moralizing and obsessive didactics in the spirit of Kant categorical imperative, - all this suddenly collapsed under the onslaught of new trends. Their herald was Rousseau with his cry “Back to nature!” Along with the intellect with its responsibilities, a heart with its incalculable impulses was discovered in man. In the depths of the literary storehouse, under a layer of classicists, young writers, prompted by Rousseau, discovered the giant Shakespeare. They opened it and gasped at its “natural” power. "Shakespeare! Nature!" - young Goethe choked with delight in one of his first magazine articles. Compared to Shakespeare, their vaunted Enlightenment seemed so ugly one-sided to the turbulent geniuses.

Shakespeare's chronicles inspired Goethe to search for a plot from German history. The drama from the times of chivalry “Götz von Werlichengen” made the name of young Goethe extremely popular in Germany. For a long time, probably since the times of Hans Sachs and, perhaps, Grimmelshausen, German pietists have not known such wide recognition, such fame. And then Goethe’s poems began to appear in magazines and almanacs, which young ladies rushed to copy into their albums.

So in Wetzlar, where twenty-three-year-old Goethe arrived - at the patronage and insistence of his father - to serve in the imperial court, he appeared like an unexpected star. It was a small provincial, burgher-like cozy town a hundred miles north of Frankfurt, striking only for its disproportionately huge cathedral. This is how the town has remained to this day. But now the house of Amtman Buffa has been added to the cathedral and the former imperial court building as a tourist attraction. However, Goethe looked into the courthouse only once - the newly minted lawyer immediately realized that he would suffocate from boredom in the heap of office papers. More than a century would pass before another young lawyer, Kafka, saw with his “trimmed eyes” an attractive artistic object in such a bureaucratic monster and created his own “Castle”. The ardent, big man Goethe found a more attractive magnet - the young and charming daughter of the Amtmann, Lotta. So, passing the courthouse, the hapless official, but famous poet frequented Buff's house. Now in an endless suite of tiny rooms on three floors of this gothic house also, of course, a museum - “Goethe and His Age”.

Goethe's blood boiled easily even in old age, but here he was young, full of unspent strength, spoiled by universal success. It seemed that the provincial Lotte would be easily conquered, like her predecessor Frederica Brion, who had just been abandoned by Goethe in mutual tears in Strasbourg. But something bad happened. Lotte was engaged. Her chosen one, a certain Kestner, who diligently made a career in the same judicial department, was a positive person, but also quite ordinary. “Honest mediocrity” - as Thomas Mann described it. No match for the brilliant rival bon vivant who suddenly fell on his poor head. After hesitating, the sober girl Lotta, however, preferred the bird in her hands. After staying only a few months in Wetzlar, Goethe was forced to retreat - in desperate feelings, thinking about suicide. Several times he even poked himself in the chest with a dagger, but, apparently, not too persistently, more out of artistic interest.

The history of the creation of the novel “The Sorrows of Young Werther”

The tragic soil that nurtured The Sorrows of Young Werther was Wetzlar, the seat of the imperial court, where Goethe arrived in May 1772 at the request of his father, who dreamed of a brilliant legal career for his son. Having signed up as a practicing lawyer at the imperial court, Goethe did not look into the building of the court chamber. Instead, he visited the house of the amtman (that is, the manager of the vast economy of the Teutonic Order), where he was drawn by an ardent feeling for Charlotte, the eldest daughter of the owner, the bride of the secretary of the Hanoverian embassy, Johann Christian Kesgner, with whom Goethe maintained friendly relations.

On September 11 of the same 1772, Goethe, suddenly and without saying goodbye to anyone, left Wetzlar, deciding to escape from the ambiguous situation in which he found himself. A sincere friend of Kesgner, he became interested in his bride, and she did not remain indifferent to him. Each of the three knows this - most clearly, perhaps, the sober and intelligent Kästner, who is already ready to return the word she gave to Charlotte. But Goethe, although in love, although maddened, shies away from his friend’s generous sacrifice, which from him, Goethe, would require a reciprocal sacrifice - a renunciation of absolute freedom, without which he, a stormy genius, could not imagine his life just beginning to unfold. literary activity- his struggle with the wretched German reality. She was not reconciled with any kind of peace, any kind of structure of life.

The bitterness of separation from the lovely girl and the suffering of young Goethe were genuine. Goethe cut this tightly drawn knot. “He is gone, Kästner! When you receive these lines, know that he is gone...” - this is what Goethe wrote on the night before his flight from Wetzlar. - Now I am alone and have the right to cry. I leave you happy, but I will not stop living in your hearts."

“Werther,” said Goethe in his old age, “is also a creature that I, like a pelican, fed with the blood of my own heart.” All this is true, of course, but still does not give reason to see in Werther just a chapter of autobiography, arbitrarily equipped with a tragic ending with the suicide of a fictional hero. But Goethe did not to a small extent not Werther, no matter how the author endowed the hero with his own spiritual and spiritual qualities, including his own lyrical gift. The difference between the writer and the hero of the novel is not erased by the fact that “The Sorrows of Young Werther” is so densely saturated with episodes and moods taken from life itself, as it developed during Goethe’s stay in Wetzlar; The poet’s original letters, almost unchanged, also found their way into the text of the novel... All this “autobiographical material”, more abundantly presented in “Werther” than in Goethe’s other works, still remained only material that was organically included in the structure of the artistic and objective novel . In other words, “Werther” is a free poetic fiction, and not a wingless recreation of facts that are not subordinated to a single ideological and artistic concept.

But, not being Goethe's autobiography, "The Sorrows of Young Werther" can with all the more justification be called a characteristic, typical "history of his contemporary." The commonality between the author and his hero comes down, first of all, to the fact that both of them are sons of pre-revolutionary Europe of the 18th century, both are equally drawn into the stormy cycle of new thinking, which broke with the traditional ideas that dominated human consciousness throughout the Middle Ages until the late baroque. This struggle against dilapidated traditions of thinking and feeling covered the most diverse areas of spiritual culture. Everything was questioned and revised back then.

Goethe for a long time toyed with the idea of responding literary to everything he experienced in Wetzlar. The author of Werther connected the beginning of work on the novel with the moment he received news of the suicide of Jerusalem, whom he knew from Leipzig and Wetzlar. The plot seems to be general outline took shape right then. But Goethe began writing the novel only on February 1, 1774. "Werther" was written extremely quickly. In the spring of that year it was already completed.

From life, from his expanded experience, Goethe drew other traits. Thus, he assigned the blue-eyed Charlotte the black eyes of Maximiliana Brentano, née von Laroche, with whom he maintained loving and friendly relations in Frankfurt; This is how he brought into the image of Albert the unattractive features of Maximiliana’s rude husband.

Werther's letters do not consist only of sorrowful lamentations. Out of his own needs and in accordance with Wilhelm’s wishes, some of his letters are narrative in nature. This is how the scenes that played out in the old man's house arose. Or the sharply satirical depiction of the arrogant aristocratic nobility at the beginning of the second part of the novel.

“The Sorrows of Young Werther,” as it is said, is a novel in letters, a genre characteristic of the literature of the 18th century. But while in the novels of Richardson and Rousseau the common narrative thread is woven by a number of correspondents and the letter of one character continues the letter of another, in Werther everything is written by one hand, the hand of the title character (minus the postscript of the “publisher”). This gives the novel a purely lyrical and monological quality, and this also allows the novelist to follow step by step the growth of the emotional drama of the ill-fated young man.

“The Sorrows of Young Werther” is a novel that defined a whole movement in literature - sentimentalism. Many creators, inspired by his success, also began to turn away from the strict tenets of classicism and the dry rationalism of the Enlightenment. Their attention was focused on the experiences of weak and rejected people, and not on heroes like Robinson Crusoe. Goethe himself did not abuse the feelings of his readers and went further than his discovery, exhausting the topic with just one work that became famous throughout the world.

The writer allowed himself to reflect personal experiences in literature. The history of the creation of the novel “The Sorrows of Young Werther” takes us into autobiographical motives. While practicing law in the office of the imperial court of Wetzlar, Goethe met Charlotte Buff, who became the prototype of Lotte S. in the work. The author creates the controversial Werther in order to get rid of the torment inspired by his platonic love for Charlotte. The suicide of the book's protagonist can also be explained by the death of Goethe's friend Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem, who suffered from a passion for married woman. It is interesting that Goethe himself got rid of suicidal thoughts, giving the opposite fate to his character, thereby curing himself with creativity.

I wrote Werther so as not to become Werther

The first edition of the novel was published in 1774, and Goethe became the idol of reading youth. The work brings literary success to the author, and he becomes famous throughout Europe. However, the scandalous fame soon served as the reason for a ban on the distribution of the book, which provoked a lot of people to commit suicide. The writer himself did not suspect that his creation would inspire readers to such a desperate act, but the fact remains that suicides became more frequent after the publication of the novel. The star-crossed lovers even imitated the way the character dealt with himself, leading American sociologist David Phillips to call this phenomenon the “Werther effect.” Before Goethe's novel, literary heroes also took their own lives, but readers did not try to imitate them. The reason for the backlash was the psychology of suicide in the book. The novel contains a justification for this act, which is explained by the fact that in this way the young man will get rid of unbearable torment. In order to stop the wave of violence, the author had to write a preface in which he tries to convince the audience that the hero is wrong and his action is not a way out of a difficult situation.

What is this book about?

The plot of Goethe's novel is indecently simple, but the whole of Europe was reading this book. Main character Werther suffers from love for the married Charlotte S., and, realizing the hopelessness of his feelings, he considers it necessary to get rid of the torment by shooting himself. Readers cried over the fate of the unfortunate young man, sympathizing with the character as with themselves. Unhappy love is not the only thing that brought him difficult emotional experiences. He also suffers from discord with society, which also reminds him of his burgher origin. But it is the collapse of love that pushes him to suicide.

The main characters and their characteristics

Werther is a good draftsman, a poet, and he is endowed with great knowledge. Love for him is the triumph of life. At first, meetings with Charlotte bring him happiness for a while, but, realizing the hopelessness of his feelings, he perceives the world around him differently and falls into melancholy. The hero loves nature, beauty and harmony in it, which is so lacking for someone who has lost naturalness modern society. Sometimes his hopes awaken, but over time, thoughts of suicide increasingly take possession of him. In the last meeting with Lotte, Werther convinces himself that they will be together in heaven.
No less interesting is the image of Charlotte S. in the work. Knowing about Werther's feelings, she sincerely sympathizes with him and advises him to find love and travel. She is reserved and calm, which leads the reader to think that the sensible Albert, her husband, is more suitable for her. Lotte is not indifferent to Werther, but she chooses duty. Female image it’s also feminine, because it’s too contradictory - you can feel a certain pretense on the part of the heroine and her secret desire to keep a fan for herself.

Genre and direction

Epistolary genre (novel in letters) – great way demonstrate to the reader inner world Main character. Thus, we can feel all of Werther’s pain, literally look at the world through his eyes. It is no coincidence that the novel belongs to the direction of sentimentalism. Sentimentalism, which originated in the 18th century, did not last long as an era, but managed to play a significant role in history and art. The ability to freely express your feelings is the main advantage of the direction. Nature also plays an important role, reflecting the state of the characters.

Issues

The theme of unrequited love is quite relevant in our time, although now, of course, it is difficult to imagine that, reading “The Sorrows of Young Werther,” we will cry over this book, as Goethe’s contemporaries did. The hero seems to be made of tears, now you even want to squeeze him out like a rag, slap him in the face and say: “You’re a man!” Pull yourself together!” - but in the era of sentimentalism, readers shared his grief and suffered with him. The problem of unhappy love certainly comes to the fore in the work, and Werther proves this without hiding his emotions.
The problem of choosing between duty and feeling also takes place in the novel, because it would be wrong to say that Lotte does not consider Werther as a man. She has tender feelings for him, would like to consider him a brother, but prefers loyalty to Albert. It is not at all surprising that the death of Lott’s friend and Albert himself are taking it hard.
The author also raises the problem of loneliness. In the novel, nature is idealized in comparison with civilization, so Werther is lonely in a false, absurd and insignificant society that cannot be compared with the nature of the world around him. Of course, maybe the hero puts forward too high demands on reality, but class prejudices in it are too strong, so it’s not easy for a person of low origin.

The meaning of the novel

By putting his experiences on paper, Goethe saved himself from suicide, although he admitted that he was afraid to reread his own work, so as not to fall into that terrible blues again. Therefore, the idea of the novel “The Sorrows of Young Werther” is, first of all, important for the writer himself. For the reader, of course, it will be important to understand that Werther’s exit is not an option, and there is no need to follow the example of the protagonist. However, we still have something to learn from a sentimental character - sincerity. He is true to his feelings and pure in love.

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