The German-Russian utopia of Thomas Mann (“Goethe and Tolstoy”)

The article deals with the historical and literary sketch of Thomas Mann “Goethe and Tolstoy. Fragments to the problem of humanism” (1921-1932) is an expressive example of the 20th century German essays, the last desperate attempt to revive the humanistic tradition on the eve of the Nazi coup. Interpreting the facts of Tolstoy’s personal and literary biography against the backdrop of Goethe’s life and creativity, T. Mann does not aim at scientific objectivity. His book is not a scientific study, but a sample of syncretic philosophical prose in which empirical material is projected onto existential universals, and the idea as an image principle merges with an art form. Tolstoy and Goethe (like the contrasting pair Schiller-Dostoevsky) receive from T. Mann the function of “personnages conceptuels” (G. Deleuze, F. Guattari), who ensure the development of author’s thought. The names of the historical figures they carry are largely conditional, their connection is not closer than the connection between the literary hero and his real prototype. The art of the psychological portrait, vivid narrative episodes, the paradoxical nature of philosophical argumentation, the self-willed interpretation of abundant quotations - all serve to Mann as a means of creating an artistic and ideological construction that transforms the antithesis of barbarous Russia and civilized Europe into a super-national myth of Western-Eastern cultural synthesis. The bearing element of this construction is the neo-Christianity of D.S. Merezhkovsky, in which T. Mann learns the legacy of classical German culture. The ideological meeting of T. Mann with Merezhkovsky takes place in a general methodological field, limited, on the one hand, from the traditional historical-genetic study of literary facts, on the other hand, from the philological analysis of the text as a pure artistic form. Like Merezhkovsky, T. Mann sees his task in creating a holistic image of the artist’s creative personality, which is a fusion of his personal biographical experiences and epochal sense of life, the poetics of his works and the spiritual experience of their interpreter.