Brief biography of Gotthold Lesing. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. Biography and review of creativity Materials from the encyclopedia "The World Around Us" were used

He studied theology at the University of Leipzig (1746-1748), medicine at the University of Wittenberg (1748; 1751-1752). From 1748 he lived in Berlin, where in 1751-1755 he worked for the newspaper Vossische Zeitung. In 1754-1758, the magazine “Theat-ral-naya bib-lio-te-ka” (“Theatra-lische Bib-liothek”) was published in Leipzig. In 1760-1765 he served as sec-re-ta-rem of the governor of Si-le-zia, the Prussian general von Tau-en-tsin in the city of Bres-lau (now Wrotz -lav). In 1767-1769, the leading dramatist of the National Theater in Hamburg. Since 1770, Lessing held the position of bib-lio-te-ka-rya of Bra-un-Schweig-skogo-duke-ga in the city of Wol-fen-buttel.

The largest representative of the German Enlightenment. De-bu-ti-ro-val class-si-ci-stic co-me-di-ey in the spirit of I.K. Got-she-da “The Young Scientist” (“Der junge Gelehrte”, staged in 1748, published in 1754), for which there were tears -media “The Jews” (“Die Juden”, staged in 1749, published in 1754) and “Der Freigeist” (“Der Freigeist”, staged in 1749, published in 1755 ), a collection of anak-re-on-ti-che-skoy poetry “No-deal-ki” (“Klei-ni-g-keiten”, 1751). The author of the first German bourgeois drama is “Miss Sara Sampson” (“Miß Sara Sampson”, staged and published in 1755). In 1758, together with K.F. Ni-ko-lai and fi-lo-so-fom M. Men-del-so-nom os-no-val literary magazine “Letter-ma about new-vey-shey li-te-ra-tu-re” ( “Briefe, die neueste Literatur bet-ref-fend”, 1759-1765), in which he turned against the French class-si-tsiz-ma and his German after-to-va-te-la Got-she-da.

In the treatise “Lao-ko-on, or About the borders of life and poetry” (“Laokoon, oder Über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie”, 1766) you stepped on the popular theory of poetry at that time as “speaking of life,” as head of the principal differences in poetry and visual arts: poetry represents “action” (so-by- tia in time), and visual arts - “bodies with their vi-di-we-mi-st-va-mi” (objects in space); you-re-crea-tive possi- bilities in the poetry of shi-re - she “are capable of such beauties, which have never been achieved before” tig-nut zhi-vo-pi-si" (unlike the following, poetry can depict and "imageless" without damage to the essence -the-the-te-feeling - for example, Lao-ko-on screaming from pain in Ver-gil-liy). In the cycle of theater reviews “Hamburg-gische Dramaturgie”, Bd 1-2, 1767-1769, according to -we-have-lived the experience of Lessing's struggle against for-the-power of French plays in the re-per-toi-re of the Ham-burg National Theatre, proposed-lo-lived program for the creation of German national drama-turgy. Lessing cr-ti-ku-et baroque “tra-ge-dia mu-che-ni-che-st-va” (Märtyrerdrama), favored by U. Scheck -slee-ru in front of Vol-te-rom, considers tragedy as a means of morality. From ari-sto-te-lev-skogo op-re-de-le-niya ka-tar-si-sa Lessing eli-mi-ni-ro-val po-nya-tie fear-ha and op-re -de-lil tra-ge-dia in a pro-light spirit as “this is the pro-iz-de-de-nie that causes compassion". Instead of the class-si-cy-stic “three unities” (see Three unities theory), Lessing put forward the principles of shi-ro-ko in no way unity -va de-st-viya and prav-do-po-do-biya, demanding the representation of rights-di-vy, “mixed” ha-rak-te-rov, and not conventional “hero-es” and “evil-de-ev”.

Lessing's theoretical views were embodied in the comedy ha-rak-te-rov “Min-na von Barnhelm, or the Soldier's Happiness” "("Minna von Barnhelm, oder Das Soldatenglück", staged and published in 1767), depicting the conflict of love and honor against the background of the Se-mi- summer war of 1756-1763, as well as in the tragedy “Emilia Galot-ti” (“Emilia Galot-ti”, staged and published in 1772), where the ro-ic plot from Ti-ta Livius about the Roman Vir-gi-nii and Ti-ra-ne Appia Claudia is-tol-ko-van as a drama without rights -no-go-lo-same-personality in a small feudal state-su-dar-st-ve. In the dramatic poem “Nathan the Wise” (“Nathan der Weise”, 1779), his spiritual statement, Lessing re-shi-tel- but you stood against religious intolerance. The parable of the three rings (za-im-st-vo-va-na from “De-ka-me-ro-na” by J. Bok-kach-cho), ras-say-zy-va-e -may, on behalf of the Jew Na-ta-na (Men-del-son served as his pro-tip), you express the idea of a common one for everything man-o-ve-che-st-va of the es-te-st-ven-noy re-li-giya gu-ma-niz-ma, to which all the worlds go back re-li-gies. Lessing for-ni-ma-et at-mi-ri-tel-nu-zi-tion between re-li-gi-ey ra-zu-ma and re-li-gi-ey from-cro -ve-niya, looking at the Bible as a historical stage on the way to the general-human “Evangelical ra- zu-ma." In his philosophical attitude, Lessing is close to Spy-no-ze - his ethos of “free man” and the idea of “es-te-st- vein re-li-gy.”

Among other works: bass in prose (“Fa-beln”, Bd 1-3, 1759; 2. Aufl., 1777), works on the theory -logia and phi-lo-so-phia mo-ra-li [dialogue “Ernst and Falk” (“Ernst und Falk”, Tl 1-2, 1778-1780); tract-tat “Recollection of the human race” (“Er-ziehung des Men-schen-ge-s-chlechts”, 1780, not finished) na)], re-re-vo-dy pro-iz-ve-de-ny Vol-te-ra, De-tu-sha, D. Di-d-ro. The work of Lessing, about-the-spirit-of-the-light of free-thought, cri-ti-ki and la-le- Mi-ki, you were so appreciative I.V. Goe-te, I.G. Ger-de-rom, F. Shle-ge-lem; in Russia N.G. showed special interest in Lessing. Cher-ny-shev-sky.

Essays:

Sämtliche Schriften/Hrsg. K. La-chmann, F. Muncker. Stuttg.;

Lpz., 1886-1924. Bd 1-23. B., 1968. Bd 1-23;

Collected works. 2nd edition. St. Petersburg, 1904. Volumes 1-10;

Hamburg drama-ma-tur-gy. M.; L., 1936;

Lao-ko-on, or About the borders of life and poetry. M., 1957;

Werke/Hrsg. H. G. Göp-fert u. a. Münch., 1970-1979. Bd 1-8;

Dramas. Bass in prose. M., 1972

Lessing Gotthold Ephraim (1729-1781)

German critic and playwright. In the 18th century together with I.V. Goethe and F. Schiller became the creator of the golden age of German literature.

Born on January 22, 1729 in Kamenz (Saxony) in the family of a Lutheran pastor. In 1746 he entered the theological faculty of the University of Leipzig, but his passion for ancient literature and theater left little time for theological studies. He actively participated in the work of the theater troupe founded by actress Caroline Neuber, who subsequently staged his first dramatic work, the comedy “The Young Scientist.”

Lessing spent the next three years in Berlin, trying to earn a living as a penman. He succeeded as a critic and writer, for some time he published a quarterly magazine on theater issues, wrote critical articles for the Vossische Zeitung, translated plays and created a number of original dramatic works.

In 1760, Lessing moved to Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland) and became secretary to the military governor of Silesia, General Tauentzin. Here he mainly collected material for Laocoon, studied Spinoza and the history of early Christianity, and also began work on his best comedy, Minna von Barnhelm. In 1767, Lessing took up the post of critic and literary consultant at the German National Theater, which had just been created in Hamburg. In 1772, Lessing published the most significant of his dramas, Emilia Galotti.

He later returned to the stage once again, writing the "dramatic poem" Nathan the Wise, the most popular of all his plays. In 1780, Lessing published the essay “The Education of the Human Race.” After the collapse of the National Theater and the publishing house, which the writer founded in Hamburg together with I.K. Water, Lessing took up the post of librarian in Wolfenbüttel (Braunschweig).

With the exception of nine months (1775-1776), when he accompanied Prince Leopold of Brunswick on a trip to Italy, Lessing spent the rest of his life in Wolfenbüttel, where he died in 1781.

Gottgold Ephraim Lessing

(Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, 1729—1781)

Leading position in the literary life of Germany in the 60s. Lessing occupies. His literary activity was versatile and fruitful. He is a talented critic, art theorist, and writer. Lessing brought literature closer to life, gave it a social orientation, and turned it into a means of socio-political and spiritual liberation of the people from feudal-serf oppression. N. G. Chernyshevsky wrote: “Lessing was the main one in the first generation of those figures whom historical necessity called upon to revive his homeland. He was the father of new German literature. He ruled over her with dictatorial power. All the most significant of the subsequent German writers, even Schiller, even Goethe himself in the best era of his activity, were his students" 1 .

Lessing was a militant, revolutionary educator. From the standpoint of reason, from the point of view of the interests of the oppressed layers of German society, he criticized the despotism of the princes, the timid German burghers who had lost faith in their strength, advocated for the national unification of the country, preached the ideas of humanism, sacrificial, heroic service to the ideals of freedom. His work was folk, national in spirit. It raised questions vital to the development of the German nation.

Lessing was born in Saxony. His father was a poor pastor, burdened with a large family. Lessing received his education at the princely school in Meissen, being on a meager princely allowance. His successes in the study of Latin and ancient Greek were especially great. Subsequently, Lessing would become a brilliant expert on antiquity, an outstanding philologist of the 18th century, who amazed his contemporaries with his extensive knowledge in the field of ancient and modern philology.

In 1746, Lessing was a student at the University of Leipzig. At the insistence of his father, he enters the theological faculty. However, the prospect of becoming a pastor does not appeal to him much. The young man has other interests. The gift of creativity awakened in him. Just at this time, a troupe of traveling actors under the direction of Caroline Neuber was touring in Leipzig. Lessing is fascinated by theatrical life. He becomes his own man in a noisy artistic environment, performs in the theater as a performer of various roles, and tries his hand as a playwright.

In 1748, Lessing moved to Berlin, the capital of Prussia. During the Berlin period of his life (1748-1760), he developed as a critic defending advanced aesthetic ideas. As a literary reviewer, Lessing collaborates with the Deutsche Privilegierte Zeitung, which received the name Voss Newspaper after its publisher. He lives by literary work, becoming the first professional critic in Germany. Lessing prefers the half-starved life of a literary day laborer, cruelly exploited by publishers, but enjoying relative freedom in defending his beliefs, to depending on the will and whim of a patron of the arts.

In the 50s Lessing is a propagandist of educational ideas and a defender of the new, burgher direction in German literature. In his reviews, he popularizes English and French educators - the novels of Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett. He is attracted to art related to real life, which truthfully reflects the inner world of middle-class people.

Lessing's authority as a critic is growing rapidly. He wins sympathy with his integrity and unparalleled scholarship for his age (review essays in the Vossovaya Gazeta, Wademekum for Mr. Pastor Lange, etc.).

A monument to Lessing's critical activity in the 50s. is the journal “Letters on Modern Literature” (Briefe, die neueste Literatur beireffend, 1759-1765), which he published jointly with the Berlin bookseller Nicolai and the enlightenment philosopher Mendelssohn. As a writer, Lessing published in the 50s. Anacreontic poems, fables, his first tragedy “Miss Sara Sampson” (Miss Sara Sampson, 1755).

In 1760, Lessig moved from Berlin to Breslau, taking up the post of secretary of General Tauentsin, the military governor of Silesia. The Breslau period of Lessing's life (1760-1765) turned out to be unusually fruitful creatively. At this time, Laokoon (Laokoon, oder über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie, 1766) was completed, where the basic principles of Enlightenment realism were theoretically substantiated. The result of Lessig's observations of the life of German society during the Seven Years' War was the realistic comedy Minna von Barnhelm (1767).

In 1765 Lessing returned to Berlin, where he lived for about two years. The days of half-starvation began to flow again. Lessing cannot find a job he likes and lives on odd jobs. Finally, happiness smiled on him. In 1765, the first permanent theater in Germany was founded in Hamburg, and Lessing was invited by its director to the position of theater critic. His responsibility was to evaluate the repertoire and analyze the actors' performances. Lessing eagerly took up the task. His numerous theater reviews compiled Hamburg Dramaturgy (Hamburgische Dramaturgic, 1767-1768), the critic’s most important theoretical work after Laocoon.

After the closure of the Hamburg Theater in 1770, Lessing moved to Wolfenbüttel (Duchy of Brunswick) to manage the Duke's rich library. Here Lessing completes Emilia Galoiti (1772), the first German social tragedy, writes a number of scholarly works, and conducts heated polemics on religious issues with the Hamburg pastor Goeze. These polemical articles made up a whole collection “Anti-Goetze” (Anti-Goetze, 1778). In 1779, Lessing published the drama Nathan the Wise (Nathan der Weise), directed against religious fanaticism. His philosophical treatise “The Education of the Human Race” (Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts, 1780) is dedicated to the defense of the ideas of humanism.

Lessing died at the age of 52.

One of Lessing's merits was that he introduced the spirit of social protest into German literature. The critical beginning is noticeable already in his youthful comedies. Thus, in “The Young Scientist” (Der junge Gelehrle, 1747), in the person of Damis, he ridicules scholastic scholarship and brings up for discussion a topic that had serious social significance; in “The Jews” (Die Juden, 1749) he opposes religious fanaticism; in “The Freethinker” (Der Freigeist, 1749), in the image of Adrast, he sneers at those who, succumbing to fashion, play at freethinking, while in reality they are afraid of freethinkers. The sketch of Lessing's tragedy “Samuel Genzi” dates back to the end of the 40s, which testifies to the freedom-loving sentiments of the author.

Lessing enters literature as a writer of a democratic way of thinking. He writes for people of his own, democratic circle. His democratic sympathies especially strengthened in the mid-50s, when he set himself the task of creating not only a comedy, but also a tragedy that was close and understandable to the people. He is not satisfied with the tragic works of French and German classicists. It seems cold and lifeless to him. Lessing sees the reason for this coldness in the fact that the playwrights of classicism, in search of material for their works, went into antiquity, into the distant historical past, ignoring living modernity and the democratic strata of society. As a rule, their role of positive heroes was government officials (kings, generals, dignitaries, etc.), whom they endowed with sublime feelings, extraordinary, strong passions, which made them unlike ordinary people and thereby reduced the power of influence on the democratic viewer. Lessing seeks to reform the tragic genre. True art, in his opinion, should excite people, and for this it is necessary to democratize the theater - introduce into it a hero from the people's environment, endow him with positive traits, force him to act in situations that are close and understandable to the people. Then the tragic character will evoke a feeling of deep compassion.

The purpose of tragedy, according to Lessing in the 50s, is to educate people in a humanistic spirit, to make them responsive to the grief of others. If the classicist theater (Gottsched and his followers) formed “citizens” for whom accepting death was as easy as drinking a glass of water, then the young Lessing sets a completely different task for the tragic genre - to educate “man”. He views art primarily as a school of humanism.

Lessing's dramatic views of this period were embodied in the tragedy "Miss Sarah Sampson". The very fact that Lessing turned to a tragic topic indicates certain shifts in his socio-political consciousness. In his first dramatic experiments, events usually unfolded within the boundaries of one social environment and were thus devoid of social urgency. In Miss Sarah, people from different social classes are drawn into the conflict. It is based on how the high-society whip Mellefont seduces the gullible burgher girl Sarah. The burgher honesty in the play is contrasted with the corruption of people in the aristocratic circle. Consequently, the opposition has a certain social character, although it affects only the sphere of moral family relations.

The tragedy takes place in a hotel where Mellefont is hiding along with the girl he abducted. Here the lovers are overtaken by Sir William, Sarah's father, who was helped to get on the trail of the fugitives by Marwood, Mellefont's lover in the recent past. Sir William forgives his daughter, he is not against her marriage to Mellefont, but events take a tragic turn thanks to the intervention of Marwood. Tormented by jealousy and burning with vengeance, she poisons Sarah. Mellefont, suffering from remorse, pierces his chest with a dagger.

In his tragedy, Lessing strives, first of all, to show the spiritual and moral greatness of a middle-class man, his superiority over an aristocrat. Sarah captivated the audience with the purity and nobility of her motives. The sensitive audience shed streams of tears during the performance of the play. Lessing's heroine concentrated all those moral virtues (humanity, kindness, compassion, etc.) that the German burghers defended, fighting against inhumane feudal morality. The tragedy contributed to the awakening of the moral self-awareness of the German bourgeoisie, and this was its considerable social significance.

At the same time, the play excluded an active struggle against inhuman forms of life. The magnanimous, humane hero of burgher literature demonstrated his moral “greatness”, humbly bearing the yoke of political and social slavery. In his further work, Lessing strives to overcome the weaknesses of burgher humanism of the 50s. - his passivity, sentimentality. He sets himself the task of introducing into the drama a strong-willed citizen who resists the unfavorable circumstances of life, but without losing simple human traits. Lessing 60-70s. struggles to combine both “human” and “civilian” qualities in one hero.

Speaking against the passive-humanistic, sentimental sentiments widespread among the burghers of the 18th century, Lessing decided on a matter of great historical importance. The social passivity of the burghers and other democratic strata of German society prevented them from launching active actions against the feudal-absolutist order for the economic and spiritual liberation of the German people. Engels, in a letter to V. Borgius, notes that “... the mortal fatigue and powerlessness of the German tradesman, caused by the pitiful economic situation of Germany in the period from 1648 to 1830 and expressed first in pietism, then in sentimentality and in slavish groveling before the princes and the Nobility , did not remain without influence on the economy. This was one of the greatest obstacles to a new rise." 2

The struggle for citizenship and the high ideological nature of art, which Lessing undertook, simultaneously raised his work in aesthetic and artistic terms. It made it possible to introduce into literature a hero who is internally contradictory, psychologically complex, and combines various traits.

Lessing's new approach to solving ideological and aesthetic issues is found in the journal Letters on Contemporary Literature. There is already a clear tendency here to bring art even closer to life. Lessing shows the fatality of imitation of foreign authors. He talks about the need to reproduce reality, criticizes those writers who, tearing themselves away from the earth, are carried into the “heavenly spheres.” Lessing considers the work of ancient playwrights to be an example of expressiveness and truthfulness. He also passionately promotes Shakespeare's theater, declaring the creator of Hamlet a creative successor to the traditions of ancient drama. Lessing sharply criticizes the classicists (Gottsched and Corneille), emphasizing that they moved away from the ancient masters, although they sought to imitate them in observing the rules of play construction (17th letter, 1759). In "Letters on Modern Literature" Lessing already fights for realism. He points out that artistic fulness is achieved by those writers who proceed in their work from reality, and do not turn the image into a means of promoting moral truths. In his 63rd letter (1759), Lessng subjected Wieland's play Lady Johanna Gray to devastating criticism, in which its author set himself the goal of "depicting in a touching manner the greatness, beauty and heroism of virtues." Such a plan, as Lessing further proves, had a detrimental effect on the heroes of the work. “Most of them,” he writes, “are good from a moral point of view, why is it sad for a poet like Mr. Wieland if they are bad from a poetic point of view.”

The review of “Lady Johanna Gray” is evidence of great progress in Lessing’s aesthetic views: after all, he built “Miss Sarah Sampson” based, like Wieland, on a moral task, turning the heroes into personifications of certain moral truths. And the result was the same as Wieland’s - schematism and one-linearity of the characters.

A significant phenomenon in the literary life of Germany was Lessing’s “Fables” (Fabeln), published in 1759. They have a pronounced democratic orientation. Approaching the solution of the issue primarily as an educator, Lessing demands from the fabulist not entertainment, but teaching.

Lessing's fables are not equal in ideological and artistic terms. In many fables, universal human vices are ridiculed - vanity, stupidity, etc., and therefore they are devoid of social originality and are distinguished by abstractness. But in some cases, Lessing exposes specific vices of German society. He mocks the passion of Gottsched and his followers for imitating foreign models (“The Monkey and the Fox” - Der Affe und der Fuchs); ridicules the boastfulness of mediocre poets who claim their ability to fly into the heavens, but cannot tear themselves away from the sinful earth (“The Ostrich” - Der Straup); denounces the arrogance of German feudal lords, which turns into cowardice in the face of a brave enemy (“The Warlike Wolf” - Der kriegerische Wolf); criticizes the boundless tyranny of princes who exterminate their subjects with impunity, both those who agree and those who do not agree with their way of government (“The Water Snake” - Die Wasserschlange). In the fable “The Donkeys” (Die Esel), the subject of ridicule is the burghers, their patience and thick skin.

Following the traditions of Aesop and Phaedrus, Lessing wrote fables in prose, striving for simplicity of expression of the concept, for maximum nakedness of the idea.

In the 60s Lessing develops the theory of realism, struggles to depict life as it is, with all its comic and tragic sides. He sees the task of a writer not to illustrate certain concepts and ideas in images, but to “imitate nature,” truthfully revealing its essence.

A profound development of the principles of realistic art was carried out by Lessing in his remarkable treatise “Laocoon, or On the Boundaries of Painting and Poetry.” The critic's approach to solving theoretical issues is noteworthy. He solves them not abstractly, but based on the requests of the democratic mass of society. There are elements of historicism in his views.

As a spokesman for the interests of the people, Lessing seeks to overthrow the aesthetic norms established in European and German literature during the period of the dominance of classicism and reflecting the tastes of the privileged classes. The classicists thought metaphysically, ahistorically. They believed that there was an absolute, time-independent ideal of beauty, which was perfectly embodied in the works of ancient artists (Homer, Phidias, Aeschylus, Sophocles, etc.). From this they concluded that it was necessary to imitate ancient models. Thus, art was divorced from the direct reproduction of modernity. He was charged with depicting, first of all, the sublime, beautiful phenomena of life. The ugly was relegated to the periphery of artistic creativity. This was precisely the nature of the aesthetic teaching of Boileau and his like-minded people, in which Moliere’s realistic comedy, everything that was aimed at debunking the ugly phenomena of feudal-monarchical society, had no place. It was necessary to smash this dogmatic theory, which was hindering the development of realistic art, and for this it was necessary to open wide the doors of the “temple of aesthetics”, sweep away the dust of metaphysical, ahistorical ideas that had accumulated in it. It was necessary to prove that aesthetic tastes and ideals are a moving phenomenon, changing depending on the changes that take place in the history of mankind. What was the norm for one era loses its normativity in another. Lessing turned out to be the theorist who had to solve this historical problem, and he solved it with great brilliance.

To substantiate his historical view of art, Lessing had to enter into polemics with Winckelmann, who defended aesthetic views in his works that were close to classicism. Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768) was a passionate promoter of the artistic achievements of antiquity, especially Ancient Greece. In his articles and in his main work, “The History of Ancient Art” (Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums, 1764), he seeks to reveal the reasons that determined the unprecedented flowering of culture in Hellas. He sees it in the free, democratic system of the ancient Greek city-states, which stimulated the development of sports games and competitions, as a result of which Hellenic sculptors were able to often observe the contours of a harmoniously built human body. From direct observations, the ideal of a physically perfect person arose in their imagination, which they sought to capture in their work. Greek sculptors did not allow anything disharmonious or imperfect into their works; they cut off everything that was individually unique. “The prototype,” writes Winckelmann, “became for them the spiritual nature created only by reason.”

The creative principle applied in ancient Greece, and only in the visual arts, Winckelmann tries, firstly, to extend to all forms of creativity and, secondly, to transplant it onto the soil of modernity without any modifications. Here he departs from the historical view of aesthetics and closes his views with the classicists.

Like Boileau and Gottsched, Winckelmann prevents the ugly from entering art, including poetry. Despite the fact that European society has undergone serious changes since antiquity, he calls for imitation of ancient artists, that is, he focuses on depicting only the beautiful phenomena of life. “The only way for us to become great and, if possible, inimitable,” he declares, “is to imitate the ancients.”

Winckelmann's aesthetics led the modern writer away from disharmonious modernity into the ideally harmonious world of antiquity. It could not serve as a theoretical basis for the art of modern times and therefore aroused Lessing’s critical attitude towards itself. The author of Laocoon proves the illegality of transferring the aesthetic laws of antiquity to the modern era. In Ancient Greece, in his opinion, poetry was ideal due to the ideal nature of life, characterized by harmony. In modern Germany, oma must be real, since reality has become replete with contradictions. The ugliness took a dominant position in it, and “beauty is only a small particle.” Therefore, the modern writer is faced with the task of depicting life as it is, and not just its beautiful phenomena. “Art in modern times,” writes Lessing, “has expanded its boundaries enormously. It now imitates all visible nature. Truth and expressiveness are his main laws.”

This remarkable position testifies to the materialistic nature of Lessing's aesthetic thinking. The critic correctly addresses the basic question of aesthetics. The main thing for an artist, in his opinion, is to truthfully reflect life - this is the only path to great artistic success. Guided by the law of truthfulness, he gains access to the most unaesthetic phenomena of reality. “... Thanks to truth and expressiveness,” writes Lessing, “the most disgusting in nature turns into the beautiful in art.” Thus, the author of Laocoon comes close to understanding the decisive role of generalization in the artistic exploration of the world.

But Lessing had to determine not only the main task of art, but also decide which of its types could most successfully fulfill it. Through comparative analysis, he comes to the conclusion that poetic creativity has the greatest potential for a broad and truthful depiction of life. Laocoon is a treatise written in defense not only of the realistic method, but also of poetry. Lessing convincingly proves that only poetry is capable of reflecting Reality in all its contradictions. The painter and sculptor, in his opinion, take only one moment from life, reproduce the object as if in a frozen state. They are unable to depict this or that phenomenon in development. In support of his thought, Lessing examines the sculptural group “Laocoon,” which depicts a Greek priest and his two sons being strangled by snakes. He asks himself the question why Laocoon does not scream, but only emits a muffled groan? Winckelmann explained this circumstance by the fact that the ancient Greeks were stoics and knew how to suppress their suffering, therefore “noble simplicity and calm grandeur” reign in the works of Greek fine art and plastic arts.

Lessing takes a completely different view. He explains Laocoön’s restraint in expressing suffering not by the insensibility or stoicism of the ancient Hellenes, but by their aesthetic views. They depicted human experiences only to the extent of their aesthetics. They took everything ugly beyond the bounds of art. “Applying what has been said to Laocoon,” writes Lessing, “we will find the explanation we are looking for: the artist strives to depict the highest beauty associated with bodily pain.” Considering that a scream can unpleasantly distort a face, the sculptor turned it into a groan.

Lessing also connects this circumstance with the limited possibilities of sculpture as a spatial art. It cannot depict the same phenomenon from different angles. The authors of the sculptural group “Laocoon” wanted to capture the courage of the priest. Therefore, they could not show him screaming, since this would contradict the idea of the work and would remove the heroic features inherent in the image of Laocoon. Poetry, as Lessing proves, has incomparably greater potential than painting and sculpture. This is a temporary art that deals with actions. Poetry is able to depict a particular subject from different sides, to show a person’s feelings in development. Nothing forces the poet, Lessing points out, “to limit what is depicted in the picture to one moment. He takes, if he can, every action at its very beginning and brings it, changing it in every possible way, to the end.”

In European aesthetics, since the time of Horace, the thesis has been considered infallible: “poetry is like painting.” Lessing was the first to draw a clear line of demarcation between them. His conclusions were of not only theoretical but also practical interest. In the 18th century There were many artists who did not take into account the specific capabilities of this or that type of art and made serious creative mistakes. Thus, in German literature, for example, descriptive poetry flourished (Haller and others), although it could not successfully compete with painting in the description of nature. On the other hand, some writers were like sculptors, creating images of internally unilinear heroes, built on the principle of the dominance of one passion. Lessing discovers such shortcomings in classicist tragedy.

Lessing's fruitful ideas were highly appreciated in literary circles in Germany and throughout Europe. Goethe, in the VIII book of his autobiography, well conveys the delight with which the appearance of “Laocoon” was greeted by progressive-minded German youth, who were looking for new ways to develop literature. “You have to turn into a young man,” wrote Goethe, “to understand what an amazing impression Lessing made on us with his Laokoop, moving our mind from the area of foggy and sad contemplations to the bright and free world of thought. What was previously misunderstood at pictura poesis (“poetry is like painting.”—N.G.) was cast aside, and the difference between visible form and audible speech was explained. The artist must stay within the boundaries of beauty, while the poet... is allowed to enter the sphere of reality. These beautiful thoughts illuminated our concepts like a ray of lightning.”

Laocoon was also a step forward in developing the problem of the positive hero. Rejecting the “insensitive”, “sculptural”, reminiscent of a “marble statue” characters of the classicist tragedy, Lessing of the 60s. Nor did he accept the “sensitive” Johanna Gray Wieland. In both cases, he is not satisfied with the monolinearity and schematism of the image. Lessing calls on contemporary playwrights to introduce into dramaturgy a hero who is psychologically complex, combining “human” and “civil” principles. As a model, he points to Philoctetes in Sophocles, in whom heroism and ordinariness are synthesized. Philoctetes suffers from an unhealed wound, filling the deserted island with cries of pain; there is nothing stoic about him, but he is ready to continue to suffer, but not to give up his convictions. Philoctetes combines the heroic spirit with feelings characteristic of ordinary people. “His groans,” writes Lessing, “belong to a man, and his actions belong to a hero. From both of these together the image of a hero is formed - a man who is neither pampered nor insensitive, but is one or the other depending on whether he yields to the demands of nature or obeys the voice of his convictions and duty. He represents the highest ideal to which wisdom can lead and which art has ever imitated.” Highly appreciating heroism from a social point of view, Lessing rejects it from an aesthetic point of view: it is not theatrical, because it is associated with the suppression of natural passions. The critic does not accept “sensitivity” either, because, while advantageous on stage, it is completely unacceptable to him on a social level. Lessing the educator is a resolute opponent of sentimental spinelessness. His civic ideal is a strong-willed person who knows how to command his feelings.

Lessing fought against sentimentality until the end of his life. He doesn't even accept Goethe's Werther. In a letter to Eschenburg dated October 26, 1774, Lessing gives a scathing assessment of the hero of the novel, highly appreciating the work from an artistic point of view. He does not forgive Werther’s suicide, emphasizing that in ancient times his act would not have been forgiven even a girl. Lessing believes that the novel needs a different, didactic ending, warning young people against the fatal step taken by Werther. “So, dear Goethe, one more chapter in conclusion, and the more cynical the better.” Lessing even wanted to write his own “Werther,” but of the entire plan he managed to carry out only a short introduction.

The most important issues of realism are also considered by Lessing in Hamburg Drama. The collection, as already noted, consisted of reviews of the performances and repertoire of the Hamburg Theater. Lessing simultaneously raises and solves theoretical problems that were not part of his responsibility as a theater critic. He pays great attention to the specifics of the drama. Developing Aristotle's thoughts, Lessing emphasizes that the playwright reveals what is natural in the moral character of people and thus differs from the historian, who narrates the life of an individual historical figure. “In the theater,” writes Lessing, “we should learn not what this or that person has done, but what every person of a certain character will do under certain circumstances. The goal of tragedy is much more philosophical than the goal of historical science” (Art. XIX).

Lessing approaches issues of aesthetics as a typical educator, convinced that the future of humanity is prepared by the moral improvement of modern society. Therefore, the focus of his attention is on social mores, people’s behavior, their characters, again understood in moral and ethical terms. Lessing attaches exceptional importance to the power of moral example. He places the educational value of drama in direct dependence on how expressively and instructively the characters are depicted in it.

Lessing proceeds from the idea that man is the creator of his own destiny. Hence, naturally, the great attention that he pays to hardening the will, the development of strong convictions necessary for each individual in his struggle for freedom. All this testifies to Lessing's revolutionary spirit. However, the critic loses sight of another important aspect of the matter - the need to change the social structure of life. He solves all social problems only through moral means, and this is his historical limitation. In aesthetic terms, it manifests itself in the tendency to reduce socio-political conflicts to moral and ideological ones.

Lessing believes that the subject of tragedy can only be a “natural” and not a “historical” person. He has a clear antipathy to everything “historical” (court intrigues, military strife, etc.) as a phenomenon that is clearly not interesting to a democratic viewer. “I have long been of the opinion,” writes Lessing, “that the courtyard is not at all a place where a poet can study nature. If pomp and etiquette turn people into machines, then it is up to the poets to turn machines into people again” (Article LIX). Based on these aesthetic requirements, Lessing in “Hamburg Drama” launched a sharp and harsh criticism of French classicism. The object of his attacks is mainly the tragic works of Corneille and Voltaire and their German followers. He criticizes the classicists for the fact that their tragedies are based not on moral conflict, but on intrigue, “external action,” which has the most detrimental effect on the aesthetic merits of the works. They do not excite the viewer, they leave him cold. It is on such foundations that the famous analysis of “Rodoguna” rests on the pages of “Hamburg Drama”. Lessing reproaches Corneille for the fact that in the image of Cleopatra he captured the features not of an insulted woman suffering from jealousy, but of a power-hungry ruler of an eastern despotic state. Hence, according to Lessing, the untruthfulness of Cleopatra and the entire tragedy as a whole. However, it is easy to notice that the critic understands the truth in a purely educational way, reducing it only to the depiction of natural, “natural” passions and not seeing it where a person appears in his historical content. Cleopatra, who was so condemned by Lessing, was also truthful in her own way. Corneille showed a certain historical understanding in portraying her as a schemer.

Lessing's critical speeches against classicism are accompanied by praise for Shakespeare, whom he contrasts with Corneille and Voltaire as an example of naturalness and truthfulness. He is attracted to the work of the English playwright because it features not historical figures, but “people” who express themselves in a language “prompted” by their hearts, and not by their social status. Lessing understands Shakespeare's realism somewhat narrowly, interpreting it primarily as a truthful reproduction of human characters and feelings and not noticing something else in it - a concrete depiction of historical, social conflicts of a certain era, refracted in the personal destinies of people. Lessing strives to bring Shakespeare under the aesthetic rank of his time; he sees in him mainly an artist-moralist and tries to extract from his work, first of all, an edifying meaning. Comparing Voltaire’s “Zaire” with Shakespeare’s “Othello,” Lessing notes: “From Orosman’s words we learn that he is jealous. But as for his jealousy itself, we will ultimately learn nothing about it. On the contrary, Othello is a detailed textbook of this destructive madness. Here we can learn everything: both how to provoke this passion and how to avoid it” (v. XV). However, attention to moral issues, to everything human, a negative attitude towards “political intrigues” did not at all mean that Lessing was alien to dramaturgy of great social content. During the period of his artistic maturity, he sought to bring the German theater out of the circle of abstract family issues into the wide arena of public life. His historical merit mainly consisted in the fact that he gave German literature a social, sharply accusatory character. And for this it was necessary to reveal the anti-humanistic essence of the feudal-monarchical order. Therefore, at the center of Lessing's dramaturgy there is always a person of an enlightening way of thinking in his clash with society. This originality is clearly visible in Minna von Barnhelm, the first German realistic comedy. The events in it unfold in living modernity, snatched from national life. They take place immediately after the Seven Years' War and historically truthfully reveal the conditions in which people of progressive views and beliefs had to live and suffer.

The play is built on the principle of antithesis. On one side are humanist heroes (Tellheim, Minna, Werner, Count von Bruchsal, Just, Franziska), on the other are persons representing the real world, cruel and callous (the hotel owner, Ricco de Marliniere), the inhuman essence of Prussian statehood. Depicting the difficult fate of people with an enlightened mindset, Lessing sharply criticizes the circumstances of their lives. The main conflict of the comedy (the clash between Major Tellheim and the Prussian military authorities) is acutely social and devoid of any comic sound.

Tellheim represents a type of officer of which there were few in the Prussian army of the 18th century, which consisted of mercenaries who lived exclusively from their military craft. During the invasion of Frederick II into Saxony, when Prussian soldiers committed unheard-of robberies and violence, Tellheim gained the respect of the inhabitants of one city by paying part of the indemnity for them, taking instead of the amount paid a bill of exchange to be repaid after the declaration of peace. Such humanity seemed so strange to the ruling circles of Prussia that the major was suspected of bribery and was dismissed from the army without a livelihood.

"Minna von Barnhelm" is addressed against the nationalist sentiments that spread in Prussia during the Seven Years' War.

All the positive heroes of the comedy are opponents of Prussianism. At the first meeting with Tellheim, Count Bruchsal declares: “I don’t particularly like officers in this uniform. But you, Tellheim, are an honest man, and honest people should be loved, no matter what they wear.” Lessing is convinced that over time the crust of national and class prejudices will come off from society and the ideals of love and brotherhood will triumph in it.

The idea of the play is symbolized by the marriage of the Prussian officer Tellheim and the Saxon noblewoman Minna, concluded at a time when Prussia and Saxony had just emerged from war.

Lessing's positive heroes are free not only from nationalist, but also from class prejudices. Both servants and masters in comedy are equally humane and compete in spiritual nobility. Justus remains in Tellheim's service even when the latter can no longer pay for his services. He himself characterizes himself as a servant “who will go begging and stealing for his master.” However, in Just there is no trace of lackey servility. He is proud and independent and devoted to Tellheim because he once paid for his treatment in the infirmary and gave his ruined father a pair of horses. Franziska is equally cordial towards Minna.

However, Tellheim, setting an example of kindness and generosity, rejects any participation in relation to himself. He's too proud. The major is ready to part with his rich fiancée Minna, as he considers it humiliating to be financially dependent on his wife. To punish Tellheim for his false pride, Minna decides to pretend to be a ruined, unhappy girl. Her plan is this: “The man who now refuses me and all my wealth will fight for me with the whole world as soon as he hears that I am unhappy and abandoned.” Tellheim is caught in a set of nets.

Tellheim is freed from his shortcoming - pride. Having lost his soldier's happiness, he finds Minna's love and friendship. The comedy ends with the triumph of humanistic ideas.

In 1772, Lessing completed Emilia Galotti, which had great stage success. In terms of the power of its denunciation of princely despotism, the play is the immediate predecessor of Schiller's Stürmer dramaturgy. Scourging feudal tyranny, Lessing created in it images of people of great civic courage who prefer death to the shame of a slave existence. This was the educational significance of the tragedy.

The creative history of “Emilia Galotti” begins in the mid-18th century. It was initially conceived in a sentimental anti-classicist spirit. In her, as in “Miss Sarah Sampson,” there should have been no politics, no sublime heroism. Having again turned to abandoned material during his life in Brunswick, Lessing greatly changed the plan of the work, linking family motives with socio-political issues. The conflict of the tragedy began to have a broad social character rather than a narrow one, which fundamentally distinguishes it from everyday plays.

“Emilia Galotti” is also interesting in the sense that Lessing made an attempt in it to practically apply the basic principles of poetic art, theoretically developed in “Laocoon” and in “Hamburg Drama”. First of all, in the person of Emilia and Odoardo, he sought to create a fundamentally new image of a tragic hero, combining, like Sophocles’ Philoctetes, the sentimental (natural) principle with the heroic. As a result, “Emilia Galotti” acquired the features of a tragedy of a special burgher-classicist type.

Lessing's heroine appears on stage as an ordinary girl. She is pious and superstitious. Emilia's ordinariness is of fundamental importance. It serves to ensure that the democratic public gains confidence in Emilia and sees in her a person of their environment, of their mental make-up. However, when faced with violence, Emilia reveals such heroic qualities that any hero of a classicist tragedy would envy.

Emilia, from Lessing's point of view, is an ideal tragic image because she is guilty without guilt. Her tragic fault lies in the fact that she unwittingly, due to her youth, succumbed to the charm of the splendor of court life. At the court ball, Prince Gonzago himself drew attention to her. Emilia also feels attracted to him, but she is the bride of Count Appiani and wants to remain faithful to her fiancé. Forcibly brought to the princely palace, Emilia is internally reborn. All the forces of her unspoiled, natural nature rebel against violence. However, afraid of somehow showing weakness and giving in to the prince’s advances, Emilia asks her father to help her resolve this conflict of spirit and flesh. Odoardo kills her with a blow of a dagger, completely sharing her decision. Lessing in “Emilia Galotti” sought to show that not only “historical people” exalted by classicism (kings, courtiers, dignitaries, etc.), but also “private persons”, the most ordinary ones, are capable of subordinating “feelings” to the dictates of “duty”, of being heroes . The play taught the German burgher to sacrificially serve the ideals of freedom. Objectively, it was directed against the mood of slavish obedience and doom, widespread in burgher Germany in the 18th century. Lessing fights for a person suffering from the despotism of princes to show disobedience and become the master of his destiny. In his tragedy, he debunks not only the princely arbitrariness, but also the sentimental “demagnetization” and cowardice of the burghers, which interfere with the fight against tyranny.

True, the economic backwardness and political inertia of the German people could not help but be reflected even in the work of such a writer as Lessing. The heroes of “Emilia Galotti” do not allow the all-powerful vice to stain themselves; they prefer death to the shame of a humiliating life. But this kind of rebellion only leads to the moral triumph of virtue. Emilia dies, and her seducer receives only the reproaches of a guilty conscience. In Germany of the 18th century, realistic art could not yet emerge, depicting not a moral, but an actual victory over the forces of socio-political evil.

The bearer of the heroic principle in the tragedy is also Odoardo Galotti. This is a democratic, Lessingian version of Brutus. Unlike the hero Voltaire, who has a “heart of steel”, burning only with love for the republic, Odoardo is humane. He loves Emilia dearly, but in a tragic situation, the principles of a citizen prevail in him over his fatherly feelings.

Lessing truthfully depicts the faces representing the feudal-monarchical camp. The playwright's success is the image of the prince. He doesn't have the traits of a refined villain. Gettore Gonzago is a good, enlightened person in his own way. He loves art, defends marriage according to his heart's inclination. Inflamed with passion for Emilia Galotti, he wants to evoke her reciprocal feelings with his passionate confessions. Only after learning about her upcoming wedding, the prince, having lost his head, uses the services of Chamberlain Marinelli. This interpretation of the image of the prince did not weaken, but rather strengthened the realistic sound of the play. Lessing made it clear that in a feudal system, anyone, even a naturally good person, due to the fact that he is vested with absolute power, in certain situations becomes a criminal.

At the end of his creative career, Lessing creates the drama "Nathan the Wise". It is a continuation of the polemic that he waged with the Hamburg pastor Goeze regarding Reimarus’s book “Fragments of the Unknown,” where seditious thoughts were expressed regarding the divinity of Christ and the Bible. The Brunswick government imposed a censorship ban on Lessing's religious and polemic works, seeing them as an insult to religion. It confiscated Anti-Getze, prohibiting its author from publishing. During the period of censorship persecution, Lessing came up with the idea of “Nathan the Wise”. “I want to try,” he writes to Elisa Reimarus on 6/IX 1778, “whether they will allow me to speak freely, at least from my former pulpit - from the theater stage.” Lessing is in a fighting mood. Having conceived the play, he decided to “play a crueler joke on the theologians than with the help of dozens of fragments.”

“Nathan the Wise,” unlike “Emilia Galotti,” is a drama not of characters, but of ideas. Lessing brings together different types of human consciousness in it. Promoting and defending humanistic, educational views and concepts, he strikes at religious fanaticism, nationalist and class prejudices. Lessing is looking to the future. He is fighting for social relations in which all divisions generated by the class structure of society will disappear, and the peoples of the world will merge into one family. In “Nathan the Wise,” the social ideal of the great enlightener was especially vividly embodied, and the hero of the play, Nathan, is the mouthpiece of the author’s ideas.

Lessing brought together people of different religious beliefs in his play, as a result of which it began to resemble a dispute of enormous proportions. The center of the drama is formed by the parable of the three rings, around which lies a number of other ideological layers. In this parable told to Saladin, Nathan sharply condemned the claims of the three dominant religions (Mohammedan, Christian and Jewish) to morally guide society. In his opinion, they are all “fake” because they encourage religious fanaticism.

The propaganda orientation of “Nathan the Wise” determined its artistic originality. The play is replete with large monologues in which the characters express their views. The action in it, unlike “Emilia Galotti,” develops slowly, which corresponds to its poetic form. Apparently, taking this circumstance into account, Lessing called “Nathan the Wise” a “dramatic poem.”

Lessing left a deep mark on the spiritual life of all humanity. He is a classic of aesthetic thought, ranking with Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Belinsky, Chernyshevsky. For his fighting spirit, his work was highly valued by German (Berne, Heine) and Russian democrats. Chernyshevsky in his work “Lessing, his time, his life and work” wrote about the author of “Laocoon” and “Emilia Galotti”: “He is closer to our century than Goethe himself, his view is more insightful and deeper, his concept is broader and more humane” 3 . The struggle for Lessing was led by figures of German Social Democracy. In 1893, F. Mehring wrote a sharply polemical work, “The Legend of Lessing,” in which E. Schmidt and other falsifiers of the legacy of the German enlightener, who sought to turn Lessing into a Prussian nationalist, were rebuffed.

Notes

1. Chernyshevsky I. G. Complete. collection op. in 15 volumes, vol. 4. M., 1948, p. 9.

2. Marx K. and Engels F. Soch. Ed. 2, t. 39, p. 175.

3 Chernyshevsky N. G. Poly. collection cit., vol. 4, p. 9-10.

Biography

Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim (1729–1781), critic and playwright; in Germany 18th century. together with I.V. Goethe and F. Schiller, he became the creator of the golden age of German literature. Born on January 22, 1729 in Kamenets (Saxony) in the family of a Lutheran pastor. In 1746 he entered the theological faculty of the University of Leipzig, but his passion for ancient literature and theater left little time for theological studies. He took an active part in the theater troupe founded by the actress Caroline Neuber (1697–1760), which subsequently staged his first dramatic work, the comedy The Young Scientist (Der junge Gelehrte, 1748). Orthodox Lessing Sr. called his son home and allowed him to return to Leipzig only at the cost of abandoning the theater; the only concession that my father agreed to was permission to transfer to the medical faculty. Shortly after Lessing's return to Leipzig, Neuber's troupe disbanded, leaving Lessing with unpaid bills of exchange signed by him. Having paid off his debts from his scholarship, he left Leipzig. Lessing spent the next three years in Berlin, trying to earn a living as a penman. From a financial point of view, he did not succeed, but he grew extraordinarily as a critic and writer. Together with Kr. Milius, a Leipzig relative and friend, Lessing for some time published a quarterly magazine on theater problems (1750), wrote critical articles for the Vossische Zeitung (at that time - Berliner Privilegierte Zeitung), and translated plays and created a number of original dramatic works.

At the end of 1751 he entered the University of Wittenberg, where a year later he received a master's degree. Then he returned to Berlin and worked hard for the next three years, establishing his reputation as an astute literary critic and talented writer. The impartiality and persuasiveness of his critical judgments earned him the respect of his readers. Published in six volumes, the Works (Schriften, 1753–1755) included, in addition to previously anonymously published epigrams and anacreontic poems, a number of scientific, critical and dramatic works. A special place is occupied by Defenses (Rettungen), written with the aim of restoring justice to certain historical figures, in particular those belonging to the era of the Reformation. In addition to the early dramas, Lessing included in the book a new drama in prose - Miss Sara Sampson (Miss Sara Sampson, 1755), the first “philistine” drama in German literature. Created primarily on the model of the London merchant J. Lillo (1731), this extremely sentimental play embodied Lessing's conviction that only by imitating the more natural English theater could the Germans create a truly national drama. Miss Sarah Sampson had a profound influence on subsequent German drama, although she herself became obsolete after two decades.

In 1758, together with the philosopher M. Mendelssohn and the bookseller K. F. Nikolai, Lessing founded the literary magazine “Letters on Modern Literature” (“Briefe, die neueste Literatur betreffend”, 1759–1765), and although his collaboration in the magazine did not last long, his critical assessments stirred up the stagnant literary atmosphere of the time. He vehemently attacked French pseudo-classicists and German theorists, especially I. K. Gottsched (1700–1766), who oriented the German theater towards French drama.

In 1760 Lessing moved to Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland) and became secretary to the military governor of Silesia, General Tauentzin. Secretarial duties left him enough time - here he mainly collected material for Laokoon, studied Spinoza and the history of early Christianity, and also began work on his best comedy Minna von Barnhelm (Minna von Barnhelm, 1767), using the impressions accumulated in Breslau to describe the characters and events that gave rise to a vivid conflict of love and honor in the era of the Seven Years' War.

In 1765, Lessing returned to Berlin and the following year published the famous treatise on aesthetic principles Laocoon, along with I. I. Winckelmann’s History of Ancient Art (1764), which was the highest achievement of literary and aesthetic thought of the 18th century. With this work, Lessing paved the way for the sophisticated aesthetics of subsequent generations, defining the boundaries between the visual arts (painting) and the audio arts (poetry).

In 1767 Lessing took up the post of critic and literary consultant at the German National Theater, which had just been created in Hamburg. This enterprise soon revealed its inconsistency and remained in memory only thanks to Lessing's Hamburg Dramaturgie (Hamburgische Dramaturgie, 1767–1769). Conceived as an ongoing review of theatrical productions, the Hamburg Dramaturgy resulted in an analysis of dramaturgical theory and the pseudo-classicist drama of Corneille and Voltaire. Aristotle's theory of drama in the Poetics remained the highest authority for Lessing, but his creative interpretation of the theory of tragedy did away with the dictate of the unity of place, time and action, which the French interpreters of Aristotle retained as an essential prerequisite for “good” drama.

After the collapse of the National Theater and the publishing house, which the writer founded in Hamburg together with I.K. Bode, Lessing took the post of librarian in Wolfenbüttel (Brunschweig). With the exception of nine months (1775–1776), when he accompanied Prince Leopold of Brunswick on a trip to Italy, Lessing spent the rest of his life in Wolfenbüttel, where he died in 1781.

Shortly after moving to Wolfenbüttel, Lessing published the most significant of his dramas, Emilia Galotti (1772). The action of the drama, which is based on the Roman legend of Appia and Virginia, takes place at a certain Italian court. Lessing set himself the task of demonstrating in modern circumstances the noble structure of ancient tragedy, not limiting himself to the social protest so characteristic of bourgeois tragedy. Later, he once again returned to stage creativity, writing the “dramatic poem” Nathan the Wise (Nathan der Weise, 1779), the most popular, although not the most dramatic of all his plays. Nathan is an enlightened liberal's call for religious tolerance, a parable showing that it is not faith, but character that determines a person's personality. It is the first significant German drama written in blank verse, which later became typical of classical German drama.

In 1780, Lessing published the essay The Education of the Human Race (Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts), written back in 1777. In one hundred numbered paragraphs of this essay, the philosopher-educator sees in the religious history of mankind a progressive movement towards universal humanism, going beyond the limits of any and all dogmas.

Materials from the encyclopedia "The World Around Us" were used

Literature:

* Lessing G. Laocoon, or On the Boundaries of Painting and Poetry. M., 1957
* Friedlander G. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. L. – M., 1958
* Lessing G. Dramas. Fables in prose. M., 1972
* Lessing G. Favorites. M., 1980
* Lessing and modernity. Digest of articles. M., 1981

Aesthetics / Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

One of Winckelmann's first critics was Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781). The appearance of Lessing in German literature represents an outstanding historical event. His significance for German literature and aesthetics is approximately the same as Belinsky, Chernyshevsky, and Dobrolyubov had for Russia. The uniqueness of this enlightener lies in the fact that, unlike his like-minded people, he stood for plebeian methods of destroying feudal relations. Lessing's diverse creativity found a passionate expression of the thoughts and aspirations of the German people. He was the first German writer and art theorist to raise the question of the nationality of art. Lessing's theoretical study “Laocoon, or on the limits of painting and poetry” (1766) constituted an entire era in the development of German classical aesthetics.

Lessing first of all expresses his disagreement with Winckelmann's concept of beauty. Winckelmann, giving an interpretation of Laocoon, tries to find in it an expression of stoic equanimity. The triumph of the spirit over bodily suffering is, in his opinion, the essence of the Greek ideal. Lessing, citing examples borrowed from ancient art, argues that the Greeks were never “ashamed of human weakness.” He strongly opposes the Stoic concept of morality. Stoicism, according to Lessing, is the mindset of slaves. The Greek was sensitive and knew fear, freely expressed his suffering and his human weaknesses, “but not a single one could keep him from performing matters of honor and duty.”

Rejecting Stoicism as the ethical basis of human behavior, Lessing also declares everything Stoic is not stagey, for it can only evoke a cold feeling of surprise. “Heroes on stage,” says Lessing, “must reveal their feelings, openly express their suffering and not interfere with the manifestation of natural inclinations. The artificiality and compulsion of the heroes of the tragedy leaves us cold, and bullies on buskins can only arouse in us surprise.” It is not difficult to see that here Lessing has in mind the moral and aesthetic concept of 17th-century classicism. Here he does not spare not only Corneille and Racine, but also Voltaire.

In classicism Lessing sees the most clear manifestation of a stoically slavish consciousness. Such a moral and aesthetic concept of man led to the fact that the plastic arts were preferred to all others, or at least preference was given to the plastic way of interpreting life material (putting drawing and painting to the fore, the rationalistic principle in poetry and theater, etc.) . The fine arts themselves were interpreted one-sidedly, since their field was limited only to the depiction of the plastically beautiful, therefore, by identifying poetry with painting, the classicists extremely limited the possibilities of the former. Since painting and poetry, according to the classicists, have the same laws, a broader conclusion is drawn from this: art in general must abandon the reproduction of the individual, the embodiment of antagonisms, the expression of feelings and close itself in a narrow circle of the plastically beautiful. The classicists essentially moved dramatic clashes of passions, movement, and life conflicts beyond the boundaries of direct depiction.

In contrast to this concept, Lessing put forward the idea that “art in modern times has enormously expanded its boundaries. It now imitates, as is usually said, all visible nature, of which beauty is only a small part. Truth and expressiveness are his main laws, and just as nature itself often sacrifices beauty to higher goals, so the artist must subordinate it to his basic aspiration and not try to embody it to a greater extent than truth and expressiveness allow. The requirement to expand the possibilities of art in the sense of the most profound reflection in it of various aspects of reality follows from the concept of man that Lessing developed in polemics with classicism and Winckelmann.

Establishing the boundaries between poetry and painting, Lessing first of all seeks to theoretically refute the philosophical and aesthetic foundations of the artistic method of classicism with its orientation towards an abstract-logical method of generalization. This, Lessing believes, is the area of painting and all plastic arts. But the laws of the plastic arts cannot be extended to poetry. Lessing, thus, defends the right to the existence of a new art, which has received its most vivid expression in poetry, where new laws are in force, thanks to which it is possible to reproduce what belongs to the realm of truth, expression, and ugliness.

The essence of the plastic arts, according to Lessing, is that they are limited to the depiction of a complete and complete action. The artist takes from the ever-changing reality only one moment, which does not express anything that is thought of as transitory. All recorded “transitory moments” acquire, thanks to the continuation of their existence in art, such an unnatural appearance that with each new glance the impression of them weakens, and, finally, the entire object begins to inspire disgust or fear in us.

In its imitations of reality, plastic art uses bodies and colors taken in space. Its subject, therefore, is bodies with their visible properties. Since material beauty is the result of a coordinated combination of various parts that can be immediately grasped at one glance, it can only be depicted in the plastic arts. Since the plastic arts can depict only one moment of action, the artist’s art consists in choosing a moment from which the previous and subsequent ones would become clear. The action itself lies outside the scope of plasticity.

Due to the noted properties of painting, the individual, expression, ugly, and changing do not find expression in it. Plastic art reproduces objects and phenomena in a state of their quiet harmony, triumph over the resistance of the material, without “the destruction caused by time.” This is material beauty - the main subject of plastic arts.

Poetry has its own special patterns. As means and techniques in her imitations of reality, she uses articulate sounds perceived in time. The subject of poetry is action. The representation of bodies here is carried out indirectly, through actions.

Lessing believes that all art is capable of depicting the truth. However, the volume and method of its reproduction in different types of art are different. In contrast to classicist aesthetics, which tended to confuse the boundaries of various types of art, Lessing insists on drawing a strict line of demarcation between them. All his reasoning is aimed at proving that poetry, to a greater extent than the plastic arts, is capable of depicting world connections, temporary states, the development of action, morals, customs, passions.

The very attempt to establish boundaries between the arts deserves serious attention and study, especially since Lessing is looking for an objective basis for this division. However, contemporaries viewed Laocoon primarily as a banner of the struggle for realism, and not as a highly specialized art historical study.

Lessing further developed the problems of realism in the famous “Hamburg Drama” (1769). This is not only a collection of reviews. In this work, Lessing analyzes the productions of the Hamburg Theater and develops the aesthetic problems of art. In full agreement with the spirit of the Enlightenment, he defines its tasks: the artist must “teach us what we should do and what not to do; to acquaint us with the true essence of good and evil, decent and funny; show us the beauty of the former in all its combinations and consequences... and, conversely, the ugliness of the latter.” The theater, in his opinion, should be a “school of morality.”

In the light of these statements, it becomes clear why Lessing pays so much attention to the theater. Theater is considered by the aestheticians of the Enlightenment as the most suitable and effective form of art for promoting educational ideas, so Lessing raises the question of creating a new theater, radically different from the theater of classicism. It is curious that Lessing understands the creation of new art as the restoration to their original purity of the principles of ancient art, distorted and falsely interpreted by the “French,” i.e., the classicists. Lessing, therefore, opposes only the false interpretation of the ancient heritage, and not against antiquity as such.

Lessing strongly demands the democratization of the theater. The main character of the drama should be an ordinary, average person. Here Lessing fully agrees with the dramatic principles of Diderot, whom he highly valued and followed in many respects.

Lessing resolutely opposes the class limitations of the theater. “The names of princes and heroes,” he writes, “can add pomp and grandeur to the play, but do not in the least contribute to its touchingness. The misfortunes of those people whose situation is very close to ours, very naturally, have the strongest effect on our soul, and if we sympathize with kings, then simply as people, and not as kings.”

Lessing's main requirement for theater is the requirement of truthfulness.

Lessing's great merit lies in the fact that he was able to appreciate Shakespeare, whom, along with the ancient writers - Homer, Sophocles and Euripides - he contrasts with the classicists.

Johann Joachim Winckelmann. About the Calderon Theater

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, literary theorist, playwright

Pushkin said that fame can be quiet. Indeed, there are figures in literature who come, create what is ultimately taken for granted, and leave, having completed their mission. Although their names are respected, they are subsequently overshadowed by the brighter glory of the new geniuses.

The contributions of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781), literary theorist, playwright, critic and poet of the Enlightenment, to European culture are widely recognized. Lessing created the modern type of magazine criticism and was one of the founders of the democratic theater of the 18th-19th centuries. J. V. Goethe, F. Schiller, and the romantics who followed in his footsteps somewhat obscured him in the eyes of his descendants, just as new buildings hide the house of the founder of a city.

In Russia, essentially the same thing happened. We remember Lessing in connection with the history and theory of literature, sometimes with the history of the Russian stage, but when we talk about the connections between the cultures of Russia and Germany, we do not mention his name first, we talk about “the heaven of Schiller and Goethe,” about Heinrich Heine , about Hegel and Nietzsche, about Thomas Mann and Heinrich Bell. But if we are reminded that the new German literature begins with Lessing, then hardly anyone will object. Russian revolutionary-democratic criticism - especially N. G. Chernyshevsky and N. A. Dobrolyubov, whose opinions had a strong influence on our literary criticism of the 20th century - did a lot for Lessing's Russian fame. In Russia, Lessing was imagined primarily as the first theorist of realistic art (if we understand realism in accordance with the principle of Chernyshevsky’s aesthetics “beautiful is life”) and a master of the magazine struggle for democratic and realistic art.

In drama he was known to be a moderate follower of Shakespeare and the immediate predecessor of Schiller. But Lessing came to Russia in a different guise than the one in which we began to perceive him from the middle of the 19th century and, in general, still perceive him.

German Lessing scholars complain that there is still no academic complete biography of Lessing, although a huge literature has accumulated about the writer, including dozens of biographical studies. The history of the reception of Lessing's legacy in Russia presents a similar picture. Among the considerable number of works related directly or indirectly to this topic, there is still no complete, analytical review of it. Therefore, let us outline the main milestones in the history of the “Russian” Lessing, paying main attention to the perception of his aesthetic ideas.

Lessing's name first appeared in the Russian press in 1765, on the title page of his comedy “The Young Scientist,” translated by Andrei Nartov’s son. There was a transition from one “national time” to another: the acquaintance with the author took place when in his homeland his work was already approaching its zenith - the first burgher comedy “Miss Sarah Sampson” was written, a new genre of magazine criticism was created in “Letters on Modern Literature”, Work began on an innovative treatise on aesthetics, Laocoon.

Russian culture was still catching up with the European Enlightenment, while German culture made a powerful leap towards new ideas and themes at this time, even ahead of the French and English thought that fed it. This breakthrough was made by Lessing.

For Russian readers and spectators of the 1760-1770s, Lessing remained a comedian and moralist, but he was better known as a fabulist who updated the ancient tradition of prose fables and parables. “Lessing is a writer of fables, full of meaning, who can be called the German Aesop,” reported the magazine “Reading for Taste, Reason and Feelings” in 1791, since, as it was said there, “German writers still retain a few simple morals.” Meanwhile, by this time ten years had already passed since Lessing died, having tasted the difficult morals of his fatherland.

Lessing's fables were widely translated and published in Russian periodicals, and in 1816 they were published separately. They were handled by V.A. Zhukovsky. They will continue to be translated in the future. However, Lessing's treatise “Discourses on the Fable,” which expressed a new view on this genre and contained the germs of the doctrine of typicality and symbolism in literature, remained untranslated.

In passing, in a translated article proposed by Lessing’s first translator A. A. Nartov, “Letters on Contemporary Literature” were mentioned, although the 152nd letter named there did not belong to Lessing. And other materials related to Lessing reached Russian readers as part of translated texts. Thus, his plan for a play about Faust became known from the preface to the “Library of German Novels,” translated by Vasily Levshin (1780), and from the translation of the famous work of Pastor I. F. Jerusalem in defense of German literature from the ridicule of Frederick II, we first learned about the fact that Lessing, “not having yet been in Italy, solely according to the perfect sowing (i.e. ancient Greek) knowledge, wrote a discussion about Laocoön...”. A really interesting fact is noted here: Lessing analyzed the features of the late antique sculptural group “The Death of the Trojan Priest Laocoon with his Sons” without seeing it and being guided only by its graphic image.

But in general, Lessing's Russian contemporaries could, soon after his death, already form an idea of his merits. In the magazine “Growing Grapes” Lessing was named one of those who freed German literature from imitation of the French, 5 - a problem that is equally relevant for Russian literature. A few years later (1789), young Nikolai Karamzin would confidently name the names of Lessing, Goethe and Schiller as reformers of the German theater and point to the Berlin educator F. Nikolai as the last surviving member of the famous triumvirate, “a friend of Lessingov and Mendelzonov.”

In the history of the perception of Lessing in Russia, its “Karamzin” period is very important. Karamzin’s translation of Lessing’s civil tragedy “Emilia Galotti” (the first version of the translation was 1786, the second was 1788) brought it to the Russian stage. 7 It was also a great event in the history of Russian theatrical aesthetics. A sample of psychological drama appeared, and in the preface to its publication and in the translator’s later review, the question of artistic truth was raised. Truthfulness meant for Karamzin, as for Lessing, the naturalness of the actors’ feelings and behavior. “Nature gave him a living sense of truth,” said Karamzin about the author of “Emilia Galotti.” 8 The theater magazine “Hamburg Drama,” published by Lessing, was, in all likelihood, well known to Karamzin.

Karamzin was the first to point out Lessing as a literary critic of a new type. In a polemical note to the article “On the Judgment of Books,” the publisher of the Moscow Journal stated that the Gospel quote “Judge not, lest ye be judged” is inapplicable to the genre of reviews. “But do you really want there to be no criticism at all? - he turned to his opponent and presented an irrefutable argument: What was German literature thirty years before this and what is it now? And wasn’t it partly due to strict criticism that the Germans began to write so well?” And to the words that “the desire to judge the works of others has always been the food of small minds,” Karamzin replied: “Lessing and Mendelssohn judged books, but can they be called small minds?”

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing is a famous German writer, poet, playwright, art theorist, literary critic, one of the largest figures in European literature of the Enlightenment. He gained the status of the founder of German classical literature; Lessing along with Schiller and I.V. Goethe is credited with creating works of such a level that their time would later be called the golden age of national literature.

On January 22, 1729, he was born into the family of a Lutheran pastor who lived in Kamenz (Saxony). After leaving school during 1746-1748. Gotthold Ephraim was a student at the University of Leipzig (theological faculty), showing more interest in theater and ancient literature than in academic disciplines. He took an active part in the activities of the Caroline Neuber theater troupe - later it was she who would stage the comedy “The Young Scientist,” Lessing’s dramatic debut.

After graduating from university, he lived in Berlin for three years, not seeking to make a spiritual or scientific career and composing works of art (by this period, his creative baggage already included several comedies that made him quite famous, as well as odes, fables, epigrams and etc.), translations, literary criticism (cooperated with the Berlin Privileged Newspaper as a reviewer).

At the end of 1751, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing continued his education at the University of Wittenberg, a year later receiving a master's degree, and again moved to the capital. The writer fundamentally avoided any official service, including very profitable ones, seeing it as a threat to his independence, and preferred to live on occasional fees. Over these years of work, he has earned credibility as a master of artistic expression and a brilliant critic, distinguished by objectivity and insight. In 1755, his new brainchild was published - the prose “Miss Sarah Sampson” - the first family “philistine” drama in national literature, which made him truly famous. Together with other works, including critical and scientific ones, it was included in the six-volume Works. Lessing received the status of leader of national journalism thanks to publications in the literary magazine “Letters on Modern Literature” (1759-1765) founded by him and his comrades.

During 1760-1765. Lessing was the secretary of the Prussian General Tauentzin, governor of Silesia, and from 1767 a literary consultant and critic of the German National Theater (Hamburg). His reviews marked the onset of a new period in the development of theater criticism. Throughout 1767-1768, Gotthold Ephraim attempted to found his own theater in the same city, but the idea failed. To obtain a stable income, in 1770 Lessing got a job at the Wolfenbüttel Ducal Library as a court librarian, and with this event a new period in his biography began, which turned out to be the most morally difficult for the writer. For nine months in 1775-1776. he traveled with Prince Leopold of Brunswick in Italy, and spent the rest of the time until February 15, 1781, the date of his death, in this city, working in the position of court librarian that burdened him.

Lessing, being a radical supporter of enlightenment and human reason, waged an irreconcilable struggle against church orthodox dogma, the ideology of absolutism, and saw in a democratic national culture a means to end feudalism, the political fragmentation of the state, the dominance of class and other prejudices. His works are filled with the pathos of this struggle, among which the most famous are “Emilia Galotti”, “Nathan the Wise”, “Minna von Barnhelm” and others.