Lecture
Romanticism — a phenomenon of European culture in the 18th–19th centuries, representing a reaction against the Enlightenment and the scientific and technical progress it stimulated; an ideological and artistic movement in European and American culture of the late 18th century — the first half of the 19th century. It is characterized by the assertion of the intrinsic value of the individual's spiritual and creative life, the depiction of strong (often rebellious) passions and characters, and of spiritualized, healing nature. It spread into various spheres of human activity. In the 18th century, everything strange, fantastic, picturesque, and existing in books rather than in reality was called romantic. At the beginning of the 19th century, romanticism came to denote a new movement, opposed to classicism and the Enlightenment.
General characteristics. Romanticism succeeds the age of the Enlightenment and coincides with the industrial revolution, marked by the appearance of the steam engine, the locomotive, the steamship, photography, and factory-and-plant outskirts. Whereas the Enlightenment is characterized by a cult of reason and of a civilization founded on its principles, romanticism asserts a cult of nature, of feeling, and of the natural in man. What proves to be in demand is the image of the «noble savage», armed with «folk wisdom» and uncorrupted by civilization.
Romanticism first arose in Germany, in the circle of writers and philosophers of the Jena school (W. H. Wackenroder, Ludwig Tieck, Novalis, the brothers F. and A. Schlegel). The philosophy of romanticism was systematized in the works of F. Schlegel and F. Schelling. In its further development, German romanticism is marked by an interest in fairy-tale and mythological motifs, which found especially vivid expression in the work of the brothers Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm and of Hoffmann. Heine, having begun his creative work within the bounds of romanticism, later subjected it to critical reconsideration. Romanticism in Russian literature. It is generally held that in Russia romanticism appears in the poetry of V. A. Zhukovsky (although some Russian poetic works of the 1790s–1800s are often already assigned to the pre-romantic movement that developed out of sentimentalism). In Russian romanticism there arises freedom from classical conventions; the ballad and the romantic drama are created. A new conception is established of the essence and significance of poetry, which comes to be recognized as an independent sphere of life, the expression of man's highest, ideal aspirations; the former view, according to which poetry appeared to be an idle amusement, something purely auxiliary, becomes no longer tenable.
The early poetry of A. S. Pushkin likewise developed within the bounds of romanticism. The peak of Russian romanticism may be considered the poetry of M. Yu. Lermontov, the «Russian Byron». The philosophical lyric poetry of F. I. Tyutchev represents at once both the culmination and the overcoming of romanticism in Russia.
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