The amazing story of Peter Shlemihl is a novel about a poor man who does not resist temptation and who sells his shadow for a magical purse that never becomes scanty. However, wealth does not bring him happiness. The people around do not want to deal with a person without a shadow. Schlemihl breaks the alliance with the devil and throws out his purse. And he finds happiness in communicating with nature, traveling the world in the seven-mile boots he found. Drawing on the difficult life of his hero, a noble and honest man who turns out to be expelled from among officials, merchants and philistines, Chamisso shows the profound insignificance of this environment. The originality of the work is in the combination of a fantastic plot and realistic sketches of the life of Germany in the early 19th century.
A sharply critical attitude to the power of money, to its pernicious power, lies at the heart of the story, written at the height of the German liberation movement. Widely using science fiction, Chamisso reveals the essential contradictions of contemporary society.
In the story Chamisso depicts the tragedy of a man who sold his human dignity for wealth. Schlemihl quickly becomes convinced of the fallacy of the step he made. His love for Fanny is falling, Minna is leaving him. Wealth, bought at the cost of the loss of human dignity, brings him only misfortunes. Chamisso, like other romantics, claims with his work that the superiority of the "spirit" over "matter," is internal, spiritual values over the external position of man.
Schlemihl finds the strength to break the agreement with the man in grey. He resolutely rejects the new deal, on which "the man in gray" promises to return the shadow in return for a soul. In the event of a contract, Schlemihl would look like Thomas John, who having completely sold himself to the devil lost all human traits. Deprived of the spiritual principle, the Englishman-businessman became like a dead man. His complete dependence on "the man in gray" is emphasized by the fact that he lives in his pocket.
Having broken the romantic plot about the deal between the man and the devil, Chamisso completes the tale by the apotheosis of scientific knowledge of the world. Unlike the romantic perception of nature in the finale of the fairy tale of Chamisso, nature is depicted in the whole reality of its material existence as an object of observation and study. This finale seems to anticipate the future scholarly career of the writer, who became director of the botanical garden in Berlin, but also outlines the path of artistic development of the Chamisso-poet - from romanticism to realism.
