Search for meaning
"Tonio Kroger" is a psychological novel about the complex relationship of the artist with reality. The storyline is simple, but its content is complex, multifaceted. Outwardly, the novel is being built as a Tonio biography that a young man feels himself alone in a bourgeois environment. At the same time, this is a striking short story: it is spoken about the meaning and potential of art and of human life itself Tonio, focused on spiritual pursuits but physically weak, is opposed by his classmate Hans Hansen, thoughtlessly cheerful, athletic youth, and the same carelessly cheerful girl, Ingeborg Holm. Tonio leaves his hometown and travels. His life is filled with flour of creativity, doubts, quest. For him talk about art with the Russian artist Lizaveta Ivanovna have a great meaning. A new meeting with Hans and Inge, who loved each other, awakens Tony's tune for everyday life, craving for a simple, healthy, normal. His art seems to him distant reality, cold, his disorder with everyday life - bitter and disastrous. But for him, this disorder is irresistible. He can not live thoughtlessly and selfishly. Spiritual activity, constant spiritual searches - and it is his life
Tragedy of bourgeois society
The foresight of Tonio is the insight of a person with a limited circle of vision. Outstanding talent, immeasurable industriousness, the ability of the artist to penetrate the essence of phenomena - all this is drawn to the study and mapping of the circle of people, concepts, events to which Tonio gravitates since childhood: this is the burghery and everything that is closely associated with it. The tragedy of the artist in bourgeois society is also that he is deprived of the possibility of free, natural, organic communication with others, unless he is looking for him outside the bourgeois circle. This is even more difficult when it is a birth, education, habits, etc., for a long time was associated with this society, when this same society forms the object of its image. In this situation, the second vision, removing the veil of well-being and decency, really can not help but injure the artist. Such creative selectivity led Tonio to the fact that the power of art "sharpened his eyes, allowed him to learn the great words that unravel the human's chest, she opened to him the souls of people and his own soul / made him a clairvoyant and revealed to him the essence of the world? , which is hidden behind words and actions. And he saw only ridiculous and miserable, miserable and ridiculous. The artist is doomed "to constantly affirm the human without having his share in it. Thus, before a potential artist, Thomas Mann believes, there is a truly tragic problem of choosing the path, but in any case, he will be tormented by the longing for the unknown. This circumstance imposes something fatal on the whole face of the creator.
Love and art
The narrative is remarkable because it directly shows the writer's love for a healthy life, for ordinary people. In the story - condemnation of art. An indispensable sign of real art, according to Mann, is the love of the ordinary, the earthly, the healthy. This is Tonio's love for Hans. But an equally important feature of the modern artist appears in the story and his life drama: an unsuccessful friendship, unrequited love for Inge. In the final, the mature Tonio Kroger will in vain wait for a heart-to-heart conversation with Hans. "Blue-eyed and Golden-haired" will not accept the artist in their circle, between them the gap. The desire to overcome this gap, to make art healthy, vital, and life full-blooded and rich - a deep philosophical and psychological overtones of the novel by Thomas Mann. In search of a culture intellectually profound, but at the same time healthy and vitally full-blooded Mann turns to the traditions of Russian art. Opponent, an astute critic and spiritual mentor Tonio is in the story Russian woman Lizaveta Ivanovna. She equally censures Kroger and for Schopenhauer's pessimism and for conservative attachment to the burghers. But it is Lizaveta Ivanovna who prompts Tonio Kroger to overcome the eternal fluctuations, to go much further. In this small but deep in the sense novella Mann with all the insight reveals the process of impoverishment of art in the era of imperialism. He criticizes not only the manifestation of decadence, but also the limitations of artistic tendencies. So, Kroger attracts the idea to make art impersonal, absolutely contemplative, to expel from the books the individual interest of the artist. Bringing Lizaveta Ivanovna's words about the greatness of Russian writers, about the significance of their individualities, Thomas Mann points out to Tonio Kroger and the artist in general a much more fruitful path. Overcome the philistine in himself and rise into the realm of pure contemplation - there is still very little, the main thing - to educate a real person, "the purity of the moral sense." The novella "Tonio Kroger" is rightly considered autobiographical.
