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In the very first sentence of "Spiegel, das Kätzchen" (1855), Gottfried Keller delineates what this story is about: economy, language, and psychology. The artistic tradition has endowed mirrors with the power to speak the truth and to reveal what otherwise falls in the blind spot of reason. Cats, on the other hand, with their experience as witches' sidekicks, decorated with boots and golden chains, are dressed to narrate and to represent obscure...
Author
Language
English
Description
The tale's emphasized novelty is manifold. Its action takes place not in a faraway land or mythical past but in Dresden, where Hoffmann moved in March 1813 to work as musical director for Joseph Seconda's opera company. He repopulates the Saxon capital with all kinds of fantastic personages who had been personae non grata during the Age of Enlightenment, rehabilitating fairies, witches and elemental spirits as voices of nature and poetry, and thereby...
Author
Language
English
Description
Dostoevsky's unfinished early novel Netochka Nezvanova reflect the young author's view of literature as a kind of metaphorical enchantment. About three decades after E.T.A. Hoffmann invents the magic library of Archivist Lindhorst as a portal to the poetic realm in "Der goldne Topf" (1814), Fyodor Dostoevsky constructs another library, grounded in a far less phantasmic dimension but marked by an equally hypnotic propensity. In Dostoevsky's library,...