Creator and Art in Hans Christian Andersen’s Novels
The article deals with three novels by Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen, who is known worldwide as an author of fairy tales. In his novels The Improviser (1835), Only a Fiddler (1837) and Lucky Peer (1870) the main plot is built on the issue of relationships between a creator, an artist and the...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences
2021-06-01
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| Series: | Studia Litterarum |
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| Online Access: | http://studlit.ru/images/2021-6-2/Korovin.pdf |
| Summary: | The article deals with three novels by Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen, who is known worldwide as an author of fairy tales. In his novels The Improviser (1835), Only a Fiddler (1837) and Lucky Peer (1870) the main plot is built on the issue of relationships between a creator, an artist and the rest of the world. The theme of art is the one of the most important for the Romantic esthetics and Andersen discusses it in different ways in his novels. Philosopher S. Kierkegaard criticized Andersen’s conception of how a talent interacts with the reality as naive and fictive, but Andersen gives different visions of the artist’s way in these texts. The first novel is the history of an Italian boy who has an outstanding talent of improvisation. He receives assistance from people and eventually becomes a real artist in Romantic sense of the word. The hero of the second novel Christian is partly alter ego of the author, a boy from a poor family who tries to realize his musical talent but has not enough spiritual power to overcome all troubles in his life. He cannot find himself as an artist and dies. The title of the last novel is relevant to its subject — it is a story about the rise of а talented singer and his death on the top of fame. These three heroes are different types of interaction between a creator and reality in its romantic interpretation. |
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| ISSN: | 2500-4247 2541-8564 |