Goethe: Life as a Work of Art
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Selection
Named one of the Best Books of the Year by the Economist and Kirkus Reviews
This “splendid biography” (Wall Street Journal) of Goethe presents his life and work as an essential touchstone for the modern age.
A masterful intellectual portrait, Goethe: Life as a Work of Art is celebrated as the seminal twenty-first-century biography of the writer considered to be the Shakespeare of German literature. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), a remarkably prolific poet, playwright, novelist, and—as Rüdiger Safranksi emphasizes—a statesman and naturalist, first awakened not only a burgeoning German nation but the European continent with his electrifying novel The Sorrows of Young Werther. Safranski has scoured Goethe’s entire oeuvre, relying exclusively on primary sources, including his correspondence with contemporaries, to produce a “fresh and authentic” (Economist) portrait of the avatar of the Romantic era. Skillfully blending “artistic analysis with swift, sharp renderings” of the great political and intellectual figures Goethe encountered, “[Safranski’s] portrait of the prolific genius leaves the reader with lasting awe, even envy” of a monumental legacy (The New Yorker). As Safranski ultimately shows, Goethe’s greatest creation, even in comparison to his masterpiece Faust, was his own life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Renowned biographer Safranski (Romanticism: A German Affair) offers a learned and arguably definitive account of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 1832). His life of the celebrated author and statesman abounds with stormy love affairs and illustrious friendships, but Safranski minimizes court gossip and personal foibles to focus on Goethe's ideas and thoughts. Goethe was a charismatic polymath who weathered several life-threatening illnesses, and was a leading figure in Weimar politics; Safranski calls him a "bureaucratic draft horse and a poetic Pegasus." After his immensely successful first novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, was published when he was 25, Goethe dominated Europe's literary culture. His early triumph stoked in him a lifelong sense of his own genius. Goethe intersected with his era's leading figures, including Mozart, Voltaire, Schiller, and the brash, brilliant Schopenhauer, the student who would be master. After a life-changing journey to Italy, Goethe embraced classical ideals of order that he never abandoned. His interest in the natural sciences and pull toward pantheism, meanwhile, led him to be skeptical of monotheism. His "life as a work of art" culminated in the play Faust, the ultimate tale of worldly ambition. Safranski's lyrical style, many speculative passages, and abundant details will daunt some casual readers. Scholars will welcome this intellectual biography, richly embellished by primary sources and aided by the strong Dollenmayer translation.
