THE PROBLEM OF THE CORRELATION BETWEEN SPIRIT AND REALITY IN T. MANN’S NOVEL “TRISTAN”

Abstract

Short stories are an integral part of T. Mann’s creative heritage, which are distinguished by ideological, thematic and artistic richness, they give an idea of the evolution of the creative method and style of the writer. And although nowadays there is already a number of scientific investigations devoted to the review analysis of T. Mann’s creative path, there is a need to study the problem of culture “end of time” (in T. Mann’s terminology) in the novelistic work of the writer who went to political and social activities through art. The purpose of the article is to reveal the nuances of the relationship between spirit and reality in T. Mann’s short story “Tristan”.The article proves that within the cross-cutting problem of the relationship between art and life, which never ceased to bother the German writer, also the novel “Tristan” clearly distinguishes the related ones: art and beauty, art and morality, aesthetics and life, beauty and death, decadence and a disease of the spirit, the artist and reality, which allowed to clarify both the ideological concepts of creative individuality and the essence of its art. At the same time, the divergence between the views of the hero of the novel and T. Mann’s personal attitude to reality and art is shown. Enough attention is paid to identifying the role of the comic and the means of its formation in the novel. “Tristan” is interpreted in the context of the development of T. Mann’s work and the European literary process at the turn of the XIX - early XX centuries.The article identifies the place of the short story “Tristan” in the work of the German master of the word and outlines the ways of its further analysis.