Marks i mirovaja literatura (di F. Šiller) [1933] - [D138]

Concise description of the directive:

The Soviet critic and scholar of German literature Franz Shiller devotes his essay to an analysis of Marx’s reflections on the development of world literature.
Dante, Cervantes, and Shakespeare — who, through the powerful expressive force of their art, portrayed the crisis of feudalism and the birth of the new bourgeois culture — stand as the three greatest representatives of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, an era marked by the clash between two opposing worldviews and two opposing cultures. Marx considered Shakespeare’s work an exemplary model of realistic creation, appreciating in particular its historical realism, breadth of the vision of reality, and extraordinary wealth of interests, passions, types and characters. After the literature and art of the Renaissance, Marx’s attention focused especially on the writers of the rising progressive bourgeoisie of the 17th and 18th centuries, who were able to depict the ‘real relations’ of the emerging capitalist society with surprising immediacy, realism and frankness.
The conservative Romanticism of the first half of the 19th century was interpreted by Marx as a reaction of the declining aristocracy to the principles of the French Revolution, as well as an ideological expression of the Restoration, as opposed to the revolutionary vision of the Enlightenment bourgeoisie of the previous century. However, while severely criticising aristocratic Romanticism as a whole and its main representatives in literature, Marx was able to recognise the value of individual works or specific aspects of the work of numerous authors traditionally ascribed to Romanticism, or related to it, such as Walter Scott, Robert Burns and Percy Shelley.

Ilaria Aletto, Maria Zavyalova