The ideal of Friedrich Gundolf and his myth of Stefan George. Reflections on a book

Part 1

Abstract

The article analyses the masterbook of the German philologist and culturologist Friedrich Gundolf, devoted to the work of a great German poet of the early 20^th century, Stefan George. The author argues that, while analysing the poetic heritage of George, Gundolf creates not merely the concept of the poet’s creative biography, but rather the myth of the ideal poet. The essence of poetry, according to Gundolf, lies in its ability to transform the language of the era, and, ultimately, the era itself. This is possible due to the fact that poetry is a means of creating symbols that express the major spiritual challenges a nation experiences at a certain point in its history. Gundolf tried to show that the works by Stefan George were a pivotal point in the whole history of Germany, and even the whole of Europe which at the end of the 19th century experienced a crisis resulting in the nations’ losing their connection to and involvement with the eternal foundation of their existence — the creative strife to define the inherent national ideals. George, according to Gundolf, is an example of a miraculous transformation of one’s own and a nation’s life, a poet who had the gift of recreating the entire evolution of the national spirit, the way of returning to the ideal in his creative work. Gundolf describes this progress, offering the key collections of George’s poetic work as its milestones. George’s real creative career happened to be somewhat more complicated than Gundolf’s representation suggested. The influence George had, which seemed extremely significant at the beginning of the 20th century, had almost completely disappeared by the middle of the century, even in Germany. The aristocratic myths about popular ideals were perceived as an essential component of national socialist ideology and aesthetics. The author attempts to explain the controversial and complex nature of the poetic influence George and his circle extended and the reasons why Gundolf did not observe or explain it. However, the ideal presented by Gundolf cannot fail to evoke respect, since it possesses such traits as universalism and the enormous task of transforming the European spirit, the traits that almost no other similar projects of philological and even philosophical scale exhibited.