Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The Tales of Hoffmann, Volumes 1 & 2
This early work by E. T. A. Hoffmann was originally published in 1885 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography. This selection of Hoffmann's finest short stories vividly demonstrates his intense imagination and preoccupation with the supernatural, placing him at the forefront of both surrealism and the modern horror genre. Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffmann was born in Konigsberg, East Prussia in 1776. His family were all jurists, and during his youth he was initially encouraged to pursue a career in law. However, in his late teens Hoffman became increasingly interested in literature and philosophy, and spent much of his time reading German classicists and attending lectures by, amongst others, Immanuel Kant."
The Sandman. The Elementary Spirit (Two Mysterious Tales. German Classics)
No literature can produce a more original writer than Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffmann (1776 1822), a German Romantic author of fantasy and horror, better known by his pen name E. T. A. Hoffmann (Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann). His works are very numerous and were published at Berlin in fifteen volumes. He is the subject and hero of Jacques Offenbach's famous but fictional opera The Tales of Hoffmann.---Of the two tales in this book, "The Sandman" is from the collection "Night Pieces," and The Elementary Spirit is from his "Later Works." In these stories, Hoffmann's purpose is to point out the ill-effect of a morbid desire after an imaginary world, and a distaste for realities. Different as t...
The Sandman
The story begins with a series of letters between Nathanael, his fiancée Clara, and her brother Lothar. Nathanael describes a childhood fear of a creature called The Sandman who was said to come at night and steal the eyes of children, which intermingled with a the appearance of a man named Coppelius in his father's room some nights to work on what appears to have been alchemy. This man once attacked Nathanael, threatening to take his eyes, and later killed his father before disappearing.
The Deserted House
Ernst Theodor Amadeus (ne Wilhelm) Hoffmann (1776- 1822), better known by his pen name E. T. A. Hoffmann, was a German Romantic author of fantasy and horror, a jurist, composer, music critic, draftsman and caricaturist. He is the subject and hero of Jacques Offenbach s famous but fictional opera The Tales of Hoffmann. Hoffmann s stories were tremendously influential in the 19th century, and he is one of the key authors of the Romantic movement. Between 1781 and 1792 he attended the Lutheran school or Burgschule, where he made good progress in classics. Ernst showed great talent for piano-playing, and busied himself with writing and drawing. The provincial setting was not, however, conducive to technical progress, and despite his many-sided talents he remained relatively ignorant, both of classical forms and of the new artistic ideas that were then developing in Germany. He had however read Schiller, Goethe, Swift, Sterne, Rousseau, and Jean Paul, and wrote part of a novel called Der Geheimnisvolle. His works include: Mlle de Scuderi, The Golden Flower Pot, The Sand-Man and Other Stories and The Devil s Elixir.
The Serapion Brethren
"Look at the question how one will, the bitter conviction is not to be got rid of by persuasion, or by force, that what has been never, never can be again. It is useless to contend with the irresistible power of Time, which goes on continually creating by a process of constant destruction. Nothing survives save the shadowy reflected images left by that part of our lives which has set, and gone far below our horizon; and they often haunt and mock us like evil, ghostly dreams. But we are fools, and expect that matters which, in reality, were nothing but our ideas, parts and portions of our own individualities, are to be found actually existent in the world outside us, and blooming in perpetual youth! The woman we have loved and parted from, the friend to whom we have said good-bye, are both lost to us for ever. The people whom, perhaps years afterwards, we meet as being them, are not the same whom we left, neither are we ever the same to them." So saying, Lothair got up from his seat, and folding his arms on the mantel-piece, gazed, with gloomy sadness, into the fire which was blazing and crackling merrily.
