Aleksei L. Volskii, DSc in Philo- logy, Professor, Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia, Moika River Embankment, 48, 191186, St Petersburg, Russia. ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2274-9667
Acknowledgements: The research was supported by an internal grant of the Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia (project No. 54-VG). Shakespeare’s work had a great influence on the entire German culture of modernism, in particular on the work of T. Mann. Shakespearean motifs can be found in his works, starting with the short story Tonio Kröger (1903) and up to the novel Doctor Faustus (1947). As A. Rusakova has shown, the musical evolution of the hero of this novel reproduces the creative biography of Shakespeare himself: from Love’s Labour’s Lost through the sonnets to The Tempest. Among Shakespeare’s works, the tragedy Hamlet stands apart, which Frank Gunther, the most famous translator of Shakespeare in German in the 20 th century, called “the most beloved play of the Germans”. The reason for such love is explained not only by the artistic merits of the play, but also by the awareness of the inner kinship of Hamlet and the German soul. Since the 18 th century, Hamlet has served as a symbolic figure of national identity for Germans. Thomas Mann himself saw himself in the light of the Hamlet myth, discovering Hamlet-like traits in his character. The writer Tonio Kröger, the hero of the novella of the same name, also compares himself to Hamlet, but gives his image a specific interpretation – through the prism of F. Schiller’s aesthetic theory, formulated in the treatise “On Naive and Sentimental Poetry” (1795). Tonio Kroeger suffers from Hamlet’s duality between the bourgeois world and the world of art. The article analyzes such specifically “Hamlet-like” motives of his image as vocation, alienation, revenge and crime.
T. Mann; Shakespeare; Tonio Kröger; Hamlet code; artist.
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10.09.2025
Volskii, A.L. “Hamlet Motif in Thomas Mann’s Short Story Tonio Kröger”. Literaturovedcheskii zhurnal, no. 4(70), 2025, pp. 33–42. (In Russ.)
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