Victor A. Finogenov, Junior Researcher of the Department of Literary Studies, Institute of Scientific Information for Social Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Nakhimovsky Avenue, 51/21, 117418, Moscow, Russia.
The article examines the development of portrait symbolism in the works of Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann. The theme of mastery and professional vocation often formed the plot of his works, and the writer clearly preferred musicians and artists. Hoffmann’s aesthetic views have been studied quite well, so the task of this work is to highlight the theme of painting from a wider range. Compared to musical images, a painting or a fresco brings the imagination to life, giving it a visible and tangible form. In Hoffmann’s work, the portrait often represents a link between reality and fantasy. The artist character embodies his feminine ideal on canvas, but he is always torn between a heavenly image and an earthly feeling. While the writer’s earlier works are dominated by the aesthetics of horror, towards the end of his life, irony comes to the fore, reconciling the contradiction between the immanent and the transcendent.
E.T.A. Hoffmann; artist; portrait; painting in literature; ekphrasis
15.02.2026
10.03.2026
Finogenov, V.A. “Portrait Symbolism in the Works of E.T.A. Hoffmann”. Literaturovedcheskii zhurnal, no. 2(72), 2026, pp. 31–45. (In Russ.)
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