This paper examines Romanticism as a predominantly artistic and intellectual movement that emerged in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe as a counter-reaction to the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason. Drawing on historians and theorists including Eugene N. Anderson, Arthur O. Lovejoy, Schiller, and Baudelaire, the paper traces Romanticism's origins in social and political upheaval, its philosophical tensions with reason, and its elevation of nature and beauty. It then considers how Romantic influences reached Russian literature through the works of Pushkin, Lermontov, and Turgenev, analyzing specific texts — The Queen of Spades, Taman, and Bezhin Meadow — as exemplars of Romantic themes entangled with realism and satire.
Some historians and literary critics are still debating the concept of Romanticism as a defined period starting at the end of the eighteenth century and lasting until about the 1850s. Whether it was a single movement or a succession of movements, Romanticism is generally considered a predominantly artistic movement that appeared at the end of the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth century in Europe, arising as a counter-reaction to the Age of Reason — the Enlightenment. The age of revolutions required the rationalism of the Enlightenment in order for the world to engage on the path to progress. The hegemony of the Western colonial powers entered a new stage when the American colonies fought for their independence and established a new country that would change the history of the world forever.
The great empires underwent social changes that would inevitably reverse the way their subjects envisioned the world and their roles within it, and began to make the distinction between divine right and civil rights. Eugene N. Anderson considers Romanticism in Germany to be the result of "the social transformation from the culture of caste and absolutism to that of class and constitutional rule."[1] The new industrial order made people — and especially artists — seek refuge in a state of mind that would supply a counterbalance to the ever-expanding horizon of the urban. Humanity and nature seemed increasingly estranged, and human nature appeared to drift in a direction governed by mercantilism.
Anderson considers that German Romanticism came mainly as a response to the intellectual and spiritual threat posed by the French Revolution and Napoleon. "The fact of living in a time of cultural crisis conditioned the thinking and acting of the young German Romanticists as no other experience did. It forced them to deal not merely with a single aspect of life but with the totality of man, society, and universe. … In the decade or so beginning with the late 1790s, Romanticism offered a way of deliverance for persons caught in a crisis."[2]
Humanity acquired new meaning, as defined by Novalis: "nothing more than living in common."[3] The idea and new values of community forced the Romanticists and the consumers of their works to rethink the individual in the context of society as a structure that needed all its parts in order to function properly.
Romanticism reconsidered and analyzed in depth the importance of beauty and art for humanity, restoring Nature to its place as the primary source of beauty and positioning human nature as an intrinsic part of that source. In his Letters Upon the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794), J. C. Friedrich von Schiller emphasized the importance of understanding and placing oneself in accordance with one's epoch, while at the same time acknowledging that man was "introduced into this state, by the power of circumstances, before he could freely select his own position."[4] The human being, as the work of nature, arrived at a state where it needed to seek out the ends that those circumstances had set loose. The laws of nature still apply to nature's work, even if the most superior being of all — humanity — does not seem aware of their interdependence.
Schiller explains why reason is not necessarily the natural form of human existence, and in doing so paves the way for understanding Romanticism as a response to the Age of Reason:
"She [Reason] takes from man something which he really possesses, and without which he possesses nothing, and refers him as a substitute to something that he ought to possess and might possess… Before he had opportunity to hold firm to the law with his will, reason would have withdrawn from his feet the ladder of nature."[5]
This passage illuminates the core tension at the heart of Romanticism: reason, however powerful, removes the human being from an organic relationship with nature and with one's own instincts, offering an abstract substitute in place of something genuine and lived. Schiller's argument provided a philosophical foundation for artists and thinkers who felt that the Enlightenment's rational program had displaced the very qualities that made human life meaningful.
Romanticism has often been considered the artistic movement that encouraged exalted, sometimes unrealistic artists and art lovers. Some regarded it as the domain of the sick, as opposed to classicism, which was seen as the domain of the sound. In the spirit expressed by Schiller, Baudelaire simply defines Romanticism as "the latest expression of the beautiful"[6] and "a conception analogous to the ethical disposition of the age."[7] For Baudelaire, Romanticism was not a retreat into fantasy or illness but rather the most authentic artistic response to the moral and spiritual temper of its time.
"Baudelaire defines Romanticism as expression of beauty"
"Romantic themes in three Russian literary works"
"Romantic art engaged with social and political realities"
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