The Emergence of Romanticism
Book by Nicholas V. Riasanovsky; Oxford University Press, 1995

Introduction I have been interested in romanticism since childhood. Romanticism meant romantic literature, especially poetry, which I could read in three languages (French, Russian, and English) then and a few others later on. As to romantic thought, ideology, or outlook -- call it what you will -- although I have always considered it inseparable from poetry, I was eager to learn more about it from whatever source and thus became an avid reader of all kinds of romantic literature as well as literature about romanticism. My Oxford doctoral disser- tation, which became my first book, was entitled Russia and the West in the Teaching of the Slavophiles: A Study of Romantic Ideology. 1 It presented my view and analysis of that remarkable teaching. Appropriately, I stressed its roman- tic nature rather than, as in some studies, its links with the spirituality of the Orthodox church or its mirroring of the historical circumstances of a certain kind of Russian educated public of the 1840s.

Slavophilism has remained a lifelong interest; but the attraction of roman- ticism, more broadly speaking, has also continued. I remember the sudden realization (one day, late in the afternoon, while working on an entirely different subject at the Bibliothque Nationale) that the obsessive romantic paradox of the finite and the infinite, of one's eternal striving and yet one's inability to reach one's goal did, after all, make sense: it represented the fundamental attitude within the Judeo-Christian tradition of the human being's relationship to God. This would also explain its compulsive power, as well as the fantastic despair of so many great poets and writers, who believed that words failed them and they could not express themselves. In time, my interest in romanticism became linked to my concern with emergence. Like other intellectual historians, I used freely the concept and framework of intellectual periods. For example, my book on the image of Peter the Great 2 was neatly divided: "The Image of Peter the Great in the Russian Enlightenment, 1700-1826" Enlightenment, 1700-1826, "The Image of Peter the Great in Russia in the Age of Idealistic Philosophy and Romanticism, 1826-1860", "The Image of Peter the Great in Russia in the Age of Realism and Scholarship, 1860-1917", and "The Image of Peter the Great in the Soviet Union, 1917-1984". It was high time to ask how an intellectual period arose.

As was mentioned earlier, the present book had its origin in lectures; and it still retains that form. Ideally there were three lectures, which now comprise three chapters. In the first I remind the reader of the emergence of roman- ticism in England; of its central poetry; and, in general, of what I consider most significant about the poetic achievement of Wordsworth and Coleridge, who created English romanticism. In the second, I attempt to do the same for Germany, where romanticism emerged at about the same time. My pro- tagonists in this instance are Novalis, Wackenroder, and Friedrich Schlegel. (I had to sacrifice my two favorite romanticisms, the French and the Russian, because they occurred later and were not present at the emergence.) The extensive citation of romantic poetry (and some prose), together with very brief but pointed accounts of their authors in the first two chapters, are meant to recall forcefully the moment of the emergence of romanticism in European intellectual history, as well as to suggest some central problems of interpreta- tion which it presents. The third chapter, then, aims to explain what actually happened in terms of pantheism or panentheism and the inner content and structure of romantic belief. Narrowly centered on that belief, this chapter is not concerned with the cultural and social evolution of the particular Euro- pean society which made romanticism possible, or even, to any significant extent, with the long intellectual and religious roots of romantic ideology itself. Although early romanticism is my main focus in this study, I do suggest some of the subsequent, often portentous, lines of development ro- manticism was to take and how the latter relate to the initial stage. Moreover, I make certain general observations, with appropriate examples, on the nature and structure of romantic thought. I offer some justification, both implicit and explicit, of my rather exclusive selection in the first two chapters of literary personalities and topics -- which I consider essential rather than mere- ly representative or illustrative. My presentation ends where it began -- with a quotation from a poet.

Among the readers engaged by the press, reader B's explication of my study is so lucid and to the point that I am quoting it in this introduction for the benefit of all who might want to become acquainted with my book. It does not often happen that an author considers a critic's understanding of his work equal to the author's own. Nicholas Riasanovsky's The Emergence of Romanticism is, as the title implies, a study of the emergence of distinctly "romantic" cultural ethos and literary sensibility. It is an essay in intellectual history (or, in current parlance, "cul- tural history"), though it draws on a large corpus of literary criticism and...