The inner reality can only be born on the basis of a careful study of the outside world - the consideration of this relationship constitutes the originality of Hoffman among his fellows at the end of the era of Romanticism. He conceives the imagination as a mediator between the external reality and the world of the spiritual. From this point of view, the positions of Cyprian and the Count are interchangeable,Cyprian may be perceived as mentally upsetting on the same grounds, which is why we are declaring the box of mentally unhealthy. This is the content of the "Serapionic Principle", which becomes a reliable key for later investigators interpreting Hoffman's novel.

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Hoffman writes in the form of a dialogue the novel "The Wind of the Cousin" at the end of his life. The author is already ill when he creates it and his work is full of his vague anticipation of the end. It is easy to see the writer's transition from the omnipresent preconceptions of Romanticism as an artistic tendency in the literature to a more comprehensive, plausible reproduction of the diversity of life. The two actors in the novel, one of whom is affected by paralysis, acquiring the significance of a symbolic sign of approaching the end of the life, are watching the life on the big market square in front of their home. They learn carefully, without their knowledge, the physical and psychic features of the people who are vanquishing it. The two elders make remote assumptions and suggestions about the character and fate of each one, interpret their unconscious gestures, present the words they say so that people turn to the two meticulous observers in experimental animals. These two strange "heroes" of Hoffmann volunteerly perform a mission very similar to the one who has set as their primary creative commitment their creator - to connect the two mutually exclusive aspects of life, the observed reality, and the reality generated by the imagination. This mixing of reality with the uniquely subjective constructions of creative fantasy will attract the surrealist and Kafka's attention to the stories of the late German romantic at the beginning of the twentieth century.

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Hoffman owes much to his reputation as a writer of "ghost stories," in which he deliberately frightens his readers with stories of buried vicious monsters, clever marsupials, and witty witches with dentures whose images he draws from medieval German legends for their apparent and bloody revenge of the living. Indeed, this German author did not believe in these entertaining fantasies, filled with fantastic ominous and cold-blooded accidents, but used them with very different motives - to surrender his constant anxiety to the mysterious being, to give an artistic expression of his anxiety as a fast-paced mortal man mystical secrets of the universe.

part 1