“Was sie anrühren, schmilzt”. Thomas Bernhard’s painter Strauch and Thomas Mann’s Jesuit Naphta

Abstract

This article is devoted to a comparative analysis of the images of the painter Strauch, the character in the novel by Th. Bernhard “Frost”, and the Jesuit Naphta, the character of Th. Mann’s “The Magic Mountain”. Such a research perspective is due to the fact that in the work of the Austrian and German classics many characteristic leitmotifs like the crisis of the subject and the search for the Self, the ambivalent being of the artist, the theme of rejection of a career, the theme of illness and death, all go back to those figures. A comparative analysis of the images of Strauch and Naphta allows shedding additional light on the specificity of Th. Bernhard’s reception of Th. Mann’s work, as well as expanding the idea of the artistic originality of the сharacter-“anti-educator” requested by the novel of the 20th century. While the differences between an artist and Jesuit are predominantly formal, their similarities reveal a conceptual systemic basis. Strauch and Naphta are related by Ungrund (groundlessness): both willingly appeal to the “prelogical”, both are prone to introversion, misanthropy and nihilism. It is emphasized that the internal conflict experienced by Strauch and Naphta allows them to feel much more subtly the drama of the “spiritual situation of time”. Without denying the self-destructive intellectual and ideological orientation of Strauch and Naphta, the author of the article comes to the conclusion that it is necessary to underline the cognitively constructive potential of their problematizing “pedagogy”.