The idea of overcoming death in Novalis’ dream world: experience of a philosophical reading of “Hymns to the night”

Romanticism has defined itself as a vector of development of European spiritual culture, opposing the leveling of personality with the aspiration for freedom and the Infinite, perfection and renewal, for personal and civil independence. The basis of the romantic worldview was the most acute discord between the ideal and reality. The determining moties of the romantic worldview and art were the affirmation of the intrinsic value of human life in all the richness of its manifestations, the motives of the spiritualizing and healing potential of nature, the motives of strong passions. The designated motives coexist in the context of the works of romantics with the motives of world sorrow, the “night” side of the soul, which is manifested through an appeal to the potential of the tragicomic, grotesque, ironically designed. The author of the article proceeds from the idea V.M. Zhirmunsky proposed in his monographic study Romanticism in Germany and England. The meaning of this idea lies in the assertion of the inseparable connection between the historical genesis of Romanticism as a school, trend, worldview and the development of a new sense of life. The author believes that elements of a worldview are present in the most naive experience of life, while the form is a later product of the crystallization of spiritual experience, the result of a new sense of life turning into a worldview. In a certain sense, this is applicable to Novalis's “Hymns to the Night”. The article presents an analysis of “Hymns to the Night” by F. Hardenberg (Novalis), a German romantic writer and philosopher. Novalis interprets the world as a symbolic all-unity (“magical idealism”) - an all-unity ensured by the existence of spirit, nature, God in relation to polarity and mutual reflection. The idea of symbolic all-unity is realized in Novalis’s work through an appeal to the potential of mythological, polysemantic encrypted symbols and a set of religious and mystical motifs and images. The article reveals the condition for the birth of a new creative task of the poet - to designate death and its overcoming as the main theme, and this condition is openness to the beyond. The poet turns to personal experience of mystical experiences, in which Light and Night are presented as symbols of harmony. Night is the queen of the world, the herald of sacred worlds, the patroness of blissful love, the secret altar of love, while Light is the personification of “earthly oppression” and those limits to which the earthly world is subject. The article examines the poetic experience of experiencing and understanding Death (Light is the personification of the limit; Night is the kingdom where time and limits have no power; Death is the True Night). The mystical experience for the poet is an exodus beyond the earthly, where the truth of the Night is revealed in the boundless infinity. Novalis in “Hymns to the Night” gives a new interpretation of Death: “Death renews in its rapidity”. “Hymns to the Night” are united by the fusion of the concept of the “True Night” as Death with the idea of the Savior, leading to overcoming the mortal limit and transforming death into a higher, gracious form open to eternity. Death and the resurrection of the Savior are interpreted as overcoming death in the form of a limit that is now open; death becomes a blessing and an opportunity for subsequent eternal life. Life and Death are transformed by the poet into correlated concepts. Destroying the usual idea of death, combining In the image of Death, the incompatible (decay and blossoming), Novalis endows Night with the status of a symbol of eternal life. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

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