Hermann Hesse (redirected from Herman Hesse)

Hesse, Hermann 

Born July 2, 1877, in Calw, Württemberg; died Aug. 9, 1962, in Montagnola, Switzerland. German writer.

Hesse lived in Switzerland from 1912. He was a pacifist during World War I. After World War II, Hesse renounced fascism, calling for the consolidation of peace and attacking the rebirth of revanchism and militarism in West Germany.

In the novel Peter Camenzind (1904; Russian translation, 1910), Hesse portrays the bitter fate of an artist in a world where profit and success are the only ideals. The novel Demian (1919) and the novella Klein and Wagner (1920) reveal the influence of C. G. Jung’s depth psychology in their treatment of the individual’s self-realization. In the novel Steppenwolf (1927; Russian translation, 1977), the destructive forces of bourgeois civilization are overcome by means of art and humor. Hess summed up his moral reflections in the Utopian novel Magister Ludi (also published as The Glass Bead Game; 1943; Russian translation, 1969), concluding that a leading cultural figure must not remain aloof from reality, even when he does not accept it.

Hesse also wrote verse cycles, short stories, critical essays, and publicist articles on contemporary themes. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1946.

WORKS

Gesammelte Werke, vols. 1–12. Frankfurt am Main, 1970.
Hermann Hesse und Romain Rolland: Briefe. Zürich, 1954.
Briefe, erweiterte Ausgabe. Frankfurt am Main, 1965.
Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann: Briefwechsel. Frankfurt am Main, 1968.
In Russian translation:
Monakh. St. Petersburg, 1912.
Okol’nyeputi: Rasskazy. Moscow, 1913.
Tropa mudrosti. Leningrad-Moscow, 1924.

REFERENCES

Istoriia nemetskoi literatury, vol. 5. Moscow, 1976. Pages 511–27.
Sedel’nik, V. D. German Gesse i shveitsarskaia literatura. Moscow, 1970.
Böttger, F. Hermann Hesse: Leben, Werk, Zeit. Berlin, 1974.
Bareiss, O. Hermann Hesse: Eine Bibliographie der Werke, vols. 1–2. Basel, 1962–64.

V. D. SEDEUNIK