Beksaeva N. A.

UNDERSTANDING LITERATURE THROUGH PAINTING

‘In response to your greetings, I am sending you a little picture I painted these past few days - for painting and drawing are my way of relaxing. The picture is designed to show you that the innocence of nature, the vibrancy of a few colors, is at any one given moment - even in the midst of a difficult and problematic life - able to stir belief and freedom in us.’ It’s written by the German-Swiss writer, the literary critic, the poet Herman Hesse (1877 – 1962). This person is well-known in the world literature. He is the Nobel Prize winner of 1946 for the novel The Glass Bead Game. His wonderful literary masterpieces such as Demian, Klingso’s Last Summer, The Steppenwolf, Siddhartha, Narcissus and Goldmund, Journey to the East, The Glass Bead Game became a source of inspiration for many readers and the purpose of scientific researches. But only few people know Hesse as the artist. Nevertheless, Hesse’s painting is an interesting phenomenon, which can help to understand his poems, novels, his attitude and European’s cultural features of the 20^th century, in particular painting, philosophy, aesthetics.

The motive of painting and its value in formation and attitude of Hesse is in detail shined by him in prose: Roshalda, the novel of 1914, Pleasure of the Artist, the poem of 1918, Artist, the story of 1918, Magic of Paints, poem of 1918, Klingsor's Last Summer, the story of 1920, Poems of the Artist, sketches to a cycle of verses of 1920, the book which named Reflections, 1925, Water color, the essay of 1926, Pleasures and Grieves of the Artist, reflection, the essay of 1928, The Old Artist in a Workshop, 1953 (the poem devoted to artist Hans Purman). In the prose Hesse opens some aspects for understanding the painting. He feels that drawing is the real magic and the wizard which dependently creates everything. Painting for Hesse is not only work, therapy, but also a way of understanding the mind, emotions and understanding the East philosophy (including Daoism). In the short biography there is a story where Hesse, meditating before the picture, is literally dissolved in it and disappears, as a Taoist wise man in clouds. Painting is introduced in his works creativity and understanding of art the principle of three concepts unification (‘word’ – ‘painting’ − ‘music’).

Painting for Hesse is a secret, mystery, which can know only its creator; differently the work and its author will be devastated. The most part of Hesse’s pictures are drawn in a water color technique (about three thousand copies). There are illustrations to his poems, sketches in the texts, and simply water colors. Some works are drawn by the pencil too. The German researcher of Hesse’s picturesque heritage Folker Mikhels noted: ‘Hesse in the drawings purposefully uses solar energy. They, as a good wine, incorporate, absorb in itself the sun, these are light, thermal and solar collectors and generators which in our cold, gloomy industrial cities give feeling of summer, hopes, pleasures of life, they - a bouquet from paints and hopes’ [

In the water color drawings Hesse immortalized mainly Swiss landscapes of the village Montagnola located near the lake Lugano, where he lived since 1919 and till the end of life. The main images are mountains, waters, small huts, trees, the crossings, clouds, flowers, plants: ‘I stick to very simple landscape-style motifs and seem unable to progress beyond this. How beautiful all the other things are, the skies and animals, the pageant of life and - most beautiful of all - people, all which I certainly see, often deeply moved and almost awestruck, yet I am unable to paint any of it.’

The main colors in painting of Hermann Hesse are, according to R. Hjum, scarlet and yellow. Scarlet symbolizes the earth and Eros, pulsing blood, sufferings of the Christ, and fire. Scarlet is also a symbol of Love (Hesse uses this color for the description of the wife – Rut Venger). Yellow associates with the woman (a yellow hair color at Teresina from Klein and Wagner, mothers Demian) as wisdom, light, knowledge. He wrote in Travel to Nuremberg: ‘My folder with pictures became more thickly, as gradually, not considerably, as every year, became yellow weeding, dawn are colder, evening mountains are more violet, and to green I added more and more yellow and red’. It is necessary to add that the abundance of the scarlet and yellow are characteristic for Hesse’s works from about 1917 to the middle of the 30th, because in his late pictures dominate not the bright, diluted tones. So, for example, in the story The Gift in the Sleep (1951) Hesse lists the colors of the picture – an ochre (from pale yellow to golden-yellow), Neapolitan yellow (light yellow – orange-yellow), a crocus (light-lilac), white, very light red.

According to many researches, his water colors can display the prosaic works, like illustrations to poems in his self-made books. So, the illustration to the history of growing and spiritual searches of young man Demian (1919) can be a water color named ‘A chair with books’ (1921). The book as a symbol of wisdom, the studying; in a water color, as well as in the novel there is a lot of yellow, as an expression of light, education, Goodness wisdom, and mystery, intimate. For Indian-based novel Siddhartha (1922) – ‘A landscape in Tessin’ (1922) (geometrical images of trees hide the house in depth. How can you see it? It is visible only from above. To get into an essence, it is necessary to be discharged of a subject? It is the essence reflection of the East wisdom). Important to note that the water color is the typical sample of the Expressionism, and the East’s image here is the mix of geometrical images - sphere, square, and triangle.

Steppenwolf (1927) is the result of psychoanalysis, telling about human masks, subconsciousness, unreality - a water color Masquerade (1926). There is a choice before the person - to learn himself or not, to unmask or not, to learn something frightening, unknown or to live in daily mass reality. It was the problem not only to Hesse’s hero, as to Hesse himself. You can be in mask in the mass (mass media, mass relation for some fact, news) or you can be without mask (alternative) most likely alone. But you can search the harmony.

The ingenious novel Glass Bead Game (1942), in the quintessence of his philosophical views, difficult descriptions of the world of the East - a cycle of landscapes of the 40th - the 50th, made in semitones, in a haze. ‘Illustration to almost biographic story Klingsor’s Last Summer tells about life of the artist, can be ‘View on Klingsor Garden’. The autobiography essay Childhood of the Wizard regards a water color with the unusual name ‘Blue sphere tree’ (the 20th). It is the author’s dream, the blue flower of knowledge in Romanticism, the symbol of wonderful in the world, the world of miracles and wonderful. Hesse noted: ‘My little watercolors are kinds of poems or dreams, which provide but a distant memory of ‘reality,’ and change it according to personal feelings or needs; the fact that I am…a mere amateur is something I never forget’ (From a letter to Helene Welti, 1919.

Shelter (1917) is a series of images of small huts in the wood (1920). Hut is the symbol of asceticism; aspiration will retire from a society, and knowledge and the nature. On the composition the hut image in water colors can be divided into two types. The first type – the hut image in a wood thicket (all picture is under construction on the hut image) (‘The small house in wood’, ‘The Hut in wood’, ‘The Hut with a palm tree’). In the foreground of these works is placed the small hut, a lodge in a wood thicket – a shelter for the wanderer. Decay and a poor type of a hut are created by Hesse of bright colors – emerald, red, lime, blue, yellow, crimson, orange, azure. The second type is the image of small huts as the detail of all composition (‘The view to Saint Gothard’ (1924), ‘The view on Parletstsu’ (1923), ‘Lake and mountains’). Huts here are ‘skillfully disguised’ among environment – mountains, waters, the wood. They supplement the general plan of a picture, the panel is similar. The composition of these water colors is more close to models of the Chinese landscape painting ‘mountains and waters’. Especially, it concerns a water color of the period of mature Hesse’s creativity – ‘The mountain in snow’ in which the picture of the mountains shrouded in an easy haze appears at the viewer, and outlines of small structures somewhere in the distance. Special role in formation of perception and creation of Hesse’s painting has played Taoist painting ‘mountains and waters’. Such conclusion is based on two facts. The first fact is Hesse’s interest to Taoist philosophy and culture (by the way, Hesse’s biographers Jean and Michel Senes draw a parallel between creativity of the Chinese Taoist poet and artist Du Faugh and Hesse). It is interesting to note that that the ways of Indian thinking had strongly influenced his basic ideas and his work of art too.

The second aspect is the similar system with Taoist painting. According to Taoist ideals painting of ‘mountains and waters’ should be ‘naturalness’, ‘simplicity’, ‘spirituality’ and ‘mystery’. The main images of Tao fine-art are mountains, waters, small temples and huts, trees, the crossings, lonely people and clouds.