The protagonist of the cultural discourse of German modernism is a creative person mythologized in the concept of genius. The theory of unconscious ingenious creativity forms the semantic center of modernist aesthetics and the aesthetical myth of German modernism. The source of ingenious poetry is creative imagination interpreted as a constructive principle of modernist literature. The first and precedent literary text about creative fantasy in Germany is the drama Torquato Tasso by J.W. Goethe, in which the German poet is the first to create the image of a modernist poet who predetermined the vector of evolution of literature about the artist from Weimar Сlassicism to postmodernism. The article attempts to read the main conflicts of Goethe’s drama through the prism of philosophical categories, the Critique of the Power of Judgment by I. Kant, published in the same 1790 as the text of Goethe. The dialogue between poetry and philosophy, which has become one of the important features of the discourse of German culture and theoretically substantiated in the philosophy of romanticism, allows an interpretation of the main
dramatic conflicts in line with the antinomies of philosophical aesthetics, as well as against the background of the philosophy of tragedy, the genesis of which coincides with the genesis of early German modernism.
For citation:
Volskiy A.L. Goethe’s drama “Torquato Tasso” and the problem of creative imagination, Ivanovo State University Bulletin, Series: Humanities, 2022, iss. 1, pp. 18—30.