American version of romantism

1. Romanticism in American Literature. Creativity N. Hawthorne and E. Poe
Romanticism as an ideological and artistic trend in European and American culture. 18th–19th centuries was based on the philosophy of idealism, which asserts that spirit, consciousness, thinking, the mental are primary, and matter, nature, the physical are secondary, derivative. The central category of romanticism is romantic duality , “the discord between the ideal and reality, which is also characteristic of previous trends,” which acquires in romanticism extraordinary intensity and intensity.³
In our work, we consider the views of various scholars on romanticism as a trend in Western European and American literature. They were studied by such researchers as Irina Grigorievna Neupokoeva, Henry Remak , Tatyana Alexandrovna Shabalina, Viktor Maksimovich Zhirmunsky , Vladimir Andreevich Lukov and others. According to Henry Remak , it can be said that “a large and respected group of critics argues that romanticism cannot be squeezed into any framework. Individualism and instability as the main elements of romanticism are not recognized by everyone. There are as many definitions of romanticism as there are authors. In any case, there are more differences than similarities. “Undoubtedly, there are romantic authors, features of the romantic style, there can also be types of romanticism, a romantic period, but there is no single romanticism. It is clear that it is much more difficult for critics who believe that European Romanticism is essentially unified to give their own definition of romanticism than for their opponents. In general, it seems that there are two types of definitions and some intermediate position between them. For Remak , romanticism is "something vague and unrealistic, which is opposed to classicism and the 18th century, which contains a whole system of metaphysical ideas and which is preached by political liberalism."
According to Sauter , Romanticism “is not a closed system, it is a dialectical, historical process; its initial function consists in the negation of the previous aesthetic theory, the further function is the creation of a new ”, and “the awareness of the personality of its active role in the social process becomes new here”.
For this study, we have chosen a working definition of romanticism, from which we will build. Romanticism (French romantisme ) is an ideological and artistic direction in European and American spiritual culture of the late 18th - 1st half of the 19th centuries. French romantisme is descended from Spanish romance (as Spanish romances were called in the Middle Ages, and then a knightly romance) through English romantic (romantic), transmitted in French romanesque, and then romantique and meaning in the 18th century. “strange”, “fantastic”, “picturesque”. At the beginning of the 19th century the word " Romanticism " becomes a term for a new literary movement opposed to classicism.
In his book, Viktor Maksimovich Zhirmunsky names the work of M. Deutschbein “The Essence of the Romantic”, in which the latter discusses romanticism: “not every phenomenon of the romantic era equally expresses the idea of romanticism. For example, Byron and Walter Scott are not romantics, French romanticism is a secondary, imitative phenomenon. The most striking expression of the idea of romanticism Deutschbein finds in Germany in Novalis, Fr. Schlegel, Schelling, Schleiermacher , in England - at Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley. Zhirmunsky writes about Deutschbein : “In his characterization of the “creative intuition” of the romantics and the romantic synthesis of the infinite and finite in the human self, in nature, in art, in historical life, one can clearly feel the sympathetic immersion of modern neo-romanticism into the atmosphere of a romantic worldview intimately related to it.”
As I. Sheter wrote , “romanticism should be considered in parallel with other contemporary literary phenomena, i.e. taking into account the interweaving of various phenomena and processes of this era. Irina Neupokoeva was of the same opinion, she highlights the following features of European romanticism:

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  its interaction with realism;
  
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  the relation of romanticism to the classical heritage;
  
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  links between romanticism and folk poetry
  

1. 
   The Interaction of Romanticism with Realism . “Most often, this interaction was observed on one side of it - as the use of many methods of romantic imagery by the greatest realists of the century - Pushkin, Gogol, Stendhal, Balzac, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, who went through in their creative evolution, as it were, through the "school" of romanticism. On the one hand, certain discoveries of romantic art were not "removed" by the development of realism, but continued to function in its artistic system in an " untransformed " form.⁴ On the other hand, Romantic art itself actively perceived the "lessons of realism", above all, what critical realism asserted itself at that time as a new type of art. It is also important to note that "the problem of the interaction of romanticism and realism has its own distinct zonal aspect, since it is directly related to the level of literary development."
   
2. 
   On the relation of romanticism to the classical heritage. “A comparative examination shows a fundamentally similar attitude of romantics (who are close to each other in their ideological and aesthetic positions) to past eras of the national and pan-European artistic heritage. Typologically, the difference in attitude towards this or that material among romantics of different ideological positions will also be characteristic. Therefore, the problem of European literary development arises. “We see how stable the selectivity is, from which romantics of different directions turn to certain periods or the largest figures of world art.” For example, some romantics (revolutionary) gravitated towards the great tradition of active humanism of the artists of the past, others did not. “While the romantics, associated with the progressive forces of historical development, were distinguished by a serious interest in the great satirists of the past (Aristophanes, Juvenal, Lucian, Swift, Voltaire, Fielding), romantic writers, whose work was associated with a protective attitude towards feudal or bourgeois orders of ideology, treated their satire either openly negatively, or did not notice its role in the development of the spiritual union of mankind. This attitude changes at different stages. "At an early stage in the development of romanticism, the main attention of romantics is attracted by the legacy of the classicists and enlighteners." Soter adds: “we can talk about deep differences in the attitude of romantics of different directions to the world classical heritage: some emphasized moral stamina, fortitude, greatness of passions in the personality, others saw sufferers marked by the sadness of fate.”
   
3. 
   From the connection of romanticism with folk poetry. There is a “typological commonality of the very fact of the widespread interest of romantics in the folk poetic work of both their own and other peoples. In countries where folk epic poetry continued to play an active and independent role in the spiritual life of the era, many works of the Romantics are directly adjacent in their poetics to folklore forms. A common feature of the relationship between romantic poetry and folklore was the free "permeability" of a number of poetic genres characteristic of romanticism for the influence of folk poetry, for the creative development of its images, themes, its very rhythmic structure. What was common was that in the folk poetry of the Romantics, first of all, the basic principles of the poetics of works of folklore genres were attracted. At an early stage, they were perceived as a force capable of resisting the influence of the regulating poetics of classicism. Soter also points out that “the desire to rely on the traditions of folk art culture in the development of national literatures caused here, already at an early stage of the romantic movement, serious theoretical speeches in defense of the folk language as the basis of modern art. In this romantic literature, they are especially attracted to those artists whose work (Aeschylus, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton) or whose personal biography (Dante, Tasso, Michelangelo) most fully revealed the tragedy of a person’s position in conditions of lack of freedom. At this time, the problem of the tragic fate of man in the conditions of bourgeois reality arose in reality. Returning to Neupokoeva, let's say about the mature stage of romanticism: "folk poetic creativity was already perceived in its genre differentiation , in an interested desire to draw from it new opportunities to enrich one's own art." This interest of the Romantics "was freely combined with their attention to all national and world artistic experience." Also "an important point of the typological commonality of the romantics' attitude to folklore was the ever-deepening differentiation of their attitude to the folklore tradition."
   

In no Western European country did romanticism play such a role as American: a whole literature was created within the direction. Early American romanticism is characterized by historical optimism, the pathos of affirmation. The mature stage of American romanticism is characterized by criticism of the direction itself, of the core of the romantic dual world . It is here that the interaction of romanticism with realism, which Neupokoeva spoke about, is revealed. There are 3 stages in the development of American Romanticism:

1. 
   Early American Romanticism ( 1820-1830s). His immediate predecessor was pre-romanticism, which developed as early as within the framework of enlightenment literature (V. Irving , D.F. Cooper, W.K. Brinet , D.P. Kennedy, etc.) With the manifestation of their works, American literature for the first time receives international recognition. There is a process of interaction between American and European romanticism.⁵ An intensive search for national artistic traditions is underway, the main themes and problems are outlined (the War of Independence, the development of the continent, the life of the Indians, etc.). The worldview of the leading writers of this period is painted in optimistic tones associated with the heroic time. There is a close continuity with the ideology of the American Enlightenment, which ideologically prepared the American Revolution. At the same time, critical trends are maturing at this stage, which are a reaction to the negative consequences of the strengthening of capitalism in all spheres of life in American society. Early American Romantics are repulsed by the rising tide of corruption, selfishness, moral and spiritual impoverishment. They are looking for an alternative to the bourgeois way of life and find it in the romantically idealized life of the American West, the heroism of the War of Independence, the free sea, the patriarchal past of the country, in the rich colorful European history.
   
2. 
   Mature American Romanticism (1840s–1850s). This period includes the work of N. Hawthorne , E.A. Poe, G. Melville, G.W. Longfellow, W.G. Simms , R.W. Emerson and G.D. Toro. There were noticeable differences in the attitude and aesthetic position of the romantics of the 1940s and 1950s. Most writers are deeply dissatisfied with the course of the country's development (the barbaric destruction of the indigenous population of the mainland, the predatory plunder of natural resources, the economic crisis of the 1830s, government corruption, foreign and domestic political conflicts). The gap between reality and the romantic ideal deepens, turns into an abyss. In mature American romanticism, dramatic, tragic tones, a sense of the imperfection of the world and man (N. Hawthorne ), moods of sorrow, longing (E. Poe), consciousness of the tragedy of human existence (G. Melville) predominate. A hero with a split psyche appears, bearing the stamp of doom in his soul. At this stage, American romanticism is moving from the artistic development of national reality to the study of the universal problems of man and the world on the basis of national material, and acquires philosophical depth. At the same time, he relies on the modern idealistic philosophy of Europe, on the German idealistic school of Kant, Schelling, Fichte. Contemporaries are faced with questions of a global nature - about the essence of man, about the relationship between man and nature, man and society, about the ways of moral self-improvement. Poe, Melville, and Hawthorne created symbolic images of great depth and generalizing power in their writings. Supernatural forces begin to play a noticeable role in their creations, mystical motifs intensify.
   
3. 
   Late American Romanticism (60s). This is a period of crisis phenomena in the romanticism of the United States. Romanticism as a method is increasingly unable to reflect the new reality. There is a sharp division within romanticism, caused by the civil war between the North and the South. On the one hand, the literature of abolitionism comes forward, protesting against slavery from ethical, general humanistic positions within the framework of romantic aesthetics. On the other hand, the literature of the South, romanticizing and idealizing "southern chivalry", stands up in defense of a historically doomed wrong cause and a reactionary way of life. The romantic trend in US literature was not immediately replaced by realism after the end of the Civil War. At the turn of these two directions is the work of the American poet Walt Whitman, Dickinson 's work is also imbued with a romantic worldview outside the framework of romanticism .
   

National features of American romanticism:
The assertion of national identity and independence, the search for national identity and national character run through all the art of American romanticism. In world romanticism, nature always acts as an alternative to inhumane civilization. In the work of romantics in the United States, this motif is reinforced by the fact that the untouched by civilization nature begins in Americans literally beyond the threshold of the house.
In the New World there were no picturesque ruins, ancient monuments, ancient traditions, legends. Gradually, in the books of Irving and Cooper, Longfellow and Melville, Hawthorne and Thoreau, phenomena and facts of American nature, history, and geography acquire a romantic flavor.⁶
Romanticism in the United States is consistently anti-capitalist and expresses the sentiments of democratic America. Also, for American romanticism, the Indian theme became a cross-cutting one. The undoubted merit of the American romantics was a sincere interest and deep respect for the Indian people, their unique worldview, culture, and folklore.
Within American Romanticism, within a single creative method, there were notable regional differences. The main literary regions are New England (northeastern states), the middle states, the South. The romanticism of New England ( Hawthorne , Emerson , Thoreau, etc.) is characterized primarily by the desire for a philosophical understanding of the American experience, for the analysis of the national past, its ideological and artistic heritage, and for the study of complex ethical problems. New English Romanticism has a strong tradition of moral and philosophical prose, rooted in America's Puritan colonial past. The work of Irving , Cooper, and later Melville is associated with the middle states . The main themes in the work of the romantics of the middle states are the search for a national hero, interest in social issues, reflections on the lessons of the path traveled, a comparison of the past and present of America. The work of E. Poe is associated with the special atmosphere of the American South , but it goes beyond the regional "southern" literature. Southern writers often sharply and justly criticize the vices of America's capitalist development, but glorify the advantages of the slave system.
For readers of the 20th century, E. Poe (January 19, 1809 - October 7, 1849) is primarily a novelist and poet. Contemporaries knew him primarily as a journalist and critic. One of the most tragic figures in the history of American literature.
He was left without parents early (Elizabeth Arnold and David Poe-actors , talented people) and grew up an orphan, brought up in a strange house (the Allan couple are childless, rich people). As a child, Edgar was not a happy child, he constantly felt like an adopted child, it was then that he already experienced a feeling of loneliness, which then did not leave him all his life. From childhood, Edgar Allan Poe was gifted with increased susceptibility and powerful imagination (he lived in his own fantastic reality). As a teenager, Edgar was an active and capable boy, but other guys from the " Richmond society" tried to suppress the personality in him.
One of Poe's best early poems, "To Helena," is dedicated to Jane Stanard , the mother of Edgar's school friend. She became the first beautiful woman in Poe's poetic mind. (Prior to this, Mrs. Allan (idealized in the boy's fantasies) took her place). Edgar had to quickly say goodbye to Jane Stanard , and Mrs. Allan , then to his future wife Virginia (she died at 25), so the idea of a beautiful woman in Poe's creative mind was painted in elegiac, sad tones.
Edgar Allan Poe was enrolled at the age of 17 at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville . During this period he wrote his first collection of poems in 1827 ("Tamerlane and other poems of a Bostonian "). Soon Allan took his stepson home due to non-payment for the university, as a result of which Edgar had a psychological strain. He left Richmond and traveled to Boston in the hope of getting his poems published. In the summer of 1827, his first collection of poetry, Tamerlane and Other Poems of a Bostonian , was released. Poe rose to the rank of sergeant major in the army under a false name, at which time Mrs. Allan died .
Edgar Poe was a son of his time, his state (Virginia), the spirit of Virginian aristocracy surrounded him in his childhood, in his school and student years. It is with him that Poe's early reflections on human and his own exclusivity, on the right to it, are connected. In the house of the Allans , a different atmosphere reigned (merchants, merchants, entrepreneurs) - bourgeois, so the young Edgar Poe must have felt the discrepancy between the two systems. There was another environment that also played a big role in Poe's life - the environment of poor Americans, owning nothing and living in various levels of poverty. When he began to look for paternal relatives in the hope of help, he found the same poor and hard workers as himself.
Edgar Allan Poe considered himself a poet, he felt in himself the creative forces sufficient to fulfill a high destiny. He shared the romantic concept of the poet-prophet, who reveals new truths to mankind. A year after the service and before entering the military academy, Edgar read English and German romantics, worked and wrote poetry, published the second collection Al Aaraaf in 1829.
In Baltimore, Poe met such people as William Worth (former US Attorney General), John Neal (popular writer and critic). Edgar was enrolled in the academy, but did not last long there, and he was expelled. Then he went to New York, where he published his third collection of poems in 1831, which, like the second ("Al Aaraaf "), included not only newly written poems, but also works published earlier. Poe did not consider the publication of the poem to be the final act and constantly returned to the printed things, continuing to work on them. Edgar Poe began writing prose in 1831.
After New York, Poe returned to Baltimore and settled with his aunt, Maria Clemm, for four years. These years played a decisive role in shaping him as a literary figure. Poe met Kennedy, who helped him and got him a job at the Southern Literary Herald. Poe repeatedly participated in competitions for the best story, but only "Colosseum" and six stories from the "Eleven Arabesques" series were triumphs, and Poe also received a prize for the story "Manuscript Found in a Bottle." Over the years, he developed a professionalism in himself, got used to looking at the general tasks and goals of literature in a new way, taking into account the needs of the readership. He finally came to the realization that he was an American poet, prose writer and critic, and that the struggle to create an American national literature should be the guiding principle of his work. He left Baltimore in 1835 as a well-established prose writer, journalist, literary critic, and editor.⁷
In the summer of 1835, Thomas White invited Poe to come to Richmond and take the place of his assistant. Poe turned the unknown Southern Literary Gazette into a profitable magazine with a national reputation. Poe gave preference to artistic creativity, but was forced to periodically return to journalism. Such a combination led to a monstrous overstrain of forces, nervous exhaustion, and psychological breakdowns. He moved to Richmond where Allan died in 1834 . Po fell into a deep depression, his whole being possessed by a feeling of bottomless unhappiness. Po was afraid to become crazy, he got more and more tired, more and more sick, but continued to work. In 1845, the collection "The Raven" was published. In 1847, his wife Virginia died, a blow for Poe from which he never recovered until the end of his days. The circumstances of his death are not entirely clear. Poe created his best stories, poems, critical articles and theoretical works in the last years of his tragically cut short life.
The core of Poe's prose heritage is his short stories .
Poe's achievements in this field can be summarized in the following points:
1. Continuing the experiments begun by Irving , Hawthorne and other contemporaries, Poe completed the formation of a new genre, gave it those features that we today consider essential in defining the American romantic novel.
2. Not satisfied with practical achievements and recognizing the need for a theoretical understanding of his (and others') experience, Poe created a theory of the genre, which he outlined in three articles on Hawthorne , published in the forties of the 19th century.
3. Poe's important contribution to the development of American and world short stories is the practical development of some of its genre subspecies. It is not without reason that he is considered the founder of the logical (detective) story, the science fiction novel and the psychological story.
E. Poe's work gravitates toward catastrophic plots, gloomy events, ominous surroundings, a general atmosphere of hopelessness and despair, and tragic transformations of the human consciousness, seized with horror and losing control of itself.
“In Poe’s psychological novels, it doesn’t matter where the action takes place (country, locality, continent), we are dealing with a closed, limited space and, consequently, with a person separated from the world, when he himself, his own consciousness becomes the only object and subject of analysis . The idea of a closed psychological space was not Poe's discovery, it is easy to find it in the short stories and novels of Hawthorne , in the stories and short stories of Melville.
“His view of the world is pessimistic, his mind is tragic. Pessimism and a tragic worldview were characteristic signs of the late romantic ideology in the United States, clearly observed in the work of the greatest artists of the era - Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville".
Nathaniel Hawthorne (July 4, 1804 – May 19, 1864) was a short story writer, novelist, children's writer, notebook writer, and journalist. Born to a Puritan family in Salem , Massachusetts. His father was a sea captain who died in 1808 when little Nathaniel was four years old. Hawthorne was introduced to New England history and folklore early on, he loved to read, he liked stories about the revolution. N. Hawthorne studied at Bowdoin College (1821–1825). He wished to become a writer. His first printed work - the poem "Ocean" - was published in 1825. 1825-1837, lived in the parental home in Salem , can be considered years of writing apprenticeship. In 1828, Hawthorne anonymously published the novel Fanshaw , in 1830 he published his first story, "The Valley of the Three Hills," in the Salem Gazette . In 1841 Hawthorne lived and worked in the agricultural community of Brook Farm , invested a large sum in it, worked as a farmer.
Conversations with transcendentalists on philosophical and moral topics gave Hawthorne a lot . In 1842 he married one of the Peabody sisters , whom he met in 1837, Sophia. After the death of the writer (1864 on the night of May 19), the widow and children published a number of his works and wrote memoirs about him. Son Julian became a famous writer, biographer of his father. The youngest daughter wrote a book of memoirs about her father. Hawthorne lived a difficult, unsecured life as a writer: work as an inspector at the Boston Custom House (1839 - May 1841), participation in the Brook Farm community (May - September 1841), service as a caretaker at the Salem Custom House (1846-1849), US Consul in Liverpool (1853- 1857), a trip through France, a stay for some time in Rome (1858), in Florence - all this contributed to the accumulation of life experience necessary for the writer, and also helped the Hawthorne family to avoid economic difficulties.⁸
The work of N. Hawthorne was closely connected with the Puritan past of New England. The Puritans of the 17th century he valued freedom, energy, patriotism, as well as strictness in matters of morality. “ Hawthorne perfectly understood the deep connection of his own creativity with the spiritual life of his native land. For him, New England was not only a geographical and political concept, but above all a historical one, interpreted in terms of intellect and morality. He felt himself to be the heir to centuries-old traditions, the successor to generations of Hawthorne Puritans , among whom were navigators, merchants, officials, judges.
N. Hawthorne considered romanticism the highest form of expression of the truth of being. He spoke about his understanding of romantic aesthetics in the essay "Customs", which precedes the novel "The Scarlet Letter" (1850). Hawthorne , a romantic, skillfully combined real and folklore, illusory and fantastic elements in his works.
Along with W. Irving and E.A. Hawthorne is considered the founder of the American short story genre . According to the subject, his romantic prose of small forms can be divided into several types:

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  stories and sketches about New England's Puritan past;
  
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  fictional "historical" and mythological stories;
  
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  allegorical essays, stories and sketches on moral themes.
  

The short stories, collected and published with the friendly support of H. Bridge in the collection Twice-Told Stories, marked the beginning of his fame as a New England moralist writer. E. Po built his theory of short stories mainly on short stories Hawthorne . In his work " Novelistics Nathaniel Hawthorne " E. Poe formulated one of the main aesthetic theses, which he constantly adhered to in his creative practice: "If the first phrase does not already contribute to the achievement of a single effect, then the writer has failed from the very beginning. In the whole work there should not be a single word that would not directly or indirectly lead to a single intended goal. This is how, carefully and skillfully, a picture is finally created, delivering to those who contemplate it with the same skill, a feeling of the most complete satisfaction.
Poe speaks of Hawthorne as follows: “... Mr. Hawthorne , author of Twice-Told Stories, does not find recognition in the press and among readers, and if he is noticed at all, it is only to “condemn with sour praise” ... I I think that he shows a rare talent and has no rivals either in America or anywhere else. “Such a non-recognition of him by the public is undoubtedly due mainly to the two reasons I have indicated - there, that he is not a rich man and not a charlatan”, Hawthorne ’s characteristic feature : “to be special means to be original, and genuine originality is the highest of literary virtues”, it consists in “ constant originality - originality, born of an active fantasy or, even better, a continuously creative imagination, which gives its own shade and its own character to everything it touches, and most importantly, it itself strives to touch everything. "He has the purest style, the finest taste, the most useful erudition, the most subtle humour, the greatest touchingness, the brightest imagination, the greatest ingenuity, and with all these virtues he has succeeded as a mystic." Edgar Allan Poe noted that "Mr. Hawthorne 's hallmark is fiction, creative imagination, originality - a quality that in fiction stands above all others." G. Melville also highly appreciated short stories Hawthorne .
“Chronologically, Hawthorne 's work clearly falls into two periods. The boundary between them falls on 1850, and it is formed not by methodological shifts, but rather by genre preferences. The first period can be safely called novelistic. The writer unconditionally and unconditionally preferred small genres. The second period passed under the sign of predominant interest in the novel. The highest artistic achievements of the first period were the collections "Twice-Told Stories" and "Mosses of the Old Manor", the masterpieces of the second period include "The Scarlet Letter" and "The House of Seven Gables".⁹
Hawthorne is prone to allegory and symbolism, moral and philosophical didacticism, to the analysis of the state of mind of a person who is tormented by secret guilt, secret sin. Hawthorne 's novellas clearly showed the influence of " esseism ". In them, description, observation, reflection are always more important than the dynamics of the action, which is usually conditional. Hawthorne urged to carefully observe and study the national character, habits, morality, religion, methods of government.
N. Hawthorne was not a professional journalist, but M. Cowley recalled the words of Hawthorne that he is as good a reporter as an artist. He went through a kind of journalism school. He started as a writer and editor of the family newspaper. The printed material was humorous and satirical in nature. The writer often turned to the theme of the American Revolution, national history. As a historian-journalist, Hawthorne is best known for his A General History for Children (1837), where he presented a wealth of material not only on American but also foreign history.
N. Hawthorne made a significant contribution to the development of the psychological romantic story and novel. Many American writers (G. James, F. O'Connor, T. Capote, etc.) have repeatedly noted that N. Hawthorne embodied his desire to unravel the mysteries of being and the human soul in a uniquely beautiful art form.
Like many contemporaries, Hawthorne was acutely dissatisfied with the state of society, felt the contradiction between the democratic ideal and reality. In search of the roots of social evil, he turned his eyes to the human personality, its soul, to the "mysteries of the human heart." Like no one else, Hawthorne was convinced that "all evil comes from man."
“In his view, the human soul was the receptacle of a certain dialectical substance of good and evil, where both components are so intertwined and even merged with one another that it is difficult to distinguish them, and an attempt to destroy one of them leads to the destruction of life. Hence the idea of the impossibility of perfection, which often appears as a plot motif in many of the writer's works, where the striving for perfection inevitably has a tragic outcome.
In the short stories and novels of Hawthorne , the atrocity and the fall exist in the form of a legend, a hint. And their moral consequences represent for Hawthorne overwhelming interest. Of great importance to him was intent, a secret intention, sometimes even unconscious. Hawthorne was driven by motive, intent, and subsequent guilt.
“In his stories and novels, there is a motif of the fatality of human fate, the inexplicable persistence with which a person moves along the wrong path, even if he knows that a sad end awaits him ahead. In the subtext of the writer's novels and stories, the idea often arises of the presence of some higher power that directs human activity, of a universal law, of "omnipotent providence", over which a person has no power. It is not given to him to feel “the inaudible pace of events that are about to take place”: “unexpected unknown accidents” lie in wait for him at every step, but the existence of mankind does not slide into chaos, because in the life of mortals “some kind of routine still reigns”. But what kind of routine this is, by whom it is established, Hawthorne does not know. For this, he lacks the philosophical depth and courage that Herman Melville possessed in his mature years.¹⁰
In the theoretical part of our work, we got acquainted with the research literature on romanticism, named representatives and scientists involved in this area. We also presented the specifics of American romanticism, the prominent representatives of which are Edgar Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne .