Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann is one of the most prominent autotextual authors who himself has commented on the key role of the leitmotif for his own work. According to the main thesis of this article, the connections between his texts is determined by a peculiar autotextual leitmotif technique. The paper elucidates what autotextual leitmotifs are and in what ways their development connects different texts of the author. The paper problematizes the boundaries between fiction and essay (in particular between the novel and the essay) of Thomas Mann through two examples of autotextual leitmotifs, the core of which is oriented towards the author's key problem of the relationship between genius and disease.

“Life as a quotation” (“das zitathafte Leben”) is a phrase that Thomas Mann formulated in his celebratory speech on the occasion of Sigmund Freud's 80th birthday to present his vision of a life that is always made up of (un)conscious repetitions of prefabricated patterns. This paper offers an analysis of the “life-as-quote” formula in two perspectives. The notion is examined, once, within the writer's speech and, secondly, in the context of psychoanalysis with an emphasis on the mechanisms of identification. Some of the questions the text attempts to answer are: what is quotation in this perspective and what is its significance for literary studies.

The article offers a comparative reading of two short novels – “Scott Reynolds and the Unattainable” by Emilian Stanev (1973) and “Death in Venice” by Thomas Mann (1913) – ‘comparative’ primarily on a large cultural-civilizational scale, in which Stanev’s novel raises and further develops the main themes and motifs of Thomas-Man’s one. Namely, the global problem of the end of Western humanistic culture 202under the pressure of modern Technique/Machenschaft (Heidegger), collapsing towards the natural-monstrous. The similar structure and the common symbolic topoi of the two works are considered: ‘old man― child’, ‘North/West―South/East’...