The Sorrows of Young Werther
1774
The Sorrows of Young Werther
1774
Translated by R. Dillon (Richard Dillon), 1805? Boylan
You will not survive this book unchanged. That was the promise and the threat of Goethe's electrifying debut, written in five weeks by a twenty-four-year-old who had recently loved a woman he could not have. The novel arrives as a bundle of letters: Werther writing to his friend Wilhelm about the countryside, about books, and increasingly about Lotte, the young woman he encounters at a village festival and can never forget. She is betrothed to Albert, a man Werther must respect even as he destroys himself wanting what Albert possesses. What follows is an almost unbearable catalog of longing, hope, and humiliation, the exquisite torture of seeing her daily, of watching her tenderness with her fiancé, of feeling his own passion deepen precisely because it can never be answered. Goethe captures something true and terrible about desire: how the impossibility of its object only makes the heart burn hotter. When Werther finally reaches for the pistol, the novel still has the power to make readers weep. The book sparked a cultural earthquake upon publication. Young people across Europe dressed in Werther's blue coat,仿 his hairstyle, and wept in the streets. Some, unable to bear their own unrequited passions, followed him to the grave. It remains the essential document of Sturm und Drang, when literature first declared that feeling was not weakness but truth.
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“The human race is a monotonous affair. Most people spend the greatest part of their time working in order to live, and what little freedom remains so fills them with fear that they seek out any and every means to be rid of it.””
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“I have so much in me, and the feeling for her absorbs it all; I have so much, and without her it all comes to nothing.””
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“I am proud of my heart alone, it is the sole source of everything, all our strength, happiness and misery. All the knowledge I possess everyone else can acquire, but my heart is all my own””
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“No one is willing to believe that adults too, like children, wander about this earth in a daze and, like children, do not know where they come from or where they are going, act as rarely as they do according to genuine motives, and are as thoroughly governed as they are by biscuits and cake and the rod.””
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“Sometimes I don't understand how another can love her, is allowed to love her, since I love her so completely myself, so intensely, so fully, grasp nothing, know nothing, have nothing but her!””
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“It's true that nothing in this world makes us so necessary to others as the affection we have for them.””
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“Is this the destiny of man? Is he only happy before he has acquired his reason or after he has lost it?””
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“The suffering may be moral or physical; and in my opinion it is just as absurd to call a man a coward who destroys himself, as to call a man a coward who dies of a malignant fever.””
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“And when I look around the apartment where I now am,”
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. The Sorrows of Young Werther. Lex, lex-books.com/book/the-sorrows-of-young-werther-d9e5d6c9-e690-472d-a724-68917b394635.Goethe, J. W. V. (1774). The Sorrows of Young Werther. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-sorrows-of-young-werther-d9e5d6c9-e690-472d-a724-68917b394635Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. The Sorrows of Young Werther. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-sorrows-of-young-werther-d9e5d6c9-e690-472d-a724-68917b394635.
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