Lotte in Weimar

16 hrs. 9 min.

Romance & Prose

Language Russian

Author Thomas Mann

Narrator Nadezhda Vinokurova

Description

The novel tells of the meeting between an aging Goethe and his youth friend Charlotte Buff, who became the prototype for the heroine of “The Sorrows of Young Werther.” From the words of different people—Charlotte herself, Goethe’s secretary, his son August von Goethe, and the residents of Weimar—a complex, many-sided, and at times contradictory image of the famous writer and thinker comes into view. Master of the intellectual novel, Thomas Mann expertly reveals the depths of the creative personality of his fellow countryman and idol. Written by the time it was published, “Lotte in Weimar” was the summit and synthesis of two strands in Thomas Mann’s earlier work: his stories about the artist—“Tonio Kröger,” “Tristan,” “Death in Venice”—and his articles devoted to the personality and work of the great Goethe—“Goethe and Tolstoy,” “Goethe as a Representative of the Bourgeois Epoch,” and finally the remarkable essay about “Werther.” In that essay, the author ended with a call to write a story—or even a novel—about Goethe’s late meeting with Charlotte Kestner, née Buff, the prototype for Werther’s Lotte, whom an unknown young poet loved forty-one years earlier—a poet who at that time was (not too diligent) a practicing attorney under the “Imperial Court Chamber” in Wetzlar. The only and first one to respond to this call was Thomas Mann himself, who a year later wrote his “Lotte in Weimar.”