Collected Works of A. I. Herzen, Volume 4

frenzied music, with a devilish accompaniment, with the smell of hell. In these tales, you have already parted with ordinary people—that is, with people who eat on time, sleep on time, die on time, spending their lives in good health; with people who, according to the report of the Paris Academy, have such a happy constitution that they cannot be magnetized. No, here appear other people—people with a soul strong, deceitfully imprisoned in this jail 1, with its small light, with its chains, with its damp air. Such a soul is not at home in the body; it incessantly breaks it and will end by breaking itself. It is the one that becomes an extraordinary person: a great man, a great villain, a madman—it is all the same. Such people have their own life, their own laws. They are comets, disregarding the uniform ellipse of planetary orbits, not afraid of shattering on their path. To recognize them, examine in Hoffmann their strange, distorted features, their huge deviations from the common vegetation of people. Imagine for yourself an unfortunate youth whose deranged imagination has clothed itself in some terrible image, a children's fairy tale about the "Sandman," and this "Sandman" pursues him everywhere: in his father's house, at the university, at night, and during the day, now in the guise of an alchemist, now in the guise of an Italian charlatan. Imagine the final minute of his frenzy, when he, with frenzied rapture, throws his bride from the bell tower and with insane laughter cries: "Feueruriel dreh’ dich! Feueruriel dreh’ dich!!" original: "Fire-uriel, spin yourself!" Hoffmann has a whole series of these terrible people: "Der unheimliche Gast" The Uncanny Guest 2, "Der Magnetiseur" The Magnetizer. Finally, he gathered all the individual rays of this direction and merged them into one hellish, sulfurous fire: this is "Die Elixire des Teufels" The Devil's Elixirs, the monk Medardus. Hoffmann was not satisfied with one life; he took four generations that inherited villainies from one another and gathered them all upon the head of Medardus. Hoffmann was not satisfied with one life: he presented a whole family born of abominable incest and struck it with the blind sword of fate, which he handed to Medardus. This fate drags Medardus from crime to crime, and there is no mercy for anyone; in this fate, the pure blood of Aurelia in its turn splashed onto the altar of God as the blood of an innocent victim of atonement. Hoffmann was still not satisfied: he split, he dissected