“Engagingly written and precisely phrased, Professor Gasparov’s study is more than illuminating: it is one of the most interesting works of intellectual history I have read in many years. Even if one does not know the Jena circle (around Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis, and others), one will learn a lot about thinkers overlooked and underestimated because they are read anachronistically in terms of the romantic movement that followed.”

— Gary Saul Morson, Lawrence B. Dumas Professor of the Arts and Humanities, Northwestern University

Michael Wachtel

“Boris Gasparov offers a pellucid account of the early German Romantics, combining subtle philosophical analysis with literary insights and placing his exemplary figures in a rich biographical, historical, and cultural context. At the center of the discussion are Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis, who come into potent focus when juxtaposed with their main interlocutors: Kant, Goethe, and Schiller. Gasparov not only sheds light on thinkers who stubbornly rejected systematicity and questioned all beliefs, including their own; he also traces their substantial legacy in linguistics and literary theory through the twentieth century. Based on a staggering amount of research, yet written with a light touch, Gasparov’s book serves as a model for how to write intellectual history.”

— Michael Wachtel, Professor, Slavic Department, Princeton University

“Boris Gasparov’s great achievement is to stay true to the idea, often advanced by Friedrich Schlegel, that Romanticism is a form of hovering. With meticulous scholarly care, Gasparov attends to the philosophical as well as historical context of the work of the early Romantics. Mindful not to shoehorn these thinkers into one ‘school’ or the other, he remains alive to the multifarious mutations their work undergoes.”

— Michel Chaouli, author of Something Speaks to Me: Where Criticism Begins

“Gasparov’s original, exciting study blends philosophically astute analysis with deep literary sensibility to reveal the work of Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis in a brilliant new light. He recounts in detail how the Jena ‘romantics’ challenged the story of the unitary claims of the cognizing mind. Gasparov convincingly demonstrates that according to the principle of poly-subjectivity developed by the Athenaeum philosophy, any unitary model of cognition is doomed. We are better served by an embrace of open processes and progressive indeterminacy. Foundational principles will not ground us, but we need not fear the freedom of spirit or its homelessness. The political, cultural, philosophical, and literary dimensions of the Athenaeum thinkers come into sharp focus in this courageous book.”

— Elizabeth Millán Brusslan, Professor and Chair of Philosophy

“Boris Gasparov’s warm and witty reading of the Athenaeum characterizes this famously elusive moment in terms of its rigorous commitment to an ‘irrepressible plurality of voices.’ As Gasparov guides his own reader from the Kantian context, through the brief flowering of a philosophical movement predicated on ‘poly-subjectivity,’ and on to the affinities between the Athenaeum and twentieth-century philosophies of language, he celebrates the courage of a philosophy that recognizes ‘fragmentation and disparate diffusion as constitutive features of the cognitive process.’ While he wears his own erudition lightly, in his close reading of Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis together with the many perspectives and personalities that make up the Athenaeum, then and now, he also emulates their example. Like the Athenaeum itself, Gasparov’s project is joyful in its openness to ‘unmanageable plurality and elusive motion.’”

— Melissa Frazier, Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature, Sarah Lawrence College

“Boris Gasparov’s analysis of the philosophical ideas of the two major thinkers of the so-called Jena circle is both stunningly refreshing and innovative, and irrefutably convincing and well-argued. By placing the acknowledged founders of the Romantic movement outside of the movement itself, Gasparov brings a perspective that allows him not only to describe the ‘Athenaeum moment’ as an event of unique significance in European intellectual history, but also to reconceptualize Romanticism as a whole. This is an exceptional achievement, especially in a book discussing such extensively and profoundly studied authors as Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel.”

— Andrei Zorin, Emeritus Professor of New College, University of Oxford

“Boris Gasparov has made an internationally distinguished career as a most accomplished philologist, in the broadest sense of the word. His books on poetry, music, cultural history, and linguistics (both theoretical and historical) have been at once original and persuasive. But in literature and in cultural history the turn of the nineteenth century has held a special attraction for him for its youthful energy and for the multiplicity of its literary and philosophical movements. This new book on the Athenaeum—his term for the young men and women who created a journal of that title—draws on his many fields. He focuses his attention on the subsequently famous thinkers, Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel, who were the periodical’s chief contributors, and on the courageous challenges that they posed to the leading theories of cognition of their time, especially those which posited integral cognitive agency: Kantian ‘pure reason’ and Fichtean foundationalist idealism. Seemingly nonchalant, fragmentary, even flippant at times, they argued in theory and example for a radically different view of cognition: poly-subjective, non-cumulative, unpredictable, and dispersive. Their style of thinking and writing does not lend itself to synoptic intellectual history, and Gasparov is everywhere equal to the task. This beautifully written and elegantly structured account carefully captures the key notions of the Athenaeum and carefully distinguishes them from those of similar but different currents, such as Saussurean semiotics, Bakhtinian discourse analysis, and French deconstruction. Lucid, analytic, and accessible, this book deserves and will reward a wide readership.”

— William Mills Todd III, Harry Tuchman Levin Professor of Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature, Emeritus, Harvard University

“In an act of intellectual courage, Boris Gasparov, an outsider to the academic field of German Romanticism, reinterprets the contribution of the Athenaeum circle, focusing on the conception of subjectivity advanced by Schlegel and Novalis. Presenting their concept of the individual ‘I’ that is open to the voices of others, this book reveals echoes of these ideas in the novels of Balzac, Dickens, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky, as interpreted by Georg Lukács and Mikhail Bakhtin. Reading this book calls for fearless openness to new visions and approaches.”

— Irina Paperno, author of “Who, What Am I?” Tolstoy Struggles to Narrate the Self

“Gasparov’s remarkable work on the Athenaeum thinkers is a deeply learned study of this crucial transition point between the Enlightenment and ‘High Romanticism.’ He is clearly enchanted by the ‘careless homelessness’ and ‘fearlessness’ of the Athenaeum group and the relevance of their ‘poly-subjective disunity’ to twentieth-century critical theory, but he eschews any anachronism in presenting this group of thinkers in their proper philosophical contexts. A major contribution to the ongoing debate about the origins of Romanticism.”

— Michael Stanislawski, Department of History, Columbia University

Boris Gasparov is Professor Emeritus of Slavic and East European Studies at Columbia University. Trained in Russian language and literature, musicology, and theoretical linguistics, he has taught at universities in America and Europe. His scholarly interests encompass philosophy of language, literary theory, and European Romanticism and modernism.

List of Abbreviations

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Between the Empire of Reason and the Reign of the Subject

The Unlikely Romantics

Poly-Subjectivity: The Athenaeum's “Republican” Constitution of Self-Consciousness and Cognition

Prologue: On the Turn-of-a-Century Scene

In the Twilight of the Age of Reason

“Kant, the grinder of everything”

Im Anfang war die That: Revolutionizing Subjectivity

In the Aftermath of a Revolution: The Rise of the Authoritarian Self 

Part One: Consciousness in a Poly-Subjective Key

Chapter 1. The Symphilosophie

Between Kant and Fichte: The Limits of a Monocentric Intelligible World 

From the Unitary Cognitive Force to Performative Diffusiveness

Schlegel's Concept of Symphilosophie: Interactivity Beyond Dialogism

Reading—Editing—Translating: Channels of Co-Reflectional Activity

Chapter 2. In the Mirror of the Other

“I am Thou” (Novalis)

The “urbane” Subjectivity (Schlegel)

From the “Sentimental” to the “Romantic” Subject (Schiller and Schlegel)

Chapter 3. The Importance of Being Wrong: The Romantic Subject Facing the “Potentialized” World 

A Submissive Agency

“The energy of wandering lost”: Pragmatic Imperfectness of the Cognitive Pursuit

“True irony” According to Schlegel 

Chapter 4. The Poly-Subjective Intelligible World

Space and Time in the Poly-Subjective Dimension

“Away from the infinite”: Cognition as “Heresy” 

Chapter 5. Romantic, Progressive, Universal: Defining “romantic poetry”

1. Why “Romantic”?

2. Universalpoesie

3. The Romantic Progression

Chapter 6. Novalis and Schlegel: A Sketch of a Double Portrait

Part Two: The Poly-Subjective Intelligible World and Its Signifiers 

Chapter 7. Meaning and Representation

The Deictic Nature of Meaning

Understanding Ideas Allegorically: Schlegel Contra Goethe

Chapter 8. Novalis, Saussure, Wittgenstein: The Athenaeum's Theory of the Sign and Twentieth-Century Philosophy of Language

The Sign's Oppositive Duality 

Elective Affinities: Signs as a “Family”

More About Affinities: The Jena-Geneva Connection

Chapter 9. The Fragment

Between Philosophical Inquiry and Salon Parlance: The Rhetoric of the Athenaeum Fragments

Collectivity

A “Hedgehog”?

A “Hedgehog” and a “Mass”: The Athenaeum’s Hermeneutics of Contiguity

Chapter 10. The “Republican” Literary Order: Schlegel in Search for the Modern Novel

    The Novel: A “Romantic book”?

Discontentment

“Beyond Goethe's Meister”

Narrative Freedom: Schlegel's Vision of the “romantic” Novel of the Future

The Athenaeum's Heritage and the Modern Philosophy of the Novel 

Epilogue: The Dissolution

The Athenaeum Under Critical Siege

Bowing to the “Absolute”: The Athenaeum at the Crossroads

“The republic of despots”

Postscriptum. In Memory of the Wanderers

Conclusion. The Athenaeum Moment 

Index