A vida do artista e a crise da modernidade: uma leitura de Morte em Veneza, de Thomas Mann

Abstract

This paper seeks to understand the problems of the cultivation of the soul faced by the bourgeois artist in the crises of modernity. Between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the autonomization of the world and the dissolution of the culture in two different spheres subjective and objective convert the everyday life a difficult perspective for those who desired an elevation of their souls. In this sense Thomas Mann s Death in Venice tells us a story of an artist Gustav Aschenbach who rejects the world and his own feelings with the intention of exploring an aesthetic ideal which is impossible to be articulated with the reality. The story is a chronicle of the journey of this artist since he decides to leave Germany, his native country, heading to Venice in order to recover from the exhaustion that the performance of hi vocational work imposes. We are going to show that Venice takes, in this sense, a major role in the story, since it relates so directly to the ideal of the artist's life. There, in Venice, Aschenbach will find in the figure of a boy the real expression of his idealistic yearnings of beauty. Such encounter will produce in the artist s soul an uncontrolled situation, a real anarchy of feelings, which will take him directly to the abyss.