{"id":2559,"date":"2019-09-11T19:58:59","date_gmt":"2019-09-11T19:58:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=2559"},"modified":"2019-09-12T09:03:07","modified_gmt":"2019-09-12T09:03:07","slug":"stephen-copley-research-report-francesco-marchionni-on-nietzsche","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=2559","title":{"rendered":"Stephen Copley Research Report: Francesco Marchionni on Nietzsche"},"content":{"rendered":"

To find out how to apply for a BARS Stephen Copley Research Award, visit the main BARS site here<\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n

Thanks to the Stephen Copley Research Award granted by BARS, I was able to spend a week in Weimar (Germany) to consult Friedrich Nietzsche\u2019s Nachlass\u00a0<\/em>and work with manuscripts related to Nietzsche\u2019s reading of Lord Byron, P.B. Shelley and Giacomo Leopardi. My doctoral thesis investigates notions of grief, death and posterity in the works of Byron, Shelley and Leopardi as a result of their readings of the Promethean myth from Aeschylus\u2019s Prometheus Bound<\/em>. I avow that the Romantics\u2019 fragmented poetic thoughts between hubris\u00a0<\/em>and nemesis\u00a0<\/em>anticipate the Nietzschean discourse of modernity as divided and contradictory.<\/p>\n

My research residence began with a visit to the Nietzsche Archiv\u00a0<\/em>museum, dedicated to Nietzsche\u2019s last days in Villa Silberblick before his death. From the very moment I entered the building, I remembered Nietzsche\u2019s letter from 1884 where he bemoans: \u2018Who knows how many generations must pass before people will come who can feel the whole depth of what I have done!\u2019 In retrospect, Nietzsche\u2019s letter seemed to me to echo Virgil\u2019s line from the first book of Georgics,\u00a0<\/em>\u2018scilicet et tempus veniet\u2019, raising the question of what we can truly know of the time to come.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Nietzsche Archiv Museum<\/p><\/div>\n

Looking at the portrait of Nietzsche in the museum as a man consumed day by day by an ill-fated disease, it seemed to me that the moribund philosopher silently lamented the paradox of the philosopher, between the deception of ambition derived from knowledge and the unfolding reality of suffering, a dilemma that finds in death an ultimate salvation. The portrait and epistle from 1884 reveal Nietzsche\u2019s uncertainty regarding posterity and his rejoicing in the certainty of death ceasing his anguish. Having left the museum, I contemplated how Nietzsche\u2019s mournful meditations chimed with the scepticism and gloom embedded in the works of Byron, Shelley and Leopardi. We can think, for example, of Shelley\u2019s ‘Ode to the West Wind’ (\u2018O Wind, \u00a0\/ If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?\u2019), Byron\u2019s Don Juan\u00a0<\/em>(\u2018What is the end of fame? \u2018tis but to fill \/ A certain portion of uncertain paper\u2019) and Leopardi\u2019s Sappho\u2019s Last Song\u00a0<\/em>(\u2018after endless\/ Hoped-for honours and enjoyed illusions,\/ Only Tartarus remains\u2019).<\/p>\n

The visit to the Nietzsche Archiv\u00a0<\/em>proved itself beneficial for the later consultation of Nietzsche\u2019s Nachlass<\/em>. From letters to friends (Erwin Rohde and Marie Baumgarten) and family (his mother Franziska Nietzsche and sister Elisabeth F\u00f6rster-Nietzsche) I could access, though in brief form, Nietzsche\u2019s commentaries on the poetry of Shelley and Leopardi. In a letter to his sister from 1861, Nietzsche requests a copy of Shelley\u2019s poetry edited by Julius Seybt (1844) and in a letter to Erwin Rohde from 1877, Nietzsche praises the English Romantic for the poetic achievement of Prometheus Unbound<\/em>. Additionally, the letter to Rohde is compelling because Nietzsche comments how he found in Shelley a version of himself, philosophically and poetically. A few years after reading Shelley, Nietzsche received from Marie Baumgarten a copy of Leopardi\u2019s poetry edited by Paul Heyse (1878). The 1878 epistle to Baumgarten about Leopardi attests to Nietzsche\u2019s fascination regarding the Italian Romantic and his delightfully gloomy poetry. However, later in the epistle Nietzsche points out a philosophical detour from Leopardi\u2019s pessimism. Nietzsche illuminates that Leopardi\u2019s poetry is suffused with a profound sense of resignation regarding the gloom of human existence. By contrast, the German philosopher argues that such gloom should be contemplated in order to apprehend human suffering.<\/p>\n

The final days of research were spent reading and working on Nietzsche\u2019s unpublished essay \u00dcber die dramatischen Dichtungen Byrons\u00a0<\/em>(\u2018On the dramatic Works of Byron\u2019), written at the age of 17. Though Nietzsche argues that Byron is not a dramatist because his works lack of dramatic objectivity, the essay presents a fond enthusiasm for the English poet. Nietzsche writes that Byron\u2019s poetry resembles the rage of a volcanic explosion that falls into a sinister tranquillity, and also contends that his poetry contains the diseases of the world within the purity of his lyricism. Nietzsche offers an interesting example of Byron\u2019s poetics by looking at Manfred<\/em>. He comments that Manfred\u00a0<\/em>encompasses a Byronic superhuman despair and, through the protagonist of the dramatic poem, Byron is capable of performing, theatrically, the stormy hall of his poetic thoughts. Thus, Nietzsche concludes, Byron deconstructs in Manfred\u00a0<\/em>a discourse about knowledge, confessions about a disordered world and the notion of divine self-consciousness.<\/p>\n

Reading Nietzsche\u2019s unpublished essay on Byron, and his letters on Shelley and Leopardi, allowed me to assess Nietzsche\u2019s familiarity with the three Romantic poets, who, interestingly, seem to be depicted as poetic titans who were forerunners of the Olympian Pantheon of what Nietzsche calls his \u2018Gay Science\u2019. I am deeply grateful to BARS for granting me this opportunity and I am sure the research in Weimar will be of great value for the completion of my doctoral thesis.<\/p>\n

– Francesco Marchionni (Durham University)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To find out how to apply for a BARS Stephen Copley Research Award, visit the main BARS site here. Thanks to the Stephen Copley Research Award granted by BARS, I… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2559"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2559"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2559\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2571,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2559\/revisions\/2571"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}