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20/01/2026. Foreign/Own: "A Romantic of Fantastic Realism" Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann
January 20, 2026:
This year, the first meeting of the Foreign/Own project was dedicated to the writer celebrating his anniversary, Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann, and his famous fairy tale, The Nutcracker, fragments of which the participants translated into the Karelian language.
During the first part of the program, participants learned about the biography and work of the German writer of the second half of the 18th and early 19th centuries. It is not easy to construct the portrait of Hoffmann's paradoxical personality, because even scholars find it difficult to provide a clear characterization of his work. "A romantic of fantastic realism," E. T. A. Hoffmann was one of the first to use the motif of duality, the blending of the fantastic and the real and detective plot elements in his works. His talent was multifaceted: writer, composer, conductor, painter, caricaturist, lawyer, and civil servant. A keenly sensitive and ironic man, he ridiculed contemporary society and himself became a victim of the passions that overwhelmed him.
This year, The Nutcracker & Mouse King fairy-tale turns 210 years, and is still perceived as one of the main works in Hoffmann's creative legacy. However, it was Pyotr Tchaikovsky's ballet The Nutcracker, which premiered in 1892, that secured the fairy tale's worldwide fame and longevity. Since then, The Nutcracker has been one of the most popular ballets in the world and a staple of the Christmas theatrical repertoire. Nevertheless, as the program participants learned, the libretto was based not on Hoffmann's original work, but on Alexandre Dumas’s adaptation of the tale from 1844.
While preparing to the program, the project participants read the original Russian translation of The Nutcracker and made their own translations of two chapters of the tale into the Livvik dialect of the Karelian language, with the editorial support of teacher Tatyana Baranova. At the program, they exchanged views on the text and translation challenges, and discussed options for rendering the main character's name in Karelian.
Patrons of the National Library of Karelia can read books by E. T. A. Hoffmann translated into Russian and also original version in German or bilingual editions.
