Exhibiting candor; privacy as public exposure in the works of Heinrich von Kleist and Evgenii Baratynskii

Under the rubric of "candor" (Freimutigkeit , откровенностъ), this dissertation explores the exposure of private life in the emerging publics of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It is argued that the concept of candor belongs alongside a set of similar concepts, such as sincerity and authenticity, each of which has received significant scholarly attention. Few scholars, by contrast, have recognized the degree to which professions of truthfulness, and especially professions of candor, help to set the stage for the emergence of the public sphere, while at the same time keeping that sphere in a state of persistent instability. Heinrich von Kleist and Evgenii Baratynskii address their audiences with unusual candor, but they do so often by expressing a sense of profound alienation. This dissertation contravenes an influential strain of scholarship on these authors by viewing their emphasis on privacy as an act of public exposure. Kleist and Baratynskii share with many of their contemporaries a new understanding of the artwork as something that only then comes to have meaning when exposed to a vast multiplicity of critical perspectives. They engage new public audiences by exhibiting privacy as it comes to be publicly relevant. In the first chapter I develop a critical perspective on Jurgen Habermas's early work in order to frame a larger reflection on traditions of public honesty. The following chapters explore how Kleist and Baratynskii reflect on the nature of public honesty by directing readers to an awkwardness inherent in acts of authentic public expression. An uneasy nakedness can be discerned in Kleist's tongue-tied style and epigrammatic wit; similarly, we find a reflection on the limits of frank expression in Baratynskii's admixture of contemplative, archaic, and yet remarkably accessible poetry. The following dissertation shows how these authors interrogate the openness of the modern political personality by confronting readers with a form of blatant honesty that exposes, especially at the level of language, the problematic way publics take their own transparency for granted.