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Abstract: The article focuses on the contemporary reception of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s novel The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr in the book The Blacksmith’s Cat (Schmieds Katze, 2025) by the German writer J. Schmidt. Introducing this new “remake” of the masterpiece of the German classic into scholarly discourse, the author of the article acquaints the reader with the concept and content of Schmidt’s book, whose protagonist is a fictional future relative of Tomcat Murr. The article highlights the artistic features of the work: it traces the connection between the cat story and its pre-text (doppelgänger motif, poetics of the fragment, parody, etc.) and analyzes the narrative techniques of the latest German prose (meta-narration, intertextuality, auto-socio-biography, regional text, etc.). It is noted that the text consists of individual local-history mini-stories interwoven with the lines of broader connections, including numerous references and reminiscences to works of world literature and folklore. The distinctive features of the author’s individual style include compositional disruptions, abrupt shifts in narrative tone, and blending of genres. The article demonstrates how Schmidt expands the spatial boundaries of the fictional world: he contaminates plots and genres from various eras and cultures in different variations, creating a new world of “postmodern fairy tale”. Concurrently, the article traces an echo of Hoffmann’s artistic method – and specifically, accompanied by the conceptualization of the gap between artistic subjectivity and objective reality. Special attention is paid to the relevance of the book’s content: it presents various forms of social existence within a familiar yet changing environment. Emphasis is placed on the issues of local identity (in its economic and cultural dimensions), collective memory, etc., from the perspective of modern German regionalism. Geopoetics thus emerges as the primary method of artistic space appropriation in Schmidt’s work. Space is revealed through a wide spectrum of manifestations – ecological, historical, cultural (language, folklore, literature, monuments), and political (including the re-evaluation of ideological values, specifically through the rejection of neoliberalism). Furthermore, the article reports the author’s use of key tenets of existentialist philosophy, which remain relevant to the experience of the contemporary 21st-century individual.

About the author(s) :

Tamara V. Kudryavtseva

A. M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences
(Moscow, Russian Federation)

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8279-8639

Publication Timeline:

Date of receipt: 12.01.2026; date of publication: 31.10.2026

References:

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