linguistic:translation
Influence

The writer Theodor Fontane, who died in 1889, had a particular stylistic influence on Thomas Mann. Of course, Mann always admired and emulated Goethe, the German “poet prince”. The Danish author Herman Bang, with whom he felt a kindred spirit, had a certain influence, especially on the novellas. The pessimistic philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer provided philosophical inspiration for the Buddenbrooks' narrative of decline, especially with his two-volume work The World as Will and Representation, which Mann studied closely while writing the novel. Russian narrators should also be mentioned, he admired the Russian Literature 's ability for self-criticism, at least during the 19th century, in Nikolai Gogol, Ivan Goncharov and Ivan Turgenev. Mann believed that in order to make a bourgeois revolution, the Russians had to forget Dostoevsky. He particularly loved Leo Tolstoy, whom he considered an anarchist and whom he lovingly and mockingly admired for his “courage to be boring.”

Throughout Mann's Dostoevsky essay, he finds parallels between the Russian and the sufferings of Friedrich Nietzsche. Speaking of Nietzsche, he says, "his personal feelings initiate him into those of the criminal... in general all creative originality, all artist nature in the broadest sense of the word, does the same. It was the French painter and sculptor Degas who said that an artist must approach his work in the spirit of the criminal about to commit a crime." Nietzsche's influence on Mann runs deep in his work, especially in Nietzsche's views on decay and the proposed fundamental connection between sickness and creativity. Mann believed that disease should not be regarded as wholly negative. In his essay on Dostoevsky, we find: "but after all and above all it depends on who is diseased, who mad, who epileptic or paralytic: an average dull-witted man, in whose illness any intellectual or cultural aspect is non-existent; or a Nietzsche or Dostoyevsky. In their case something comes out in illness that is more important and conducive to life and growth than any medical guaranteed health or sanity.... n other words: certain conquests made by the soul and the mind are impossible without disease, madness, crime of the spirit."