It is one of the masterpieces of the famous Swiss-German writer Hermann Hesse (1877-1962) in the 20th century, published in June 1927.After the novel came out, it was translated into nearly 20 languages ​​successively, arousing strong repercussions among the literary circles and readers. Hesse was born in a pastor's family in Calw, a small town in southwest Germany, and grew up in an environment with strong religious overtones and oriental spirit.When he was a teenager, Hesse could not bear the rigid scholastic education, so he dropped out of school and worked successively as a factory apprentice and a bookstore clerk.He had a strong interest in literature, studied hard by himself, and began to write. At the beginning of the 20th century, Hesse successively published novels such as "Peter Kamenzingt", "Under the Wheel", and "Gertrut". , became a well-known writer.In 1911, he traveled to India, returned to China the following year, moved to Switzerland, and became a Swiss citizen in 1924.Hesse has a lot of works, among which the important ones are the novels "Demion", "Sithalta", "Narzis and Goldmont" and "Glass Bead Game".In 1946, Hesse won the Goethe Prize and the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Most of Hesse's novels focus on young people, reflecting their life, anguish, hesitation and exploration.It describes the spiritual crisis of middle-aged artists.The protagonist of the novel, Harry Harrell, calls himself a Steppenwolf, a "steppenwolf who got lost and came to our city, among the livestock."When Harrell was young, he wanted to make a difference, to do something noble and of eternal value. He had a sense of justice and humanitarianism.But in real life, his ideals were shattered; he opposed wars that killed each other, and narrow national chauvinism and militarism, but he attracted a lot of slander and abuse. , All parties and factions are fighting for self-interest.He deeply feels that the times and the world, money and power always belong to mediocre and insignificant people, but real people have nothing.The morality and culture of the society are degenerate, and everything emits a rotten smell.Steppenwolf is out of tune with this society. In his view, everything around him is just a monkey show.He felt very miserable and lonely, he was restless and homeless, "Oh, in our world... how difficult it is to find traces of the gods! In this world, I have no joy. In this world, how can I be happy?" Can you not be a Steppenwolf, a down-and-out hermit."

Harrell's mental pain and crisis are vividly displayed in front of readers not by describing his direct conflict with reality, but by self-dissection and soul analysis.Steppenwolf "lost his job, lost his family, lost his hometown, drifted away from all social groups... Constantly clashed with public opinion and public morality...Religion, motherland, family, and country all lost their value... Science, guilds, art, mystification, pretentiousness", he was disgusted.This is his contradiction with the outside world.His heart is also full of contradictions: he has both human nature and animal nature, both a noble and bright side and a vulgar and dark side. He hates the petty bourgeoisie but is used to the life of the petty bourgeoisie; he hates order but cannot get rid of it.He dissected his soul in the magic theater, saw himself split into countless selves, and experienced the love life of his youth again.He found the beast-tamer, the minister, the general, what the madman concocted in their minds, lurking in his own as well, loathsome, savage, vicious, brutish, stupid.So he decided to endure the evil to the end, and once again traveled to his inner hell to purify his soul in order to achieve harmony in his soul.He is no longer so pessimistic, he believes that one day he will learn to laugh. "Mozart is waiting for me."

It is clear that the mental crisis and illness of Steppenwolf are not isolated phenomena, but typical to a certain extent.Just as the author said through the mouth of the publisher, "This is a record of an era...Harrell's spiritual illness is not a strange disease of individual people, but a disease of the era itself. The mental illness of a whole generation." Hesse lived in an era when capitalism entered the stage of imperialism, various social contradictions were further intensified, and the decadence and parasitic nature of capitalism were more clearly manifested.Hesse saw that this system was going into decline, and also had a premonition that a new era was coming, but he had neither a clear concept nor a correct understanding of this new era. He opposed the typical capitalist system of the United States, and did not Approved of the Bolshevik Revolution and the Soviet system.His protagonist, Harrell, is one of those "people at the turn of two eras, who have lost their sense of security and innocence, and whose fate is to doubt life, to take the question of its meaning as a personal anguish and Doomed to experience."In that "age of technology and money, war and greed", people pursue naked material interests, spirituality and morality are ignored, and traditional culture and humanitarian thought are destroyed.Honest intellectuals like Harrell are in conflict with the harsh reality. They neither want to join forces with others, nor can they see a way out to transform society, nor can they see the power of the masses.They are confused, hesitant, and depressed.Their inner pain and contradictions are the reflection of their contradictions with social reality.Modern capitalist society has the conditions and soil to continuously produce Steppenwolf, especially in times of social turmoil and crisis, there are always many people who fall into the realm and crisis similar to Steppenwolf, and they can find some kind of resonance in it.This may be one of the reasons why Hesse and other works of Hesse became popular in Europe, America and Japan in the late 1960s and 1970s.

Hesse opposed war from a humanitarian standpoint.In his novel, he keenly pointed out that people did not learn from the first world war. Every day, thousands of people are eagerly preparing for the next war. Thousands of newspapers, magazines, thousands of speeches, Meetings, public or secret, promote false patriotism and foment vengeance.Hesse warned people through the novel that a new and more terrible war was brewing.Twelve years after the novel was published, Hitler launched the Second World War, which once again pushed Germany and the world into the abyss of pain.Hesse's warning was unfortunately on the mark.

In the postscript of the 1941 Swiss edition, Hesse wrote: "Although the story of Steppenwolf is about disease and crisis, it does not describe destruction, it does not describe the crisis leading to death, on the contrary, it describes It's a cure." So what was his cure?Mozart and the Immortal appear again and again in the novel.He believes that people must replace the idols of the times with beliefs of eternal value, and this belief is the reverence for Mozart and the immortal, and the persistent pursuit of humanity.Just as many things in Hesse's works are symbolic, here, Mozart and the Immortal both have symbolic meaning, representing the eternal value, beauty, humanity, sacredness and noble spirit.He hopes that people will love more, believe more, replace hate with love, revenge with reconciliation, and superficial and commercialized fake culture with real culture.The remedies prescribed by Hesse may have a certain effect on individual people.If they listen to the author's call from the heart, they may turn to themselves, to overcome the base and dirty things in their bodies, to improve their morality, to cultivate their sentiments, to pursue inner harmony and peace of conscience, and to find a little comfort in their spirits. A small step on the so-called path of becoming a real human being.However, in a filthy society, the result of doing so can only be clean and self-care.For the entire real society, this is not an effective medicine after all, because it does not guide people to participate in practical activities to change the society. The dirty and dirty society will not be eliminated by itself, and the contradiction between them and the real world will not be overcome. .

Hesse's analysis of Steppenwolf's spiritual crisis and his description of the declining spiritual culture of the era he lived in is undoubtedly a denial and protest against capitalist society.It can be seen from the novel that he pursues abstract freedom, explores the eternal value of life, and hopes that human personality can be fully developed.These, for a bourgeois humanitarian writer, naturally have a certain progressive significance; his novels have a certain cognitive value for our understanding of capitalist society and the development of human nature suppressed by capitalist society.

Just as many of Hesse's works have an obvious autobiographical nature, they are also a portrayal of the writer's own life experience and spiritual crisis. The "Publisher" said in the preface: "I believe that the inner activities he described are also based on a period of life he actually experienced." When Hesse was writing, like his protagonist Harrell, he was facing fifty years old.The experience of the First World War was still vivid in his mind, still tormenting him.He is incompatible with many values ​​in the world around him and modern civilization that has become his own purpose. He sees that human spirit and soul are damaged with the development of modern civilization.He felt a burning hell beneath his feet, disaster and war looming, coupled with family and personal misfortunes—divorce from his second wife, suffering from illness—he was almost on the verge of collapse.He was confused, depressed, and in agony almost unbearable.He, a hermit, frantically went out of his study, drank and danced, participated in masquerade balls, loved beautiful women, and satisfied the demands of primitive instincts to anesthetize himself.He mentioned several times in letters to friends during this period that he almost killed himself.When Hesse creates, he often puts himself in and writes about what he has experienced and felt.In 1937, when Hesse recalled his creative career, he said: "Facing a world full of violence and lies, I want to appeal to the human soul as a poet. I can only use myself as an example to describe My own existence and pain, so I hope to be understood by like-minded people, but I am despised by others." It is no exaggeration to say that what Hesse described in the novel is a ruthless analysis of himself.It is no accidental coincidence that the names Harry Harrell and Hermann Hesse both start with Hs.

There are no twists and turns and complicated plots, and there are not many intertwined characters, but it focuses on describing the inner world of the protagonist Harrell.Harrell's own account is nothing more than a hellish trip "through the chaotic and dark world of the mind".The novel has a rigorous structure and presents Steppenwolf's soul to readers from three different levels.On the first level, the author describes Steppenwolf’s appearance, lifestyle and personality and the impression he left on him—ordinary citizens—in the publisher’s preface; The psychological treatise of "For Madmen" discusses the nature and characteristics of Steppenwolf; the third layer is Harrell's self-narration, which is the main part of the novel. It uses the first person to describe Harry Harrell's experience during his stay in a small town and feelings, contradictions and pain.The author uses the technique of inner monologue and intersperses many associations, impressions, memories, dreams, and hallucinations, blending reality and hallucinations together.In the chapter of the Magic Theater at the end of the novel, the use of this stream of consciousness reaches its climax.The famous German writer Thomas Mann pointed out in an article in 1937 that Hesse's experiment was not inferior to Joyce's in boldness.

Since its publication, critics and readers have received mixed reviews and reactions, and their understandings and views on it vary greatly.Hesse himself said that novels are often misunderstood.It is indeed a difficult novel to understand.However, it is one of Hesse's representative works and one of the important works in the world literature of the twentieth century. On this point, the opinions are more consistent.Hesse and Hesse's other works are still the subject of Eastern and Western researchers, and attracted many readers in the Hesse fever in Europe, America, Japan and many other countries in the 1960s and 1970s.Hesse's thought was influenced by Chinese culture, especially Lao Zhuang's theory, which is also reflected in his works.His early works "Peter Carmenzinte" and "Under the Wheel" as well as some essays and short stories have been translated into Chinese and published.Now, we are introducing the translation to Chinese literary circles and readers, in order to arouse more readers and critics' interest in and research on this important writer.

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