Summary
Gottfried August Bürger: Baron Münchhausen
Although "the highest duty of a traveler is strict adherence to the truth... some travelers are sometimes capable of asserting more than what, strictly speaking, can be true... If, however, anyone from this society doubts my truthfulness, I must regret him from the bottom of my heart because of his suspicion... because I am a sworn enemy of any lies..." - so said a man with an extraordinarily constructive imagination and storytelling ability gift, not looking for the limits of the experience of guaranteed reality, once the world's biggest liar and synonymous with lies, the legendary Baron Münchhausen. This is recorded in the masterpiece of the art of lying, the full title of which is Strange Voyages by Sea and Land, War Campaigns and Merry Adventures of Baron Münchausen as he used to narrate them with a bottle to his friends, which appeared in Germany for the first time at the Leipzig Fair in 1786 as a translation from English, without the name of the writer, translator and publisher, pretending to be London as his birthplace. And this lie is one of the rare truths in this disturbingly imaginative book - namely, Rudolf Erich Raspe first translated from German into English seventeen of the most incredible travel, hunting and warrior exploits of the then still living eccentric Hieronymus Carl Friedrich Baron Münchhausen, only to be translated into German a year later by Gottfried August Bürger and supplemented with thirteen new grotesque-fantastic "Munchauseniads". In this form, in the popular series of strange incidents of the "honorable" superhero, Münchausen entered world literature and stood alongside Gulliver, Faust, Robinson, Eulenspiegel, Alice and other standard-bearers of the literary imagination. the aesthetic sphere: it ceases to be a lie, it becomes a literary work of wild imagination, and as a poetic truth - but also as our everyday life, with the wholehearted support of the more and more hymnic modern-day Munchausens - it continues to live intensely.
A classic lie - a true classic! Unbelievable!
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