RICHARD WEINER AND THE AVANT-GARDE

Apart from poets like R. M. Rilke, P. Valéry, T. S. Eliot, O. Mandelshtam, S. Lörincz or V. Holan the late modern pendant to the avant-garde includes also prose-writers, e. g. Richard Weiner. Contrary to the avant-garde aesthetics of blasphemy and shock, he develops the aesthetics of terror. His works, especially the short story 'An Empty Chair' are based on some unexplainable guilt, not caused by any act of the individual, bound to endless horror: every time one seems to reach its bottom there is only more terror, emptiness and nothingness. Weiner's perception of sublimeness as tremor and fear of the magnificence of the terrible oscillates between negative theology of emptiness and nothingness and the aesthetics of mythical epiphany and unity possible exclusively in a dream.