In the Library
Hyperion
Friedrich Hölderlin, 1797
- Form
- Form Novel
- Reading time
- Reading time 3.5 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 61
- Length
- Length 48k words
£1.99
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About the book
A young Greek writes letters from exile in Germany to a friend he left behind, mourning a lost beloved named Diotima and a failed war against the Turks. Friedrich Hölderlin published this epistolary novel in two volumes between 1797 and 1799, working alongside his classmates Hegel and Schelling at Tübingen and beginning the long descent into the madness that would silence him for thirty-six years. Hyperion remembers the Greek mountains, the philosopher Adamas who taught him, the soldier Alabanda who tried to remake the world by force, and the girl whose name means God-given. The prose moves between elegy and ecstatic invocation, German straining toward the music of Greek. Hölderlin's homeland is a country no living person has ever entered.