This text discusses the celebration of anniversaries and their role as catalysts for cultural processes. It uses the 250th anniversary of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s birth in 2026 as an example, comparing it with previous anniversaries of his life. It traces major events dedicated to the celebration in parallel with ancient ritual practices. The hypothesis is proposed that anniversaries are dependent on the political and historical context and reflect public opinions, attitudes, and the cultural and political trends of the time. They also boost scientific research potential and consolidate public attitudes around a significant cause.

This article examines the role of aphorism, fragment, and novel in the theoretical framework of German Romanticism, focusing on Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis. In contrast to rigid philosophical systems, the Romantics developed progressive Universalpoesie, an aesthetic of openness, dynamism, and incompleteness. Aphorism and fragment, with their anti-systemic and paradoxical character, became central forms for articulating this vision. They condense meaning while simultaneously foregrounding incompletion, thus reflecting the Romantic commitment to process, becoming, and irony. The novel, in turn, represents the practical realization of this aesthetic. Conceived as a synthesis of multiple genres – lyric, narrative, philosophy – it aspires to totality while remaining consciously unfinished. In its interplay with fragmentary and aphoristic forms, the Romantic novel highlights the tension between striving for unity and embracing incompleteness. Together, these forms establish a poetics that not only subverts established literary systems but also anticipates modernist ideas such as aesthetic autonomy, self-referentiality, and the dissolution of genre boundaries.

The English reception of The Sandman seems to begin with Walter Scott’s overview of Hoffmann’s writing in 1827. The first English translation of the novella was published in 1834. The text was abridged and appeared in The Keepsake, highlighting the name of the translator, Lord Albert Conyngham, rather than that of the author. The choice of words and phrases, along with the missing parts of the text, closes the door for the common sense and the rationalisations of the Enlightenment, leaving readers with Nathaniel’s feverish imagination. Thus, the alignment with the literature of the supernatural that Coleridge had preferences for becomes even more pronounced. What is generally considered the first translation of The Sandman, Oxenford’s translation for the collection Tales from the German, was published a decade later, in 1844. Comparing and contrasting the two versions of the text in English reveals the translators’ diverging sensibilities.

This paper attempts the hypothesis that Hoffmann’s Bulgarian reception is based on the principle of mediation. One aspect of this mediation is immediately identifiable with the first Bulgarian versions of his works translated from French and Russian translations; another aspect of it emerges with the first Bulgarian translations from the German originals in the 1920s, a by-product of a secondary interest in the author subordinate to the exultant Bulgarian reception of German diabolism that recognised Hoffmann as one of its originators; still another aspect of the mediation is revealed by the specific role of Jacques Offenbach’s Les contes d’Hoffmann in integrating Hoffmann’s name in the Bulgarian cultural memory.

Der Beitrag untersucht das Automatenmotiv bei E. T. A. Hoffmann (Die Automate, 1814; Der Sandmann, 1816), Wladimir Odojewski (Holzgeist, 1833), Gustav Meyrink (Der Golem, 1915) und Aleksandr Grin (Die goldene Kette, 1925) als literarisches Experimentierfeld zur Transformation des Subjektbegriffs zwischen Romantik und früher Moderne. Während Hoffmann im Sandmann die Projektion von Innerlichkeit als Quelle des Unheimlichen inszeniert und in Die Automate die ästhetische Differenz zwischen mechanischer Performanz und beseeltem Ausdruck reflektiert, problematisiert Odojewski im Holzgeist die Reproduzierbarkeit kultureller Zeichen von Subjektivität. Meyrink radikalisiert diese Bewegung im Golem, indem Identität als prekäre Besetzung einer leeren Form erscheint. In Grins Roman Die goldene Kette wird der Automat schließlich selbst zum Kommentator dialogischer Illusionen und entlarvt die Zuschreibungsmechanismen, durch die Menschen Subjektivität konstituieren. Der abschließende Blick auf gegenwärtige KI-Diskurse zeigt, dass literarische Automaten weniger technische Vorläufer als analytische Modelle jener Zuschreibungslogiken sind, die auch heutige Debatten strukturieren.

This study examines the figure of the automaton and the robot as a site of intersection between the human and the technological, between reality and simulation, through the lens of Sigmund Freud’s concept of das Unheimliche (“the uncanny”). Employing close reading, comparative literary analysis, and conceptual juxtaposition with contemporary technological phenomena, the investigation begins with E. T. A. Hoffmann’s novella “The Sandman“ (1816) and his story “Automata” (1814), where childhood trauma, the doppelgänger, and mechanical imitation produce the first modern literary image of the uncanny. Special attention is given to musical automata as a defence of human creativity against mechanisation. The transformation of this figure is traced through Karel Čapekʼs “R.U.R.” (1920) and Isaac Asimov’s “I, Robot” (1950). Contemporary artificial intelligence (AI) systems are compared to the literary automata, demonstrating that the uncanny is not historically bounded but evolves in tandem with technological development, persisting as a fundamental marker of the anxiety generated by the simulation of human subjectivity.

This paper aims to find the intertextual connection between two short stories written in different periods: The Sandman by E. T. A. Hoffmann and Miss Witch by Velichka Nastradinova. It is the figure of the double that appears in both texts but functions in different ways. In Hoffmann’s story the double creates the sense of something uncanny whereas in Nastradinova’s work it is presented in a more positive aspect. However, her interpretation is problematic, as the text raises a difficult ethical question.