托玛斯.曼(1875～1955年)

Mann, Thomas

德国小说家和随笔作家，被认为是德国20世纪最伟大的小说家。曾短暂从事办公室工作，後与哥哥亨利希.曼（1871～1950）一起致力於写作。第一部小说《布登勃洛克一家》（1901）是一部为古老的资产阶级美德谱写的挽歌。在笔调阴郁的中篇小说杰作《魂断威尼斯》（1912）中，他描写了艺术家在一个即将摧毁的社会中的悲剧性困境。虽然他在第一次世界大战开始时怀抱着满腔的爱国热忱，但自1919年後逐渐改变了他对独裁德国的观点。他的巨着《魔山》（1924）清晰地表明他日益增长的对启蒙运动作为一个复杂而多元化的整体的支持。他直言不讳地反对法西斯主义，在希特勒统治时期逃亡瑞士，1938年在美国定居，但在1952年返回瑞士。四部曲《约瑟和他的兄弟们》（1933～1943）写的是《圣经》中约瑟的故事。《浮士德博士》（1947）是他最直接的政治小说，分析了德国灵魂的阴暗面。而欢乐的《骗子菲利克斯.克鲁尔的自白》（1954）则没有完成。他以细腻的风格、丰富的幽默和讽刺、精细的描写、多层次的智睿叙述而闻名。其随笔作品则分析了托尔斯泰、弗洛伊德、歌德、尼采、契诃夫和席勒等人物。1929年获诺贝尔文学奖。

English version：

1875～1955年

Mann, Thomas

German novelist and essayist, considered the greatest German novelist of the 20th century. After a brief period of office work, Mann devoted himself to writing, as had his elder brother Heinrich (1871-1950). Buddenbrooks (1901), his first novel, was an elegy for old bourgeois virtues. In the novella Death in Venice (1912), a somber masterpiece, he took up the tragic dilemma of the artist in a collapsing society. Though ardently patriotic at the start of World War I, after 1919 he slowly revised his views of the authoritarian German state. His great novel The Magic Mountain (1924) clarified his growing espousal of Enlightenment principles as one strand of a complex and multifaceted whole. An outspoken opponent of Nazism, he fled to Switzerland on Adolf Hitler's accession; he settled in the U.S. in 1938, but returned to Switzerland in 1952. His tetralogy Joseph and His Brothers (1933-43) concerns the biblical Joseph. Doctor Faustus (1947), his most directly political novel, analyzes the darker aspects of the German soul. The often hilarious Felix Krull, Confidence Man (1954) remained unfinished. He is noted for his finely wrought style enriched by humor, irony, and parody and for his subtle, many-layered narratives of vast intellectual scope. His essays examined such figures as Leo Tolstoy, Sigmund Freud, Johann W. von Goethe, Friedrich Nietzsche, Anton Chekhov, and Friedrich Schiller. He received the Nobel Prize in 1929.