Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre oder Die Entsagenden. Stuttgart and Tübingen, J. G. Cotta, 1821.
First edition, the first (1821) version of the novel, shorter than and distinct from the expanded text Goethe published in the Ausgabe letzter Hand of 1829; with the poems and maxims on four preliminary leaves. Four unnumbered preliminary leaves and 550 pp. Small octavo (148 × 94 mm).
Contemporary black half-morocco with rich Romantic-period spine gilding (very good to near-fine; internally beautiful and almost free of spotting), from the library of Victor Lange.
Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre is not a simple sequel to the Lehrjahre but something stranger and more radical. Goethe reworked and greatly expanded the novel for the Ausgabe letzter Hand of 1829, so the present 1821 text is the first and shorter version. Its structure resists the expectations of the traditional novel. Novellas, tales, letters, conversations, aphorisms, songs and pedagogical fragments are assembled under a governing principle of Entsagung, renunciation. The late style abandons the developmental confidence of the Lehrjahre for a more open, discontinuous vision of education, work and human limitation. Reception has always reflected that difficulty; H. R. Vaget counts it among Goethe's most advanced achievements [Vaget].
The provenance gives the copy a particular resonance. Victor Lange (1908–1996), the Princeton Germanist who helped shape American Goethe studies and was one of the three executive editors of Goethe: The Collected Works, with Eric Blackall and Cyrus Hamlin, owned it; Princeton's departmental history names him a founding figure of its modern German department.
PROVENANCE
Victor Lange (1908–1996), Germanist, Princeton professor, editor and translator.
The Heribert Tenschert Collection.
REFERENCES
Goedeke IV/3, 434; Hagen 425; Hirzel A 369; Meyer 1329; Kippenberg I, 402; Borst 1359.
H. R. Vaget, in Kritisches Lexikon der deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur; Goethe's Collected Works (Princeton); Princeton University Department of German, history of Victor Lange.
