Читать книгу Recently Discovered Letters of George Santayana. Cartas recién descubiertas de George Santayana онлайн

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To date, we have not been able to ascertain the precise origin of the second batch of letters published in this book. We only know that in 2016 the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University reported that a collection of 60 letters written between 1903 and 1937 by Santayana to Baron Albert Wilhelm Freiherrn von Westenholz, had been added to their George Santayana Papers archive.

Santayana talks about Westenholz (from here onwards I will drop the «von», following Santayana’s practice) in the first chapter of the second part of Persons and Places, titled «Germany». Between 1886 and 1888, Santayana spent two semesters studying in Berlin. After that he made several holiday visits to Germany, the last of which

[he] called a Goethe pilgrimage, because [he] went expressly to Frankfort and to Weimar to visit the home of Goethe’s childhood and that of his old age.[He] was then preparing [his] lectures on Three Philosophical Poets, of whom Goethe was to be one. Even that, however, would probably not have induced me to revisit Germany had I not meantime formed a real friendship with a young German, Baron Albert von Westenholz.²⁴