Il filellenismo tragico di Friedrich Hölderlin.. Note sull’'Iperione' e su 'Arcipelago'

Friedrich Hölderlin’s Hyperion is the first novel in German literature to be set in modern Greece during the Russo‑Turkish war of 1770. This paper outlines how the comparison with the philhellenic and revolutionary utopia, in Hyperion and in Der Archipelagus (1800/1801), is filtered through a tragic vision of ancient Greece and of the worsening of the widening gap between antiquity and modernity. In both the novel and the poem, contemplation of the past equates a descent into Hades, and in this approach Hölderlin finds inspiration in the Odyssey and Antigone, eventually approaching a pessimistic vision of history and of political change. Rather than upholding a specific state form, Hölderlin seems therefore to envisage the ideal of a new spiritual and natural form of human coexistence in nature.