In what would prove to be his last interview, Bolaño named for Monica Maristain the books that had marked his life. Alongside works in Spanish, English, French, and Latin, he also named Franz Kafka’s novels, the Aphorisms of Lichtenberg, and the Tractatus by Wittgenstein. This troika can be supplemented with Russian authors mentioned repeatedly in works and essays, for example Anton Chekhov and Fyodor Dostoevsky. This chapter enumerates and analyzes Roberto Bolaño’s deep and persistent engagement with German and Russian literatures, and tries to make sense of a fundamental difference in the two repertoires: most of the Russian authors mentioned or alluded to in Bolaño’s work are recognized names in world literature read and appreciated by non-specialists, whereas his chosen German authors range from immortals such as J. W. von Goethe to long-forgotten names like Heinrich Lersch and Max Barthel. It is no surprise that these two literary traditions join in dialectical fashion in Bolaño’s magnum opus, 2666, where a German, Hans Reiter, derives literary inspiration from the diary of a Russian Jew, Boris Abramovich Ansky. The two literatures struggle with each other as do the two armies to cognitively map the evils of the 20th century.

The Introduction presents the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel and raises questions about the influence of his Berlin lectures in the 1820s. A remarkable generation came to learn from him, which included figures such as Ludwig Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, Max Stirner, David Friedrich Strauss, and Heinrich Heine. After his death a second generation of students came to Berlin and were inspired by his legacy. Among these were Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Søren Kierkegaard, Ivan Turgenev, and Mikhail Bakunin. All of these thinkers testify to the special intellectual atmosphere in Berlin that arose in connection with Hegel’s philosophy both during his lifetime and in the decades after his death. The present work takes as its point of departure the intellectual milieu at the University of Berlin, which was the fountain of inspiration that nourished the leading figures of the age. The introduction defines Hegel’s concepts of alienation and recognition, which are taken as the guiding themes for a study of philosophy in the nineteenth century. A handful of critical theses are sketched.