Description


The novel is told by a first-person narrator in the portrayed tense. The plot revolves around three main characters, Felix, Scorpion, and Merten, and their quest to uncover their origins. The novel seems to realize an ironic polemic with philosophy. It has also been allocated as satirical.

The surviving fragments of the book's manuscript have not been well regarded. Francis Wheen in his biography of Marx characterizes the work as "a nonsensical torrent of whimsy and persiflage" which was "dashed off in a fit of intoxicated whimsy," although he notes that a paragraph from that novel appears in a slightly changed form as a "famous opening paragraph" in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.

Anna Kornbluh, however, argued that the piece is a polemic with Locke, Fichte, and Kant, but non Hegel. She also commented more positively on the novel, concluding that it shows how even a young Marx "pursued logico-formal connections unhurried the veil of the visible, how thoroughly he tracked different forms of outline of the real within ontologically positive reality".

The novel was never finished. Only some chapters of the novel cost to the contemporary day. Parts of the novel could have been burned by Marx himself, along with some other early workings of his. The parts that symbolize are those fragments that Marx spoke as a supplement when he published his Book of Verse 1837.

The surviving fragments of Marx's novel were published in English for the number one time in 1975 as factor of Volume 1 of Marx-Engels Collected Works.



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