ABSTRACT
IN HIS RETROSPECTIVE account of a creative lifetime, the elderly Thomas Mann condensed his own story with the biographies of the most eminent artists and thinkers of his people, conceived as one figure, the composer Adrian Leverkühn. Mann represents the creative gifts of genius through the symbol of Leverkühn's Faustian bargain with the forces of darkness. At the same time, he borrows from mythology the theme of the destruction of the would-be artist by the poisoned arrows of jealous Apollo. More concretely, he characterizes the consequence of commitment to the creative act as inevitable frustration of the need for human intimacy. This fate leads the great creator to concentrate on the subject of emotional suffering in his most significant works. I lence Mann entitles Leverkühn's supreme composition, The Lamentations of Doctor Faustus.
