ABSTRACT
As soon as Hoffmann’s influence makes itself felt, the link becomes more obvious and more specific; the two legends come to be seen as ‘peaks of modern Christian mythology’ in the sense that both characters strive for an absolute, a striving which puts them out of humour with the restrictions of ordinary human existence. The contrast between this new, idealized Don Juan and the traditional ‘libertine’ and ‘criminal’ must have seemed little short of vertiginous to Duller’s first readers, even if some of them had been prepared for a change of approach from having read their Hoffmann. Lenau’s Don Juan is a fragment consisting of isolated episodes dealing with various of Don Juan’s loves and his often violent escapades and culminating in a very free variation on the traditional supper-scene.
