The stolen letter

The stolen letter , illustration from 1864

The Purloined Letter (English title The purloined letter ) is a detective story by Edgar Allan Poe , the first time in December 1844 in the literary almanac The Gift for 1845 was published and soon reprinted it in various journals and newspapers. The tale is the last of Poe's three detective stories about C. Auguste Dupin , which also include The Double Murder in Rue Morgue and The Secret of Marie Rogêt .

action

As in The Double Murder on Rue Morgue , the main character is Auguste Dupin. The story is told from the first person perspective of one of his friends. Dupin is asked by the Paris Prefect of Police for help in finding a letter that was stolen from a noble lady with the intent of extortion. Although the perpetrator is known, he cannot be arrested because publication or destruction of the document would cause great damage. A house search by the police remains unsuccessful. Through a character analysis of the perpetrator, Dupin comes to the correct conclusion that the letter is not lavishly hidden, but lies openly in a filing system and was therefore overlooked.

Literary significance and reception history

Poe's figure of C. Auguste Dupin became the model for many subsequent detective characters , including Arthur Conan Doyle's famous Sherlock Holmes . Likewise, the pattern established by Poe of narrating the approach of the outstanding detective and the clarification of the case by an assisting friend of the detective was adopted as a classic narrative scheme in numerous other detective stories and detective novels.

Poe himself thought The Purloined Letter was one of his best stories. It was reprinted many times, for the first time in abridged form in the Chambers' Edinburgh Journal in November 1844. The story was subsequently translated into various languages. The first translation appeared in 1845 under the title Une lettre volée in the magazine Magasin pittoresque ; a translation into German by Alfred Mürenberg under the title The stolen letter was probably first published in 1881 in the collection Strange Stories at the Spemann Verlag in Stuttgart.

The story was the subject of a more extensive literary theoretical debate between the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and the philosopher Jacques Derrida in the 1960s and 1970s .

In 1988 the material was filmed under the direction of Stephan Bender with the title The stolen letter at scenes in France. Bender's attempt at a film-literary approach to Poe's narrative with borrowings from Expressionist film was viewed by critics as a rather brittle staging.

German translations (selection)

approx. 1890: Alfred Mürenberg : The stolen letter. Spemann, Stuttgart.
1896: unknown translator: the stolen letter. Hendel, Halle / S.
around 1900: Johanna Möllenhoff : The stolen letter. Reclams Universal Library, Leipzig.
1901: Hedda Moeller and Hedwig Lachmann : The stolen letter. JCC Bruns, Minden.
approx. 1920: Carl Wilhelm Neumann : The stolen letter. Reclams Universal Library, Leipzig.
1922: Gisela Etzel : The stolen letter. Propylaea, Munich
1922: M. Bretschneider : The stolen letter. Rösl & Cie., Munich.
1923: Wilhelm Cremer : The stolen letter. Verlag der Schiller-Buchhandlung, Berlin.
circa 1925: Bernhard Bernson : Her Majesty's letter. Josef Singer Verlag, Strasbourg.
1927: Julius Emil Gaul : The stolen letter. Rhein-Elbe-Verlag, Hamburg.
1930: Fanny Fitting : The Stolen Letter. Fikentscher, Leipzig.
1945: Marlies Wettstein: The stolen letter. Artemis Verlag, Zurich
1948: Ruth Haemmerling and Konrad Haemmerling : The stolen letter. Schlösser Verlag, Braunschweig.
1953: Richard Mummendey : The stolen letter. Hundt, Hattingen.
1953: Elisabeth Seidel : The stolen letter. Dietrich'sche Verlagbuchhandlung, Leipzig.
1966: Hans Wollschläger : The stolen letter. Walter Verlag, Freiburg i. Br.
1976: Felix Friedrich: The stolen letter. Rütten & Loening, Berlin
1989: Dietrich Klose: The stolen letter. Reclams Universal Library, Stuttgart
2017: Andreas Nohl : The stolen letter. dtv, Munich, ISBN 978-3-423-28118-8 .

literature

John P. Muller (Editor): The purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida & psychoanalytic reading . Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, Baltimore 1988. ISBN 0-8018-3292-6
Walter Reimers and Günter Schubert: Great Detective Stories - Model Interpretations . Ernst Klett Verlag, Stuttgart 1980, ISBN 3-12-578730-0 , pp. 34-44.
Manfred Smuda: Variation and Innovation. Models of literary possibilities of prose in the successor of Edgar Allan Poe . In: Jochen Vogt (ed.): The crime novel: Poetics, theory, history. Fink Verlag, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-7705-3226-0 (new publication as UTB paperback announced for July 2016, ISBN 978-3-8385-8147-7 ), pp. 121–142.

Web links

Wikisource: Tales (Poe) / The Purloined Letter - Sources and full texts (English)

Text (english)
German translation by Hedda Eulenberg at Haus Freiheit (PDF; 287 kB)
free audio book (German)

Individual evidence

↑ In a letter to James Russell Lowell from July 2, 1844 Poe wrote shortly before the first publication: " 'The Purloined Letter', forthcoming in the 'poison', is, perhaps, the best of my tales of ratiocination." . See July 2 (1844): Edgar Allan Poe to James Russell Lowell . On: The American Reader , accessed February 5, 2016.
↑ See Edgar Allan Poe - “The Purloined Letter” - Historical Texts for details on the publication history . On: The Edgar Allan Poe Society , accessed on February 5, 2016. WorldCat names the probable date of the first publication of the collection Strange Stories by Spemann Verlag 1881 or the following years 1882 and 1883; the Edgar Allan Poe Society , on the other hand, gives the date of the first edition of the translated and edited by Mürenberg. Collection of stories from 1890. Mürenberg's translation is available online in the Internet Archive at [1] .
↑ See Jacques Lacan: Le seminaire sur 'La Lettre volée' . In: Ecrits , Editions du Seuil , Paris 1966, pp. 11-61, in the English translation by Jeffrey Mehlman under the title Seminar on the Purloined Letter , published in: Yale French Studies , Yale University Press , No. 48, 1972, special edition French Freud , pp. 39-39 (online Seminar on The Purloined Letter. , At: www.lacan.com), and Jacques Derrida: "Le Facteur de la vérité", Poetics, 21 (1975), Pp. 96-14, in the English translation by Willis Domingo et al. published under the title The Purveyor of Truth in Yale French Studies , Yale University Press, No. 52, 1975, special edition Graphesis: Perspectives in Literature and Philosophy , pp. 31–113 (available online at The Purveyor of Truth , at: JSTOR . On the debate between Lacan and Derrida, see also Barbara Johnson: The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida. In: Yale French Studies , Yale University Press, No. 55/56 (1977), Special Issue Literature and Psychoanalysis. The Question of Reading: Otherwise , pp. 457-505 (available online at The Frame of Reference: Poe , Lacan, Derrida. ) On JSTOR ). On the controversy, see also Servanne Woodward: Lacan and Derrida on "The Purloined Letter". In: Comparative Literature Studies , Penn State University Press , Vol. 26, No. 1 (1989), pp. 39-49 (available online at Lacan and Derrida on "The Purloined Letter" on JSTOR ).
↑ See the information under The stolen letter in the Lexicon of International Films on Zweiausendeins.de, accessed on February 5, 2016.

[1] In a letter to James Russell Lowell from July 2, 1844 Poe wrote shortly before the first publication: " 'The Purloined Letter', forthcoming in the 'poison', is, perhaps, the best of my tales of ratiocination." . See July 2 (1844): Edgar Allan Poe to James Russell Lowell . On: The American Reader , accessed February 5, 2016.

[2] See Edgar Allan Poe - “The Purloined Letter” - Historical Texts for details on the publication history . On: The Edgar Allan Poe Society , accessed on February 5, 2016. WorldCat names the probable date of the first publication of the collection Strange Stories by Spemann Verlag 1881 or the following years 1882 and 1883; the Edgar Allan Poe Society , on the other hand, gives the date of the first edition of the translated and edited by Mürenberg. Collection of stories from 1890. Mürenberg's translation is available online in the Internet Archive at [1] .

[3] See Jacques Lacan: Le seminaire sur 'La Lettre volée' . In: Ecrits , Editions du Seuil , Paris 1966, pp. 11-61, in the English translation by Jeffrey Mehlman under the title Seminar on the Purloined Letter , published in: Yale French Studies , Yale University Press , No. 48, 1972, special edition French Freud , pp. 39-39 (online Seminar on The Purloined Letter. , At: www.lacan.com), and Jacques Derrida: "Le Facteur de la vérité", Poetics, 21 (1975), Pp. 96-14, in the English translation by Willis Domingo et al. published under the title The Purveyor of Truth in Yale French Studies , Yale University Press, No. 52, 1975, special edition Graphesis: Perspectives in Literature and Philosophy , pp. 31–113 (available online at The Purveyor of Truth , at: JSTOR . On the debate between Lacan and Derrida, see also Barbara Johnson: The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida. In: Yale French Studies , Yale University Press, No. 55/56 (1977), Special Issue Literature and Psychoanalysis. The Question of Reading: Otherwise , pp. 457-505 (available online at The Frame of Reference: Poe , Lacan, Derrida. ) On JSTOR ). On the controversy, see also Servanne Woodward: Lacan and Derrida on "The Purloined Letter". In: Comparative Literature Studies , Penn State University Press , Vol. 26, No. 1 (1989), pp. 39-49 (available online at Lacan and Derrida on "The Purloined Letter" on JSTOR ).

[4] See the information under The stolen letter in the Lexicon of International Films on Zweiausendeins.de, accessed on February 5, 2016.


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