The initiations in the garden of childhood

The article in question is about one of the fragments of Novalis’s prose found in The Novices of Sais (the original title: Die Lehrlinge zu Sais), which is commonly categorised as a fairy-tale about Hyacinth and Rose Petal. The main interpretative aim of the article was to identify the Novalis’s project of human cognition and achievement of ever deeper levels of consciousness. Within the framework of the deepening of such a mode of analysis, the problem of creating the events setting and the characters of the literary piece are highlighted and become situated in the terms of symbolic imagination. In the light of this type of conduct, the topos of garden in Novalis’s work becomes a figure beyond the image of order and wealth created in the culture of the Enlightenment or the space of security and moderateness as shaped by the Sentimentalism. The Novalis’s early Romantic understanding of the garden (and more broadly of nature) was associated with the belief that it is the space of constant and infinite existential and spiritual initiations for a sensitive individual