Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz

Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz (Seßwegen, Livonia, 1751 – Moscow, 1792) was a Baltic German writer associated with the Sturm und Drang movement, the pre-Romantic German current that championed emotion and creative freedom over classical rules. He wrote in German, at a time when Livonia belonged to the Russian Empire, and his dramas anticipated features of the modern stage.

The son of a pietist pastor, he moved as a child with his family to Dorpat (now Tartu). After beginning theology at Königsberg, he attended lectures by Immanuel Kant and gradually turned away from his studies towards literature. In 1771 he accompanied two young noblemen to Strasbourg, where he met Goethe, who became his literary model and introduced him to Herder and Lavater. His plays, with short, abrupt scenes and a blunt style, departed from the ideal of elevated heroes: their characters were ordinary people caught in a social world that shapes them, and good and evil were shown across every class.

His relationship with Goethe cooled after his expulsion from Weimar in 1776, and soon afterwards he began to suffer a serious mental illness that halted his writing. He spent long periods in Switzerland and Riga, and in 1781 settled in Moscow, where he worked as a tutor and translator amid growing hardship. He died in 1792, found in a Moscow street, in poverty.

His legacy grew mostly after his death. Büchner wrote the short novella Lenz (1839) about him, and Brecht reworked his plays in the twentieth century. Today he is remembered as one of the most distinctive dramatists of eighteenth-century German literature.