The Czech decadents around the journal The Modern Revue, particularly Jiří Karásek and Karel Hlav... more The Czech decadents around the journal The Modern Revue, particularly Jiří Karásek and Karel Hlaváček, often stylized themselves as vampires, which in a programmatic poem the latter dubbed "the symbol of decadence". In this essay I shall explore what this metaphor meant for the Czechs, a topic that has never been discussed at length. I will base my analysis on close readings of selected works within the context of the fin-de-siècle decadent movement throughout Europe. The vampire was a potent motif for the Czech decadents, representing both culture in general, conceived as a vampiric force that drains physical strength, and decadence in particular, which infects its readers with the venom of pessimism. For Karásek, the vampire metaphor also carried marked homoerotic overtones. The vampire topos may further be interpreted in socio-political terms, in view of the Czechs' status as subjects within the Austro-Hungarian Empire: in Czech decadence, the image of the vampire overlaps with that of the barbarian, who threatens to lay siege to the empire from without. In contrast to the barbarian, however, the vampire is an internal force of entropy, a symbol of degeneration, which undermines the empire from within. At the same time, Czech vampires drain the last remaining strength from their own nation and culture and infect one another with deadly poisons that spread the curse of vampirism. The vampire in Czech decadence represents insidious, corrosive resistance from within, resistance that poisons itself along with its oppressors. The late nineteenth century was haunted by apprehensions of degeneration, which was believed to result from humanity's removal from the conditions necessary for natural selection according to Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. Influential degeneration theorists such as Cesare Lombroso and Max Nordau propagated the view that the overly refined culture created by modern-day civilization was causing man to regress rather than evolve, and as a result, society was sick, or, in other words, decadent. Artists, they claimed, were among the most degenerate of all. Decadent writers appropriated this vision of artists as degenerates and society in decay and created protagonists and lyrical personae afflicted by the nervous illnesses, hypersensitivity, weakness, apathy, and despair associated with degeneration. With subtle irony, Joris-Karl Huysmans celebrated the symptoms of degeneration as the source of creative genius in his 1884 novel Against Nature, a manifesto of the decadent movement in prose. In the programmatic 1892 essay Towards a Psychology of the Individual I: Chopin and Nietzsche, the influential Polish decadent Stanislaw Przybyszewski
Examining mirror imagery in the prose works “In the Mirror” by Valery Briusov and The Resurrected... more Examining mirror imagery in the prose works “In the Mirror” by Valery Briusov and The Resurrected Gods: Leonardo da Vinci by Dmitry Merezhkovsky, both published in 1902, this article situates the Russian Decadent and Symbolist associations of the mirror in the pan-European literary and philosophical context. The mirror constitutes the threshold of manifold oppositions, including life and art, life and death, and reality and dream or imagination. It is a realm of alternative reality, magical and seductive, as in Briusov’s story, or potentially both demonic and divine, as in Merezhkovsky’s novel. In accordance with the Romantic tradition as well as Decadent and Symbolist iconography, mirror imagery in these two works is inseparable from questions of the nature of art and the power of artistic creation. This article is available in Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol34/iss2/4 Mirrors in Russian Decadent and Symbolist Prose: Valery Briusov and...
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, 2010
Examining mirror imagery in the prose works "In the Mirror" by Valery Briusov and The Resurrected... more Examining mirror imagery in the prose works "In the Mirror" by Valery Briusov and The Resurrected Gods: Leonardo da Vinci by Dmitry Merezhkovsky, both published in 1902, this article situates the Russian Decadent and Symbolist associations of the mirror in the pan-European literary and philosophical context. The mirror constitutes the threshold of manifold oppositions, including life and art, life and death, and reality and dream or imagination. It is a realm of alternative reality, magical and seductive, as in Briusov's story, or potentially both demonic and divine, as in Merezhkovsky's novel. In accordance with the Romantic tradition as well as Decadent and Symbolist iconography, mirror imagery in these two works is inseparable from questions of the nature of art and the power of artistic creation.
A prominent feature of the Decadent movement, which emerged in France and had taken root in Russi... more A prominent feature of the Decadent movement, which emerged in France and had taken root in Russia by the 1890s, was an obsession with the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Stéphane Mallarmé, for instance, boasted that he liked everything that may be subsumed under the words decline and fall and that he particularly enjoyed "the agonizing poetry of the last moments of Rome." 1 In Paul Verlaine's words, Decadence celebrates "the collapse among the flames of races exhausted by the power of feeling, to the invading sound of enemy trumpets." 2 Verlaine captured the basic elements of this topos in his programmatic 1883 sonnet "Languor," with its first line "I am the Empire at the end of the decadence ...," which was received as a manifesto of the movement in verse. The lyrical persona, an imperial subject, is writing acrostics (that is, creating subtle and recherché art) as barbarians invade the Empire. Weary and debauched, he embodies the Empire, which contemporaries understood not only as Rome but also as France, recently defeated in the Franco-Prussian War. Valery Briusov, who translated this poem and who played an enormous role in bringing Decadence to Russia, demonstrated a similar concern with the collapse of empires in his famed 1905 poem "The Coming Huns," in which he welcomes the new barbarians coming to destroy the old culture and usher in a new, younger civilization on its ruins. 3 The barbarians in this poem may be understood as the Japanese, who had just defeated Russia in war, or the revolutionary masses threatening the regime at the time. 1 Stéphane Mallarmé, Oeuvres complètes (Tours, 1965), 270. All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. 2 Cited in English in Richard Gilman, Decadence: The Strange Life of an Epithet (New York, 1980), 5. 3 This poem's connection with Verlaine's sonnet and the trope of the fall of Rome are particularly evident in earlier drafts, which include the variants: "Crash down from your camps! / To infuse the decrepit body [or: To revive the impotence of Rome] / With the fire of blood! ("Рухните с ваших становий! / Чтоб влить в одряхлевшее тело [Оживить безсилие Рима] / Огнём [Огонь] крови!" See Rossiiskaia gosudarstvennaia biblioteka (RBG), Moscow, f. 386 (Fond Briusova), op. 6, ed. khr. 3, l. 29. All of this is crossed out except the first line and krovi. For further examples of the topos of the fall of Rome and related motifs in Briusov's work see Kirsten Lodge, "The Peak of Civilization on the Brink of Collapse: The 'Roman Paradigm' in Czech and Russian Decadence" (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2006).
Chlebnikov's prose poem 'Zverinec' is generally not considered a programmatic work; it is usually... more Chlebnikov's prose poem 'Zverinec' is generally not considered a programmatic work; it is usually viewed merely as an early piece by a budding poet under the influence of Walt Whitman. However, as I will argue below, the poem may be read as a programmatic piece rejecting the Symbolist aesthetic and proposing a new poetics, in which images grow organically out of language and relations in the real world are "discovered" through the study of relations in language. The poet also introduces the notion that heterogeneous forms are varying expressions of an underlying unity. This theme, and the poetics by which it is expressed in 'Zverinec', can be traced throughout the whole of Chlebnikov's remarkably unified and coherent oeuvre. 'Zverinec' was significantly revised twice between 1909 and 1911. An examination of the poem's first variants is particularly illuminating for the study of Chlebnikov's movement away from Symbolism. In this article I will not deal specifically with the third version, a poetic protest against the establishment of the Duma, as this version has been discussed elsewhere at some length (Turbin 1981). I will examine instead the changes appearing in the poem's second version, reworked after plans to publish the poem in the journal Apollon fell through and Chlebnikov broke with Symbolism. Chlebnikov sent the first variant of 'Zverinec' (1940: 356-357) to his mentor, Vja6eslav Ivanov, in 1909. It is formally the least experimental of the three, and also the least polemical in content. It contains the fewest disruptions of meter, and there is no explicit indication of a connection between
A prominent feature of the Decadent movement, which emerged in France and had taken root in Russi... more A prominent feature of the Decadent movement, which emerged in France and had taken root in Russia by the 1890s, was an obsession with the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Stéphane Mallarmé, for instance, boasted that he liked everything that may be subsumed under the words decline and fall and that he particularly enjoyed "the agonizing poetry of the last moments of Rome." 1 In Paul Verlaine's words, Decadence celebrates "the collapse among the flames of races exhausted by the power of feeling, to the invading sound of enemy trumpets." 2 Verlaine captured the basic elements of this topos in his programmatic 1883 sonnet "Languor," with its first line "I am the Empire at the end of the decadence ...," which was received as a manifesto of the movement in verse. The lyrical persona, an imperial subject, is writing acrostics (that is, creating subtle and recherché art) as barbarians invade the Empire. Weary and debauched, he embodies the Empire, which contemporaries understood not only as Rome but also as France, recently defeated in the Franco-Prussian War. Valery Briusov, who translated this poem and who played an enormous role in bringing Decadence to Russia, demonstrated a similar concern with the collapse of empires in his famed 1905 poem "The Coming Huns," in which he welcomes the new barbarians coming to destroy the old culture and usher in a new, younger civilization on its ruins. 3 The barbarians in this poem may be understood as the Japanese, who had just defeated Russia in war, or the revolutionary masses threatening the regime at the time. 1 Stéphane Mallarmé, Oeuvres complètes (Tours, 1965), 270. All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. 2 Cited in English in Richard Gilman, Decadence: The Strange Life of an Epithet (New York, 1980), 5. 3 This poem's connection with Verlaine's sonnet and the trope of the fall of Rome are particularly evident in earlier drafts, which include the variants: "Crash down from your camps! / To infuse the decrepit body [or: To revive the impotence of Rome] / With the fire of blood! ("Рухните с ваших становий! / Чтоб влить в одряхлевшее тело [Оживить безсилие Рима] / Огнём [Огонь] крови!" See Rossiiskaia gosudarstvennaia biblioteka (RBG), Moscow, f. 386 (Fond Briusova), op. 6, ed. khr. 3, l. 29. All of this is crossed out except the first line and krovi. For further examples of the topos of the fall of Rome and related motifs in Briusov's work see Kirsten Lodge, "The Peak of Civilization on the Brink of Collapse: The 'Roman Paradigm' in Czech and Russian Decadence" (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2006).
The Czech decadents around the journal The Modern Revue, particularly Jiří Karásek and Karel Hlav... more The Czech decadents around the journal The Modern Revue, particularly Jiří Karásek and Karel Hlaváček, often stylized themselves as vampires, which in a programmatic poem the latter dubbed "the symbol of decadence". In this essay I shall explore what this metaphor meant for the Czechs, a topic that has never been discussed at length. I will base my analysis on close readings of selected works within the context of the fin-de-siècle decadent movement throughout Europe. The vampire was a potent motif for the Czech decadents, representing both culture in general, conceived as a vampiric force that drains physical strength, and decadence in particular, which infects its readers with the venom of pessimism. For Karásek, the vampire metaphor also carried marked homoerotic overtones. The vampire topos may further be interpreted in socio-political terms, in view of the Czechs' status as subjects within the Austro-Hungarian Empire: in Czech decadence, the image of the vampire overlaps with that of the barbarian, who threatens to lay siege to the empire from without. In contrast to the barbarian, however, the vampire is an internal force of entropy, a symbol of degeneration, which undermines the empire from within. At the same time, Czech vampires drain the last remaining strength from their own nation and culture and infect one another with deadly poisons that spread the curse of vampirism. The vampire in Czech decadence represents insidious, corrosive resistance from within, resistance that poisons itself along with its oppressors. The late nineteenth century was haunted by apprehensions of degeneration, which was believed to result from humanity's removal from the conditions necessary for natural selection according to Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. Influential degeneration theorists such as Cesare Lombroso and Max Nordau propagated the view that the overly refined culture created by modern-day civilization was causing man to regress rather than evolve, and as a result, society was sick, or, in other words, decadent. Artists, they claimed, were among the most degenerate of all. Decadent writers appropriated this vision of artists as degenerates and society in decay and created protagonists and lyrical personae afflicted by the nervous illnesses, hypersensitivity, weakness, apathy, and despair associated with degeneration. With subtle irony, Joris-Karl Huysmans celebrated the symptoms of degeneration as the source of creative genius in his 1884 novel Against Nature, a manifesto of the decadent movement in prose. In the programmatic 1892 essay Towards a Psychology of the Individual I: Chopin and Nietzsche, the influential Polish decadent Stanislaw Przybyszewski
Examining mirror imagery in the prose works “In the Mirror” by Valery Briusov and The Resurrected... more Examining mirror imagery in the prose works “In the Mirror” by Valery Briusov and The Resurrected Gods: Leonardo da Vinci by Dmitry Merezhkovsky, both published in 1902, this article situates the Russian Decadent and Symbolist associations of the mirror in the pan-European literary and philosophical context. The mirror constitutes the threshold of manifold oppositions, including life and art, life and death, and reality and dream or imagination. It is a realm of alternative reality, magical and seductive, as in Briusov’s story, or potentially both demonic and divine, as in Merezhkovsky’s novel. In accordance with the Romantic tradition as well as Decadent and Symbolist iconography, mirror imagery in these two works is inseparable from questions of the nature of art and the power of artistic creation. This article is available in Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol34/iss2/4 Mirrors in Russian Decadent and Symbolist Prose: Valery Briusov and...
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, 2010
Examining mirror imagery in the prose works "In the Mirror" by Valery Briusov and The Resurrected... more Examining mirror imagery in the prose works "In the Mirror" by Valery Briusov and The Resurrected Gods: Leonardo da Vinci by Dmitry Merezhkovsky, both published in 1902, this article situates the Russian Decadent and Symbolist associations of the mirror in the pan-European literary and philosophical context. The mirror constitutes the threshold of manifold oppositions, including life and art, life and death, and reality and dream or imagination. It is a realm of alternative reality, magical and seductive, as in Briusov's story, or potentially both demonic and divine, as in Merezhkovsky's novel. In accordance with the Romantic tradition as well as Decadent and Symbolist iconography, mirror imagery in these two works is inseparable from questions of the nature of art and the power of artistic creation.
A prominent feature of the Decadent movement, which emerged in France and had taken root in Russi... more A prominent feature of the Decadent movement, which emerged in France and had taken root in Russia by the 1890s, was an obsession with the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Stéphane Mallarmé, for instance, boasted that he liked everything that may be subsumed under the words decline and fall and that he particularly enjoyed "the agonizing poetry of the last moments of Rome." 1 In Paul Verlaine's words, Decadence celebrates "the collapse among the flames of races exhausted by the power of feeling, to the invading sound of enemy trumpets." 2 Verlaine captured the basic elements of this topos in his programmatic 1883 sonnet "Languor," with its first line "I am the Empire at the end of the decadence ...," which was received as a manifesto of the movement in verse. The lyrical persona, an imperial subject, is writing acrostics (that is, creating subtle and recherché art) as barbarians invade the Empire. Weary and debauched, he embodies the Empire, which contemporaries understood not only as Rome but also as France, recently defeated in the Franco-Prussian War. Valery Briusov, who translated this poem and who played an enormous role in bringing Decadence to Russia, demonstrated a similar concern with the collapse of empires in his famed 1905 poem "The Coming Huns," in which he welcomes the new barbarians coming to destroy the old culture and usher in a new, younger civilization on its ruins. 3 The barbarians in this poem may be understood as the Japanese, who had just defeated Russia in war, or the revolutionary masses threatening the regime at the time. 1 Stéphane Mallarmé, Oeuvres complètes (Tours, 1965), 270. All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. 2 Cited in English in Richard Gilman, Decadence: The Strange Life of an Epithet (New York, 1980), 5. 3 This poem's connection with Verlaine's sonnet and the trope of the fall of Rome are particularly evident in earlier drafts, which include the variants: "Crash down from your camps! / To infuse the decrepit body [or: To revive the impotence of Rome] / With the fire of blood! ("Рухните с ваших становий! / Чтоб влить в одряхлевшее тело [Оживить безсилие Рима] / Огнём [Огонь] крови!" See Rossiiskaia gosudarstvennaia biblioteka (RBG), Moscow, f. 386 (Fond Briusova), op. 6, ed. khr. 3, l. 29. All of this is crossed out except the first line and krovi. For further examples of the topos of the fall of Rome and related motifs in Briusov's work see Kirsten Lodge, "The Peak of Civilization on the Brink of Collapse: The 'Roman Paradigm' in Czech and Russian Decadence" (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2006).
Chlebnikov's prose poem 'Zverinec' is generally not considered a programmatic work; it is usually... more Chlebnikov's prose poem 'Zverinec' is generally not considered a programmatic work; it is usually viewed merely as an early piece by a budding poet under the influence of Walt Whitman. However, as I will argue below, the poem may be read as a programmatic piece rejecting the Symbolist aesthetic and proposing a new poetics, in which images grow organically out of language and relations in the real world are "discovered" through the study of relations in language. The poet also introduces the notion that heterogeneous forms are varying expressions of an underlying unity. This theme, and the poetics by which it is expressed in 'Zverinec', can be traced throughout the whole of Chlebnikov's remarkably unified and coherent oeuvre. 'Zverinec' was significantly revised twice between 1909 and 1911. An examination of the poem's first variants is particularly illuminating for the study of Chlebnikov's movement away from Symbolism. In this article I will not deal specifically with the third version, a poetic protest against the establishment of the Duma, as this version has been discussed elsewhere at some length (Turbin 1981). I will examine instead the changes appearing in the poem's second version, reworked after plans to publish the poem in the journal Apollon fell through and Chlebnikov broke with Symbolism. Chlebnikov sent the first variant of 'Zverinec' (1940: 356-357) to his mentor, Vja6eslav Ivanov, in 1909. It is formally the least experimental of the three, and also the least polemical in content. It contains the fewest disruptions of meter, and there is no explicit indication of a connection between
A prominent feature of the Decadent movement, which emerged in France and had taken root in Russi... more A prominent feature of the Decadent movement, which emerged in France and had taken root in Russia by the 1890s, was an obsession with the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Stéphane Mallarmé, for instance, boasted that he liked everything that may be subsumed under the words decline and fall and that he particularly enjoyed "the agonizing poetry of the last moments of Rome." 1 In Paul Verlaine's words, Decadence celebrates "the collapse among the flames of races exhausted by the power of feeling, to the invading sound of enemy trumpets." 2 Verlaine captured the basic elements of this topos in his programmatic 1883 sonnet "Languor," with its first line "I am the Empire at the end of the decadence ...," which was received as a manifesto of the movement in verse. The lyrical persona, an imperial subject, is writing acrostics (that is, creating subtle and recherché art) as barbarians invade the Empire. Weary and debauched, he embodies the Empire, which contemporaries understood not only as Rome but also as France, recently defeated in the Franco-Prussian War. Valery Briusov, who translated this poem and who played an enormous role in bringing Decadence to Russia, demonstrated a similar concern with the collapse of empires in his famed 1905 poem "The Coming Huns," in which he welcomes the new barbarians coming to destroy the old culture and usher in a new, younger civilization on its ruins. 3 The barbarians in this poem may be understood as the Japanese, who had just defeated Russia in war, or the revolutionary masses threatening the regime at the time. 1 Stéphane Mallarmé, Oeuvres complètes (Tours, 1965), 270. All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. 2 Cited in English in Richard Gilman, Decadence: The Strange Life of an Epithet (New York, 1980), 5. 3 This poem's connection with Verlaine's sonnet and the trope of the fall of Rome are particularly evident in earlier drafts, which include the variants: "Crash down from your camps! / To infuse the decrepit body [or: To revive the impotence of Rome] / With the fire of blood! ("Рухните с ваших становий! / Чтоб влить в одряхлевшее тело [Оживить безсилие Рима] / Огнём [Огонь] крови!" See Rossiiskaia gosudarstvennaia biblioteka (RBG), Moscow, f. 386 (Fond Briusova), op. 6, ed. khr. 3, l. 29. All of this is crossed out except the first line and krovi. For further examples of the topos of the fall of Rome and related motifs in Briusov's work see Kirsten Lodge, "The Peak of Civilization on the Brink of Collapse: The 'Roman Paradigm' in Czech and Russian Decadence" (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2006).
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