Abstract
This chapter analyzes two works published in 1897 – Zinaida Gippius’s “Among the Dead” and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Decadence is at once the representation of the age’s deep-seated anxieties and a strategy for coping with the fears induced by the upcoming end of the era and ensuing prospect of social decline. What I call a “Decadent metaphysics” imbues the movement with a productive and aesthetically pivotal place in late nineteenth-century culture. The dominant tropes of Decadence play quite readily into the underside of Victorian steadfastness. Yet complementing these articulations of fin-de-siècle pessimism were stylistic and aesthetic traits that granted access to the positive metaphysical potential of the coming era. When notions of progress, evolution, and the complete comprehensibility of nature and society began to morph into frightening glimpses of decay and disorder, Decadence offered a means of moving on into a new age by embracing, rather than escaping, the looming precipice.
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Notes
- 1.
Quoted in Theodore Martin, The Life of His Royal Highness the Prince Consort, vol. 2 (New York: D. Appleton & Co, 1877), 204–5.
- 2.
Sebastian Barry, The Steward of Christendom (London: Metheun, 1995), 14.
- 3.
Alex Murray and Jason David Hall, “Introduction,” in Decadent Poetics: Literature and Form at the British Fin de Siècle, ed. Alex Murray and Jason David Hall (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 13. Bernheimer also points to this close connection arguing that “decadence appears as a kind of subversive counterpoint to naturalism arising from within it.” Charles Bernheimer, Decadent Subjects: The Idea of Decadence in Art, Literature, Philosophy, and Culture of the fin de siècle in Europe (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 59.
- 4.
Weber and Steinberg offer thorough historical overviews of the period in France and Russia with particularly emphasis on the upheavals and transitions welling up in the final decades of the nineteenth century. Eugen Weber, France, fin de siècle (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1986); Mark D. Steinberg, Petersburg fin de siècle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011).
- 5.
Vladimir Alexandrov’s study of Nabokov makes a strong claim for the importance of otherworldliness in modern literature and culture. Vladimir Alexandrov, Nabokov’s Otherworld (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).
- 6.
Jean Pierrot, The Decadent Imagination, 1880–1900, trans. Derek Coltman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); Zinaida Gippius, Novye liudi (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia M. Merkusheva, 1896).
- 7.
Liz Constable, Dennis Denisoff, and Matthew Potolsky, eds., Perennial Decay: On the Aesthetics and Politics of Decadence (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 21.
- 8.
Bram Stoker, Dracula, Norton Critical Editions (New York: Norton, 1997), 296. See also Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 167–75.
- 9.
Stoker, Dracula, 184, 172.
- 10.
Genova notes the frightening aspects of Eastern monsters in connection to the nineteenth-century obsession with Japan. Pamela Genova, Writing Japonisme: Aesthetic Translation in Nineteenth-Century French Prose (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2016), 125–8.
- 11.
Stoker, Dracula, 249.
- 12.
See David Sweetman, Explosive Acts: Toulouse-Lautrec, Oscar Wilde, Félix Fénéon and the Art & Anarchy of the Fin de Siècle (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999) and Debarati Sanyal, The Violence of Modernity: Baudelaire, Irony, and the Politics of Form (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). Anatole Baju’s 1886 journal Le Décadent had a distinctly anarchist orientation. See Pamela Genova, Symbolist Journals: A Culture of Correspondence (Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate, 2002), 85–7; Matthew Potolsky, The Decadent Republic of Letters: Taste, Politics, and Cosmopolitan Community From Baudelaire to Beardsley (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); and Patrick McGuinness, Poetry and Radical Politics in Fin-de-siècle France: From Anarchism to Action française (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
- 13.
See Pick, Faces of Degeneration .
- 14.
Sergei Diagilev, “Slozhnye voprosy (Nash mnimyi upadok. Vechnaia bor’ba),” Mir iskusstva, no. 1–2 (1899), 3.
- 15.
Ibid., 5.
- 16.
Furness, “Decadence and fin de siècle,” 341. See also Richard Gilman, Decadence: The Strange Life of an Epithet (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1979).
- 17.
Paul Verlaine, Selected Poems, trans. Martin Sorrell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 124–25.
- 18.
Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature [1899] (Manchester: Carcanet, 2014), 5–6.
- 19.
Valerii Iakovlevich Briusov, “Kliuchi tain [1904],” in Sredi stikhov, 1894–1924: manifesty, stat’i, retsenzii, ed. N. A. Bogomolov and N. V. Kotrelev (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1990).
- 20.
Sherry, Modernism and the Reinvention of Decadence, 1–36.
- 21.
Olga Matich, Erotic Utopia: The Decadent Imagination in Russia’s Fin de Siècle (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005).
- 22.
Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer, Studies in Hysteria, trans. Nicola Luckhurst (New York: Penguin, 2004), 9.
- 23.
Tsvetan Todorov, The Fantastic, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1975), 25.
- 24.
Pierrot, The Decadent Imagination, 1880–1900, 190.
- 25.
John Bramble, Modernism and the Occult (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
- 26.
Michael Bell discusses the scope of this encounter. Michael Bell, “The Metaphysics of Modernism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, ed. Michael Levenson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
- 27.
Paul Bourget, Essais de psychologie contemporaine (Gallimard, 1993), 14.
- 28.
Matich, Erotic Utopia: The Decadent Imagination in Russia’s Fin de Siècle and Jenifer Presto, Beyond the Flesh: Alexander Blok, Zinaida Gippius, and the Symbolist Sublimation of Sex (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008).
- 29.
Olga Matich makes a compelling argument for the affiliation of the modernist “new person” and the mid nineteenth-century revolutionary “new person” of Nikolai Chernyshevsky who was invested in reforming social institutions such as marriage. As both a retrospective concept appropriated from the 1860s and a modernist notion embodying the upheavals taking place in the 1890s, the idea of “new people” functions as a challenge to established nineteenth-century norms. Olga Matich, “The Symbolist Meaning of Love: Theory and Practice,” in Creating Life: The Aesthetic Utopia of Russian Modernism, ed. Irina Paperno and Joan Delaney Grossman (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994).
- 30.
Gippius, Novye liudi.
- 31.
Early reviewers of the book prominently discussed the dedication and amplified Gippius’s affirmation of the optimism and beauty of her stories. See A. Bogdanovich, “Novye liudi [1896],” in Z.N. Gippius: Pro et contra, ed. D.K. Burlaka (St. Petersburg: RKhGA, 2008); N.K. Mikhailovskii, “Literatura i zhizn’ [1896],” in Z.N. Gippius: Pro et contra, ed. D.K. Burlaka (St. Petersburg: RKhGA, 2008).
- 32.
I discuss the group dynamics of Russian modernism, particularly as focuses on cultivating a readership, more fully in Jonathan Stone, The Institutions of Russian Modernism (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2017).
- 33.
The stories first appeared in The Herald of Europe (Вестник Европы), Our Times (Наше время), Labor (Труд), The Northern Herald, and Russian Thought (Русская мысль).
- 34.
Bramble, Modernism and the Occult, 55–65.
- 35.
Pierrot, The Decadent Imagination, 1880–1900.
- 36.
The story’s connection to past forms is emphasized in Gippius’s use of character names and settings alluding to Goethe’s 1774 The Sorrows of Young Werther.
- 37.
Zinaida Gippius, “The Living and the Dead (Among the Dead),” in The Dedalus Book of Russian Decadence, ed. Kirsten Lodge (Cambs, England: Dedalus, 2007), 169. Originally published in the journal The Northern Herald (Северный вестник) in March of 1897 as “Among the Dead,” the story was given its expanded title for Gippius’s 1898 collection Mirrors (Зеркала). Russian citations are to the collected edition of her works: Zinaida Gippius, Sobranie sochinenii. Sumerki dukha, vol. 2 (Moscow: Russkaia kniga, 2001), 83–104. “Но с любимого места Шарлотты все пространство кладбища, песок аллеи, деревья, белые камни памятников -- казались другими, совсем неожиданными. Когда Иван Карлович вставлял в окна столовой красные и желтые стекла -- ему по ошибке прислали одно голубое. Шарлотта упросила, чтобы это стекло вставили в ее комнате, с той стороны окна, где она любила работать. И все изменилось в глазах Шарлотты: бисерные незабудки стали синее, бесцветная ромашка нежно окрасилась. На белой скатерти легли голубые полосы, горящие холодно и бледно, как болотный огонь. А там, за окном, точно мир стал другим, прозрачный, подводный, тихий. Кресты и памятники светлели, озаренные, листва не резала глаз яркостью, серел песок дорожки. Однообразная легкая туманность окутывала парк. А небо голубело, такое нежное, такое голубое и ясное, каким Шарлотта видела его только в раннем детстве на картинках -- и еще иногда во сне.” (84)
- 38.
Aage Hansen-Löve, Mifopoeticheskii simvolizm (St. Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 2003), 431.
- 39.
Françoise Meltzer, “Color as Cognition in Symbolist Verse,” Critical Inquiry 5, no. 2 (Winter 1978), 253–4.
- 40.
See Stone, The Institutions of Russian Modernism, 77–98.
- 41.
Zinaida Gippius, Stikhotvoreniia (St. Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 1999), 75.
- 42.
Zinaida Gippius, ““Song”,” in The Dedalus Book of Russian Decadence, ed. Kirsten Lodge (Cambs, England: Dedalus, 2007), 219.
- 43.
Briusov, “Kliuchi tain [1904],” 100. Translation from Ronald E. Peterson, The Russian Symbolists: An Anthology of Critical and Theoretical Writings (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Ardis, 1986), 62.
- 44.
Olga Matich places death among the five thematic categories of Gippius’s “religious” poetry. She notes, “[t]he poet’s death-wish has two related sources: a decadent feeling of exhaustion, a desire to flee from earthly existence; and the wish to enter the sphere of eternity.” (Olga Matich, The Religious Poetry of Zinaida Gippius (Munich: Fink Verlag, 1972), 100) Both are evident in “The Living and the Dead”. Boris Glinskii devoted his 1896 review of Gippius’s earliest writings to the question, “Illness or Advertisement?” and asserted that the “poor” and “ill” Gippius had contracted the malady of the nerves symptomatic of her contemporaries. Boris Glinskii, “Bolezn’ ili reklama?,” Istoricheskii vestnik LXIII(Ianvar’, fevral’, i mart 1896).
- 45.
David Weir, Decadence: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 33.
- 46.
See Barbara Spackman, Decadent Genealogies (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989); Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the fin de siècle (New York: Viking, 1990); Georges Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière, trans. Alisa Hartz (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003).
- 47.
Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the fin de siècle, 197; Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage, 1988), 241–78.
- 48.
Caroline Walker Bynum, “The Female Body and Religious Practice in the Later Middle Ages,” in Fragments For a History of the Human Body. Part One., ed. Michel Feher (New York: Zone, 1989).
- 49.
Gippius, “The Living and the Dead (Among the Dead),” 167.
- 50.
Ibid., 168, 174, 176. “Часовщик, за которого [сестра] вышла по любви, оказался человеком крайне болезненным, припадочным и угрюмым. Он сидел за кофеем зеленый, с убитым видом. Дитя от него родилось еще более зеленое и болезненное, готовое испустить дух при каждом удобном случае. […]Она смотрела на часовщика, его зеленого сына -- и радовалась, что не связана цепью любви с этими утлыми сосудами.” (90)
- 51.
Ibid., 182. “Вот у вас... У вас точно мертвецы... Я помню: всё тела мертвые, кровь…” (95).
- 52.
Glinskii, “Bolezn’ ili reklama?”
- 53.
Vivian Greene, ed. Mystical Symbolism: The Salon de la Rose et Croix in Paris, 1892–1897 (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2017), 26.
- 54.
Gippius, “The Living and the Dead (Among the Dead),” 193–4. “Зубы Шарлотты стучали, она спешила добежать, точно там, у Альберта, ее ждало тепло. Опять снеговые тучи заслонили луну, все замутилось, искры погасли, расширилась тень. Но тучи разорвались -- и снова перед Шарлоттой открылись голубые, тихие, туманные ряды крестов, мир, теперь совсем похожий на тот, который она видела сквозь стекло своего окна. Вот и крайняя дорожка, вот решетка. Шарлотта увала на снежное возвышение могилы, раскрыв руки торопливо и радостно, как падают в объятия. Теперь в самом деле ей уже не было холодно. Снег, такой же белый, как ее платье, почти такой же, как ее светлые неподобранные косы, так ласково прижался под ее узким телом. [...]Убаюканная нездешней отрадой, Шарлотта спала. Ей грезился голубой мир и любовь, какая бывает только там. А сверху все падал и падал ласковый снег, одевая Шарлотту и Альберта одной пеленой, белой, сверкающей и торжественной, как брачное покрывало.” (104)
- 55.
Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny [1919], trans. David Mclintock (New York: Penguin, 2003), 148.
- 56.
I will return to a discussion of the uncanny and the power this indeterminacy exercises on the mind in Chap. 6.
- 57.
Ibid., 132, 135.
- 58.
Nadia Tazi, “Celestial Bodies: A Few Stops on the Way to Heaven,” in Fragments For A History of the Human Body. Part Two., ed. Michel Feher (New York: Zone, 1989), 519.
- 59.
Ibid., 522.
- 60.
Ibid., 548.
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Stone, J. (2019). Decadent Metaphysics. In: Decadence and Modernism in European and Russian Literature and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34452-8_3
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