The Dedalus Book Of Russian Decadence

Including writings by the well-known authors Valery Briusov, Leonid Andreyev, Fedor Sologub and Zinaida Gippius, this collection explores the darkest depths of the unconscious, which lead their characters to sadism, masochism, rape, murder and suicide.

The Decadent Movement which flourished in the 1890s produced some of Europe’s most striking and exotic works of literature. The Decadents, convinced that civilisation was in a state of terminal decline, refused to rebel as the Romantics had, but set forth instead to cultivate the pleasures of calculated perversity and to seek the artificial paradise of drug-induced hallucination. J.-K. Huysmans described Decadence as a ‘black feast’ and The Second Dedalus Book of Decadence offers a veritable banquet, with offerings from the major practitioners in France and England. It completes Brian Stableford seminal two-volume study of the decadent movement.

Decadence and Modernism in European and Russian Literature and Culture: Aesthetics and Anxiety in the 1890s rewrites the story of early modernist literature and culture by drawing out the tensions underlying its simultaneous engagement with Decadence and Symbolism, the unsustainable combination of this world and the other. With a broadly framed literary and cultural approach, Jonathan Stone examines a shift in perspective that explodes the notion of reality and showcases the uneasy relationship between the tangible and intangible aspects of the surrounding world. Modernism quenches a growing fascination with the ephemeral and that which cannot be seen while also doubling down on the significance of the material world and finding profound meaning in the physical and the corporeal. Decadence and Symbolism complement the broader historical trajectory of the fin de siècle by affirming the novelty of a modernist mindset and offering an alternative to the empirical and positivistic atmosphere of the nineteenth century. Stone seeks to recreate a significant historical and cultural moment in the development of modernity, a moment that embraces the concept of Decadence while repurposing its aesthetic and social import to help navigate the fundamental changes that accompanied the dawn of the twentieth century.

Edited by Jane Desmarais and David Weir.

Art and literature during the European fin-de-siècle period often manifested themes of degeneration and decay, both of bodies and civilizations, as well as illness, bizarre sexuality, and general morbidity. This collection explores these topics in relation to artists and writers as diverse as Oscar Wilde, August Strindberg, and Aubrey Beardsley.

A boy who feels persecuted by the banality of everyday life yearns to ascend to the cold and majestic plane of the stars. A seamstress finds liberation of a sort in “becoming” a dog and howling at the moon. A club of young girls masquerade as the grieving fiancées of strange men. This book brings together these and other remarkable short stories by the Russian Symbolist Fyodor Sologub that explore the lengths to which people will go to transcend the mundane. Renowned as one of late imperial Russia’s finest stylists, Sologub bridges the great nineteenth-century novel and the fin-de-siècle avant-garde. He stands out for his masterful command of both realist and fantastic storytelling; his play with language evinces a belief in its capacity to access other worlds and other levels of meaning. Many of Sologub’s stories are set among children whose alienation from the adult world has lent them imagination and curiosity, enabling them to create an alternative reality. At the same time, he bluntly examines the sordid realities of late imperial Russian society and frankly presents sometimes unconventional sexuality. The book also features a selection of Sologub’s “little fairy tales,” ambiguous parables couched in childlike language whose ingenuity anticipates the miniatures and “incidents” of Daniil Kharms. Susanne Fusso’s elegant translation offers these artful tales to an English-speaking audience.