Beardsley Men in Early Twentieth-Century Russia: Modernising Decadent Masculinity

Abstract

This article explores the reception of the Decadent artist Aubrey Beardsley (1872–1898) in Russia concentrating on new gendered meanings acquired by ‘Beardsleyism’ in modernist Russian culture. While the so-called ‘Beardsley Woman’ became a widely discussed literary construct and journalistic trope in Britain, the imagination of Russian artists and literati was captured by a ‘Beardsley Man’. Due to the circulation of the artist's portraits and descriptions by modernist periodicals such as Sergei Diaghilev's Mir iskusstva (1899–1904), a specific form of male (self-)representation emerged in the homophile art circles of St Petersburg and Moscow. Exploring this new urban Russian masculinity, I use the case studies of four men who were compared to Beardsley or used Beardsley as a model in their work and self-fashioning: artist Nikolai Feofilaktov, poet Georgii Ivanov, writers Mikhail Kuzmin and Iurii Iurkun.