Museum and Society in Imperial Russia: An Introduction

Abstract

At the turn of the twentieth century, European critics who were distressed about contemporary developments in the fine arts tended to use medical, psychopathological terms to diagnose the existing state of the field. In 1892-1893, an Austrian physician and writer, Max Nordau, publishedEntartung(Degeneration). Drawing on positivist psychology and anthropometry, Nordau expressed his pessimistic views on the mental and physical health of the leading figures of European fin-de-siécle culture: Friedrich Nietzsche, Paul Verlaine, the impressionists, the symbolists, and many others. In Russia this book went into nine editions, in three different translations. The patriarch of Russian liberal-nationalist criticism, Vladimir Stasov applied Nordau's metaphors to Russian “decadent” artists in such reviews as “Podvorl'e prokazhennykh” (Lepers’ inn, 1899) or “Dve dekadentskie vystavki” (Two decadent exhibitions, 1903). He sarcastically remarked that, when viewing canvases by some contemporary painters, he felt as though he were “walking amidst a madhouse.”