The Woman on the Cross: Ritual and Self‐Sacrifice in the Decadent Search for Meaning

Abstract

T A oward the end of the nineteenth century, ritual-laden religious practices were deepening their hold on the popular imagination in Europe. At this time French and Russian decadents, having disposed of conventional modes of belief, found themselves caught in a disorienting vacuum, which they experienced as metaphysical pain and sought to palliate by embracing ancient or esoteric forms of ritual. In her pioneering 1896 article on Joris-Karl Huysmans, the father of decadence, Zinaida Vengerova connected the prevalence of ritual in A rebours (1884) with spiritual woundedness. Her phrase despairing searches for the divine can in fact characterize several Russian novels?Fyodor Sologub's Tiazhelye sny (1896), Valery Briusov's Ognennyi angel (1907), and Anna Mar's Zhenshchina na kreste (1916)?showing the interplay between Russian and French sensibilities as their marginal heroes restlessly cast about for expiation and fulfillment.1 In particular, women seek power by exceeding the suffering of men as they conflate religious and sadomasochistic rituals. Although their despair in the face of metaphysical emptiness was more pronounced, Russian authors found inspiration in French works. My points of departure in tracing these influences are Madame Gervaisais (1869) by Jules and Edmond de Goncourt (a naturalist novel prefiguring some of the decadents' favorite themes) and Huysmans's ritual-laden La-bas (1891). Starting in the French decadent novels, and taken to the next level of intensity in the Russian ones, characters assuage metaphysical pain through ritual. Many such practices stem from fantasies about Catholicism, which exerted a strong hold on the Russian imagination not only because threatening belief systems can fascinate but also, in part, because the Russian Orthodox tradition recognizes fewer martyrs, especially women martyrs,