Decadent Aesthetics Research Articles

Дискурс декаданса в «Истории византийского искусства...» (1876) Никодима Кондакова

The aim of the paper is to reevaluate the theoretical dimension of the book “History of Byzantine Art and Iconography Based on Miniatures of Greek Manuscripts” (1876) by the leading Russian art historian Nikodim Pavlovich Kondakov (1844-1925) within the context of examining the cultural and social problem of decadence. The article provides a new interpretation of the well-known work by N. P. Kondakov. Scientific novelty lies in the following: the terminology of the book (and, above all, such concepts as naturalism, realism and idealism) is considered for the first time in connection with the problems of biological and decadent discourses. Particular attention is paid to the social and cultural aspects of the cyclical theory of decline set forth in Nikodim Kondakov’s book. As a result, this concept of cultural degradation is linked with ideas about social decline that were formed in the culture of the 19th century. The components of the aesthetics of decadence and biological discourse are studied, among other things, through the lens of Russian realistic aesthetics. The article uses methodological complexes that help shed new light on the peculiarities of the functioning of the cultural tradition in the Russian Empire in the second half of the 19th century, especially in aspects related to the influence of culture on the development of the humanities. The emphasis is on finding those cultural and intellectual sources of Nikodim Kondakov’s scientific activity that turned out to be the most important in terms of the formation of his innovative theoretical and methodological concepts.

Decadent Aesthetics in Cyril Scott’s Translations and Song Settings

Decadent Aesthetics in Cyril Scott’s Translations and Song Settings

Black Feathers and Poison Wine Decadent Aesthetics in Davíð Stefánsson’s Poetry

Black Feathers and Poison Wine Decadent Aesthetics in Davíð Stefánsson’s Poetry

“Clothed with Poetry”: Lafcadio Hearn’s Decadent Aesthetics of Translation

“Clothed with Poetry”: Lafcadio Hearn’s Decadent Aesthetics of Translation

Published Belgian Style: Albert Lacroix, Charles De Coster, Henry Kistemaeckers, Camille Lemonnier, and the Belgian Contribution to French Decadent Aesthetics

Published Belgian Style: Albert Lacroix, Charles De Coster, Henry Kistemaeckers, Camille Lemonnier, and the Belgian Contribution to French Decadent Aesthetics

Protesting Venetians

Protest, in a multitude of forms, is increasingly present in the lived experience of Venetians and visitors to the city of Venice. The demands vary: limit tourism, no more cruise ships in the lagoon, protect the city, invest in infrastructure, promote new jobs, make the city liveable again. Such protests are highly performative, done as actions to be seen and noted: marches, graffiti, public letters, processions. Appropriately for a city synonymous with carnival, the repertoires of protest in Venice frequently include irreverent and fun elements of carnival culture, particularly dressing-up, eye-catching displays and participatory interactions. Restituted in 1980, today's Venice Carnival channels aspects of the bygone carnival of past centuries, with a particular emphasis on a visual aesthetics of opulence, beauty, mystery and decadence. A dominant narrative of the carnival as a staid and graceful affair has evolved, but this is challenged by grotesque realism, scabrousness and deliberate vulgarity during the event. The modern day Compagnie de Calza, I Antichi, established a Committee for the Abolition of the Venice Carnival in its current commercialized guise in 2021, and they simultaneously set up a Committee for the Rebirth of the Carnival of Theatre: a positive, forward-looking suggestion of how carnival could exist sustainably and in an enriching way for Venetians and tourists. This proposal alludes to the key role that theatre played in the re-establishment of carnival in the city. Reinvigorating theatre during carnival would give theatre and performance makers the impetus to address key issues, to speak to the community and to protest. A carnival of theatre could renew and embolden the carnival's ability to subvert in the twenty-first century.

Gaudy Havoc: Iris Tree’s performative decadent modernism

ABSTRACT This article is the first detailed critical discussion of the modernist poet Iris Tree. Despite being a prolific poet and a regular contributor to the modernist magazine Wheels, Tree is today primarily remembered as a muse for others rather than a poet in her own right. I suggest that Tree’s neglect is partly due to her playful incorporation of decadent modes in her work, rather than the rejection of the fin de siècle more usually associated with modernist writing. As my analysis of her poems shows, Tree uses decadent aesthetics to address the absurdity of war and to contemplate the boundaries of identity in her work. In this sense, a consideration of Tree’s poetry has much to offer thriving areas of enquiry in modernist studies, including queer, camp, ornamental and decadent modernisms, as her exuberant and expansive incorporation of decadent tropes, personae and forms results in a multi-faceted, extravagantly performative poetics.

The Image of the City in the Novels of Jiří Karásek ze Lvovic

Fin-de-Siècle Europe appears in the prose of the Czech poet and writer Jiři Karasek from Lvovice (1871–1951) as a mystical space full of nostalgia and claustrophobia, which force the characters to experience the hereditary involvement of history. This is, for example, how the hero of the novel “Gothic Soul” (Czech: Gotická Duše) feels. The novel shows Prague at the turn of the century as a place where the past is more real than the present. The trilogy “Novels of the Three Magicians” (Czech: Romány tří mágů), inspired by the legends about European “sorcerers”, uses Vienna, Venice, and Prague as magic or decadent territories that affect the characters’ behaviour. Karasek creates urban images with decadent aesthetics by applying special features and techniques. Among them we can highlight the night atmosphere, intentional emphasis on the artificiality of the reality, and the description of the scene with the symbols of decline or decay. Such a subjective view from the eyes of a decadent character can open up a city from a unique perspective, making it possible to distinguish previously unseen details. The image of Prague in Karasek’s works is dual and ambivalent. On the one hand, it is an aesthetically artifi cial decadent Prague and on the other, a mystical, magical Prague. Venice by Karasek is also a decadent city where only the past is alive. With help of Karasek’s prose one can obtain the prism of decadent and “gothic” novels — rather rare and original for Czech literature genres. His works also give us the opportunity to experience the lost atmosphere of pre-war Europe.

\u201cUn estado de la conciencia contempor\xe1nea\u201d: g\xe9nero y moral en La sirena negra de Emilia Pardo Baz\xe1n

Despite Emilia Pardo Bazán’s prominent feminism, La sirena negra has been strangely overlooked by gender studies. When the novel was published in 1908, Gómez de Baquero judged it “non feminist” due to its superficial heroines and the centrality of its complex masculine characters. Academic studies of La sirena negra have not refuted this idea, since they have elided gender approaches to focus on its decadent aesthetics. This article argues, on the contrary, that the novel’s androcentrism can be read as a Pardo Bazan’s strategy to appropriate the patriarchal discourse and hold it responsible for national degeneration. Emilia Pardo Bazán was harshly affected by the fin-de-siècle crisis. In her opinion, Spanish decay came from a lack of solid morality. Thus, Catholic principles should be restored because they would provide the autoregulation mechanisms to regenerate and reassemble the country. Literature should show the new reality, and the French roman psychologique provided her with an appropriate model. La sirena negra sets out the problem of the moral anomie through its protagonist, Gaspar de Montenegro. The analysis of his sexuality and gender performance reveals the danger of this amoral behavior for the degeneration of society, attributed ultimately to the patriarchal order and the androcentric discourse.

Morbid Vitalism

This essay frames Djuna Barnes’s 1936 novel Nightwood as an attempt to overcome an impasse between the discourses of hope and the discourses of despair in an interwar period in many ways preoccupied with questions of mortality. Synthesizing Decadent aesthetics and elements of Spinoza’s vitalist philosophy, Barnes produces a “morbid vitalism,” exemplified by Dr. Matthew O’Connor, by which life and death are conceived as variant expressions of a single force, and the subject is modeled as an assemblage of affects, impersonal but inherently social, that can be understood primarily through its pursuit of what Jack Halberstam has called “generative models of failure.” In exploring this mode of subjectivity, Barnes seeks to undermine a host of ostensible oppositions (hope and fear, ascendence and decadence, success and failure, morbidity and vitality), opening up a conceptual and affective space for thinking through—if not necessarily beyond—the ubiquity of despair in twentieth-century modernity. Ultimately, morbid vitalism points a way toward a broader conversation between life-oriented modernist scholarship on vitalism and affect, on the one hand, and ongoing inquiries into the relationship among death, Decadence, and modernism, on the other.

Gertrude Bell’s Persian Pictures and Fin-de-Siècle Decadence

ABSTRACT This article uncovers the first publication of Gertrude Bell, known in the early twentieth century for her exploration, archaeological work, and diplomacy in the Middle East. Examining her 1894 travel book, Persian Pictures, and contextualizing it within fin-de-siècle Aestheticism and Decadence, I argue that Bell shapes a unique version of Decadent aesthetics and experimental prose far from the European metropole. Suggesting connections between her early aesthetic work and her later diplomacy, I foreground how Decadence allows a young woman traveling at the perceived margins to engage with geopolitical, gendered, and imperial conflict, and thus expand the view of Decadence as inherently male and intrinsically European. Concluding with a brief examination of texts by twentieth-century Persian poet Forugh Farrokhzad, this essay proposes some ways that, for both Bell and Farrokhzad, both of whom were women at the margins, Decadent representations of Eastern landscapes facilitate revisionary ideas of gender and geopolitics.

Decadence in the Age of Modernism ed. by Kate Hext and Alex Murray

Reviewed by: Decadence in the Age of Modernism ed. by Kate Hext and Alex Murray Richard A. Kaye Decadence in the Age of Modernism. Ed. Kate Hext and Alex Murray. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019. Pp. 304. $54.95 (cloth); $54.95 (eBook). This collection brings new attention to modernism's self-repression—and the repression by critics—of its origins in fin-de-siècle decadent poetics. Examining a tantalizing range of Anglo-American writers, the contributors variously make a case for decadent writing as entwined with modernist achievements. Running through the volume, too, is an emphasis on the ways in which decadent literature determined a queer poetics that stood astride modernism in the writing of familiar writers such as Djuna Barnes, Ronald Firbank, Gertrude Stein, D.H. Lawrence, Mina Loy, H.D., Hart Crane, and Carl Van Vechten as well as lesser-known figures such as Margaret Sackville, Ada Leverson, Bruce Nugent, and Donald Evans. The trio of decadent/queer/modernist concerns informs the essay by Vincent Sherry, whose 2018 book Modernism and the Reinvention of Decadence is itself a pioneering work tracing the neglected sinews linking modernist artistry and decadent aesthetics. Here Sherry considers the legacy of decadence in the fiction of Woolf, Joyce, Barnes, and Beckett, in which queer, minor characters (St. John Alaric Hurst of Woolf's The Voyage Out, Baron Felix in Barnes's Nightwood) wander like ghosts from the Wildean past. Drawing on the argument of Lee Edelman's No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Sherry suggests that these writers found considerable value in forgoing a viable, erotically normative future. The modernist reliance on a decadent midVictorian legacy informs Howard Booth's essay on Lawrence's adoption of Swinburnean tropes in his fiction, particularly Swinburne's use of the Pan figure and the theme of nympholepsy, the belief originating with the Ancient Greeks that human beings could be inhabited by nymphs. For Lawrence, such tropes "imagine a resolution of the split and division between humankind and the world" (186). In later fiction such as St. Mawr (1924), however, Lawrence will come to see such breaches as unbridgeable as he sought to conceive of a futurity beyond or without modernity. [End Page 797] Wilde's imprisonment for "gross indecency" casts a shadow over much of this volume. Nick Freeman explores post-1895 writers such as John Edmund, Max Beerbohm, and Hector Hugh Munro (Saki), all of whom borrowed the stylistic strategies of decadent writing while dispensing with, through playful satire and elegant evasiveness, its immoral or scandalous scenarios. Kristin Mahoney revisits the career of Wilde's friend Ada Leverson, whose parodic fictions provided a light critique of dandyism even as they sought to find a place in decadence for feminist aspirations. Joseph Bristow brings fresh insight to the legacy of late-Victorian aestheticism in the work of another feminist, the poet and pacifist Margaret Sackville. Sarah Parker explores the Baudelairean elements in the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay, who sought to invigorate the spirit of Les Fleurs du Mal (she was one of the volume's first female translators) with irony, humor, and a markedly American idiom. This volume resurrects a number of forgotten modernists indebted to the decadent movement. Douglas Mao discusses the literary career of the Greenwich Village poet Donald Evans, whose press Claire Marie published Stein's writing. Mao considers the place of "cuteness" and "naughtiness" in Evans and Stein's work, two features of 1890s sensibility that become denigrated in an age of high modernist seriousness and austerity. Kirsten MacLeod offers a fine reading of Van Vechten's 1923 Jazz-age novel The Blind Bow-Boy, where decadent and camp aesthetics commingle (the novel's title is a campily lascivious reference to a line in Romeo and Juliet: "… the very pin of his heart cleft with the blind bow-boy's butt shaft"). Michèle Mendelssohn draws on original archival research to explore the life and work of the African-American writer Bruce Nugent, whom Mendelssohn describes as "one of the few African American writers" of the Harlem Renaissance "with the audacity to challenge homophobic prejudice and explicitly portray interracial sensuality" (a characterization that perhaps overly...

Taking Wilde to Sri Lanka and Beardsley to Harlem: Decadent Practice, Race, and Orientalism

This article examines the reworking of decadence by writers of color in the early twentieth century, focusing on the uses to which the Harlem Renaissance writer Richard Bruce Nugent and the Sri Lankan writer Lionel de Fonseka put decadent style while engaging in anticolonial critique and contesting rigid categories of power and identity. I read the implementation of decadent aesthetics by Nugent and de Fonseka as a form of criticism that teases out the troubles and potentialities of thinking race and empire through the lens of decadence.

«Проблемне поле» французької гуманістики: досвід другої половини ХІХ століття

The material of the article is focused on the second half of the 19th century - an important and very specific stage in the development of French humanities. Specific historical and cultural traditions that positively influenced the research of the 1850s and 1870s and contributed to active cultural processes in the period of the end of the Romantic era are singled out.Emphasis is placed on the formation of theoretical and practical - a structural element of European humanities - in the logic of which organically combined research and artistic creativity. It is emphasized that its scientific potential was very strongly manifested in the French space thanks to F. d'Aubignac, F.-M. Voltaire, D. Diderot - prominent figures of national culture.During the 19th century theoretical and practical parity was established in the French humanities and found a logical continuation both in outlining and justifying the expediency of the next aesthetic and artistic movement: - realism - naturalism - symbolism - The blurring of the creative principles of romanticism by both realism (O. de Balzac) and naturalism (E. Zola) is stated, and the position of S. Baudelaire is emphasized, who on one hand criticized romanticism since the late 1840s, and on the other hand, gradually rooted the principles of the aesthetics of decadence and symbolism - the origins of which literary critics associate with his poetry - in the European cultural space. It is argued that these processes formed a problem field of French humanities, which outlined the contradictory movement of further artistic development.The article highlights the figure of T. Gautier, who continued to profess the principle of parity, positioning himself as a poet, novelist, theorist and journalist. It is emphasized that he tried to harmonize the then tendencies of French humanities around the of for art's sake, which is still perceived and evaluated by the scientific community very ambiguously. Conducted comparative analysis of interpretations of theory for and defined its aesthetic principles, as both Gauthier and his immediate entourage - S. Baudelaire, G. de Nerval, S. Leconte de Lisle - strongly denied the importance of the functionality of art, emphasizing its self-sufficiency and self-worth. It is emphasized that as a result of such a orientation, they, on the one hand, refuted a number of statements of both the first and second generation of French educators, and on the other hand, significantly strengthened the aesthetic factor in assessing the phenomenon of art in the late 19th century.The aesthetic factors used by T. Gautier and his supporters are considered. Trying to prove the value of a work of art, not the functions it can perform. In this context, the object of attention are beauty, ideal, beautiful - ugly, dream-delirium and a set of issues related to the logic of the creative process and psycho-physiological states of the artist who carries it out (inspiration, imagination, fantasy, sensuality - rationality).The special significance of the last two decades of the 19th century is noted, when, on the one hand, the scientific space includes intuitionism - the concept of H. Bergson - thus defining the emergence of a new problem field, and on the other, exhibits fauvist paintings of H. Matisse (1905) that witnessed the emergence of avant-garde.

А. М. Ремизов в журнале символистов «Весы»: к истории сотрудничества

The paper reveals the history of the relations of Alexey M. Remizov’s and the symbolists’ magazine “Vesy” (1903–1909) in the context of the periodical editorial policy and from the standpoint of the artist’s aesthetic values. The documentary basis of Remizov’s relationship with the magazine’s board can be considered his correspondence with Valery Bryusov, as well as fragments of the epistolary heritage of both a personal nature (letters to his wife Seraphima Remizova-Dovgello) and official correspondence with leading employees of St. Petersburg press. The contacts of the novice writer with Moscow and St. Petersburg symbolists, his gradual entry into the circle of modernist writers contributed to some extent to the formation of his artistic guidelines and poetics of his works in the framework of decadent aesthetics. Invited by Valery Bryusov, Remizov published the reviews of the cultural life in the provinces and in the capital for several years, most often anonymously, in the magazine’s sections “Chronicle,” “On Life,” and “Miscellaneous”. His literary works sent to the editorial board did not pass the censorship and were not accepted for publication because of the hostile attitude of the magazine’s owner S. A. Polyakov. Remizov’s attempts to become a permanent member of the “Vesy” staff for six years did not yield a positive outcome. However, they showed the independence of the author’s position from the editorial policy of the magazine in his choice of artistic priorities and contributed to the formation of the writer’s literary person-ality outside the ideological and aesthetic program of the symbolists.

Katherine Mansfield and Periodical Culture by Chris Mourant

MLR, .,   carefully curated experience. Denisoff’s book is driven by the contention that while ‘[Machen’s] pieces circulated in the gyre of British Decadent culture’, his was an ‘innovative form of Decadence’ rooted in Machen’s fascination with pagan spirituality (dating back to his childhood in rural Wales) and unique exposure to occult literature (p. ). e plentiful annotations painstakingly guide the reader through the range of Machen’s (literary) reference, showing how the idiosyncrasies of his experience find expression in the Decadent aesthetics of his writing. is apparatus is usefully reinforced by a ‘Decadent Chronology of Machen’s Life’, selections from the non-fiction, and a critical contexts section—materials which illuminate Denisoff’s claims and make the volume a valuable teaching edition. Among the fiction, the volume contains tales (such as ‘e Lost Club’) which reveal the influence of Wilde and Stevenson, and at its core are the two novellas—e Great God Pan () and the Hill of Dreams ()—both produced, as Denisoff explains, ‘during his most Decadent period of writing’ (p. ). Interestingly, though, Denisoff accommodates both the  story ‘e Bowmen’ (a work of fabulation based around the battle of Mons) and ‘Ritual’ (a  tale about a tribal ritual enacted in a contemporary London suburb) within the remit of his volume. In doing so, Denisoff sensitively describes an engagement with Decadence which (through a series of disavowals and abiding preoccupations) survives beyond its high cultural moment in the s. It is this inclination to open up the parameters of Decadence, along with its success in adding considerable depth to our understanding of a popularly neglected fin-de-siècle writer, that locates Decadent and Occult Works squarely within Kaye’s definition of the ‘third wave’. T U J F Katherine Mansfield and Periodical Culture. By C M. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. . x+ pp. £. ISBN ––––. Katherine Mansfield spent her entire career, first and foremost, as a writer for periodicals. Book publications came second, and were, almost without exception, comprised of previously published periodical material. It is fitting, therefore, that she be considered as a ‘magazine modernist’ (p. ), and surprising that Chris Mourant’s Katherine Mansfield and Periodical Culture is the first to take up her development as a writer with a detailed focus on how she navigated the networks of production and exploited the particularities of the periodical medium. Within this context, Mourant is also concerned with issues of gender and national identity. e monograph therefore provides a complex consideration of Mansfield. We see her not simply as a magazine writer, but as a colonial woman magazine writer in a male-dominated literary field in the metropolitan heart of empire. e book is structured chronologically, with each chapter covering a specific periodical . e Introduction usefully and thoroughly situates the monograph within the relevant scholarly contexts, while also providing an overview of Mansfield’s New Zealand juvenilia. Chapter , focused on e New Age, offers productive reassessments of Mansfield’s feminist politics and aesthetics within broader national and  Reviews cultural contexts. Mourant undertakes a substantial consideration of Beatrice Hastings ’s writings for the journal as a comparative frame through which to consider what he identifies as Mansfield’s ‘renegade feminism’ (p. ), a radical individualist form that sat in opposition to the suffrage-inflected feminism. In the second chapter Mourant shows how Mansfield used the periodical space and networks of Rhythm magazine as a means to explore cultural difference through contributions that critique nationalist, colonial, and gendered perspectives. Chapter  covers Mansfield’s much-overlooked body of critical writings that defined the core of her work for the Athenaeum. Mourant argues that Mansfield used book reviewing to contribute to a broader ‘new word/new world’ discourse that was informing emerging theories of literary modernism. In a particularly rich section of this chapter, Mourant explores the affinities between Mansfield and Woolf and the dialogic nature of the development of their aesthetic ideas. A final short chapter considers her posthumous publications in the Adelphi, which served as a means for J. M. Murry to fashion an idealized image of her, one which smoothed over her...

ТЕОРЕТИЧНА СПАДЩИНА ШАРЛЯ БОДЛЕРА У ПЕРСПЕКТИВІ ЧАСУ

The theoretical legacy of Charles Pierre Baudelaire (1811-1867), a prominent French poet, has aroused interest for more than a hundred years. It is emphasized that Baudelaire began his literary career as an art critic, whose interest was focused mainly on the fine arts. Focusing on the current process, he was perhaps its first connoisseur and interpreter. It is shown that the articles that the critic published in the magazine SALON for several years raised a number of art problems, some of which were of a general theoretical nature. The publications of such a plan should include research, which considers the genre specifics of fine arts, artistic eclecticism, of arts. The article highlights the problem of of arts as one that was of fundamental importance for the further development of French humanities, as G. Flaubert and other members of the creative community, sharing the relevant theses of aesthetics of I. Kant, ironically treated the possibility of of aesthetic and artistic principles of different types of art and the feasibility of such experiments. At present, Baudelaire's frank focus on the of word - color, word - sound is emphasized, which significantly dynamized the poetic lines, asserting the potential of rhythm as a component of the art form. It is noted that the author's idea of CORRESPONDANCES - compliance - scrupulous consideration of the specifics of each art form, the synthesis of which the creative personality plans to carry out, was of special importance for substantiating the problem of synthesis. It is emphasized that another direction of Baudelaire’s art-critical activity is connected with the evaluation of the works of specific painters and graphic artists, whose works reflected different directions of aesthetic and artistic pursuits of the French art of that time. It is articulated that acting as a critic of both academicism and romanticism, which - according to Baudelaire - in the period 1840s - 1850s already exhausted its creative potential, he gradually began to lay the foundations of the aesthetics of decadence and symbolism, which will be fully embodied in his poetic collection Flowers of Evil (1857). Зауважено, що підтримуючи і поділяючи засади біографічного методу Ш.-О.Сент-Бьова, котрий активно входив у теоретичний ужиток за життя Бодлера, він виразно персоналізував матеріал статей, плідно використовуючи потенціал аналогій та порівняльного аналізу. It is noted that by supporting and sharing the principles of the biographical method of S.-O. Sainte-Beuve, which was in active theoretical use during Baudelaire's life, he clearly personalized the material of the articles, fruitfully using the potential of analogies and comparative analysis. The article focuses on Baudelaire's interest in the principle of interdisciplinarity, that its application allows to organically combine specific aspects of several humanities. In the artist's research field, the marker of interdisciplinarity was the conceptual-categorical apparatus he had developed: philosophy (eclecticism, pattern), aesthetics (ideal, beauty), ethics (doubt, heroism), psychology (feelings, imagination), and also shown that Baudelaire's idea of falsification of feeling is still not adequately interpreted. It is stated that Baudelaire's position on the need for a clear distinction between the concepts of complete and perfect - he formulated this thesis in the process of analyzing the work of C. Corot, which he praised - needs further understanding and elaboration. The article emphasizes that Baudelaire's theoretical legacy - in the long run - is consistent with the main trends of modern European humanities and should be taken into account in the logic of its further development.

“Les Névroses” de Maurice Rollinat: une tentative de retour/recours fin-de-siècle à la nature

Maurice Rollinat’s Les Nevroses (1883) exhibits a distinctively original feature as a work of poetry; it draws on two kinds of inspiration that are usually regarded as categorically opposed if not categorially exclusive, that, artificialist, of decadent poetry, on the one hand, and that, naturist, of rustic poetry, on the other. A close reading of the work suggests that the relationships between these two poetic trends are to be conceived not only in terms of opposition, as critics would normally do, but also in terms of hybridization. We intend here to draw attention to the main aspects of this singular hybridization of aesthetic codes and values, and to capture its global symbolic motivation by presenting it as a tentative decadent return/resort to nature. Through this aesthetic gesture, as we will suggest, Rollinat extends the “quivering” of modern sensitivity to natural order. By doing so, he allows for the use of pastoral and animal motifs which are usually excluded from poetic representation of fin-de-siecle modernity. Conversely, he also provides a new possibility of revitalisation or regeneration for the Baudelairian poetic paradigm. We will postulate that the fact that this possibility remains in the end unexploited by other poets and that Rollinat came to be associated, both in the eyes of his contemporaries and in the memory of posterity, with a rather unfortunate epigone of Baudelaire could be attributed to two reasons: his poetic ethos generally maladapted to decadent aesthetics and, more importantly, the radicalism of his endeavour which brings the decadent logic of the sensation to a point of self-contradiction pragmatically untenable.

Consuming Surfaces: Decadent Aesthetics in <em>The Debt to Pleasure</em>

Consuming Surfaces: Decadent Aesthetics in <em>The Debt to Pleasure</em>

Three Colors of the Nail: The Aesthetics of Manicure in Late Imperial and Soviet Russia

Examining manicure practices, the article looks at the emergence in the early twentieth century of a cosmetic culture, unconnected with the concept of the natural. Where nails are concerned, natural beauty meant choosing tinting and polishing materials that accentuated the nails’ pink hue and shine. Later, nail varnish was created in order more effectively to serve the same purpose: its ability to make nails shiny was particularly valued. Meanwhile, stage make-up for hands involved painting nails red, which could look “natural” considering the lighting and distance between the stage and the audience.In the early twentieth century, members of the bohemian arts scene took this practice outside the theater, turning it into an important element in decadent aesthetics. With the appearance of nail varnish, red became a popular color choice for manicure. This signaled a departure from nature not only in tone, but also in chemical composition: thus, red nails came to be seen as a sign of modernity and scientific progress. The author also looks at the emergence of nail whitening with its connotations of cleanliness as a consequence of the popularization of ideas on hygiene.