Mental Illnesses in Symbolism [1 ed.] 9781443873857, 9781443891264

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Mental Illnesses in Symbolism

Mental Illnesses in Symbolism Edited by

Rosina Neginsky

Mental Illnesses in Symbolism Series: Art, Literature and Music in Symbolism, Its Origins and Its Consequences Edited by Rosina Neginsky This book first published 2017 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2017 by Rosina Neginsky and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-9126-6 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-9126-4

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations .................................................................................... vii Contributors ................................................................................................. x Introduction ................................................................................................ xi Rosina Neginsky Part One: Madness in Art Chapter One ................................................................................................. 2 Psychiatric Photography, the Expression of Emotions, and Italian Symbolist Art: The Search for Self and Identity Crisis at the Turn of the 20th Century Mario Finazzi Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 31 The Hidden World of the Unconscious: Expressions of Underground Chaos in the Work of Mikhail Vrubel Rosina Neginsky Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 44 “Tout n’est que syphilis”: Venereal Terror and the Representation of Women in fin de siécle Belgium Natalia Vieyra Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 63 Verhaeren on Rembrandt’s “folie”, “S’il n’était un génie, on le prendrait pour un fou” Albert Alhadeff

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Table of Contents

Part Two: Madness in Literature Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 86 Nabokov and Psychiatry: The Case of Luzhin Nora Bukhs Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 103 Russian Paranoid Discourse Olga Skonechnaya Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 110 Sexual Neurosis or Creative Catalyst? Hysteria and Demonic Possession in Alexei Remizov’s Solomoniia Julia Friedman Part Three: Madness in Music Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 130 Mental Disorder and Creativity in Composers: The Performer’s Gesture as a Pointer to Traces of “Madness” Jean-Pierre Armengaud

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Chapter One Fig. 1-1. Guillaume-Benjamin Duchenne, Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine, TAV.7 (Illustration from Duchenne’s book). Fig. 1-2. Cesare Lombroso, L'uomo delinquente [The Criminal Man] Mad Criminals (Illustration from Lombroso’s book). Fig. 1-3. Emilio Poli - Lunatics of the San Lazzaro Asylum (1890 c.) (Archive of the former Psychiatric Asylum San Lazzaro - Archivio ex Ospedale psichiatrico San Lazzaro, Reggio Emilia, Italy). Fig. 1-4. Adolfo Wildt. Self-portrait or Mask of Sorrow (1908), (Civic Museums of Forlì, Italy). Fig. 1-5. Adolfo Wildt. The Idiot Mask (1909 c.), (“Vittoriale degli Italiani” Foundation, Gardone Riviera, Brescia, Italy). Fig. 1-6. Romolo Romani. The Laugh (1903 c.), (Brescia Musei Foundation, Brescia, Italy). Fig. 1-7. Romolo Romani. The Unperturbed one (1907 c.), (Brescia Musei Foundation, Brescia, Italy). Fig. 1-8. Muscular Head From Charles Bell's Philosophy and Anatomy of Expression, (Illustration from Bell’s book). Fig. 1-9. Romolo Romani. The Grudge (1905 c). Fig. 1-10. Henry Clarke. A patient in a restraint chair at the West Riding Lunatic Asylum, Wakefield, Yorkshire, 1869, (Wellcome Library, London, UK). Fig. 1-11. Romolo Romani. Portrait of Vittore Grubicy de Dragon (1905), (Brescia Musei Foundation, Brescia, Italy). Fig. 1-12. Adriana Bisi Fabbri. Self-portraits (1913), (Private Collection). Fig. 1-13. Giannetto Bisi. Portraits of Adriana Bisi Fabbri, (Private Collection). Fig. 1-14. Adriana Bisi Fabbri - Pazzia (Madness), (Private Collection).

Chapter Two Fig. 2-1. Mikhail Vrubel, The Demon Seated, oil on canvas, 114 x 211 cm, 1890, The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia, courtesy of Russian Art Gallery, http://russianartgallery.org/vrubel/index.htm.

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List of Illustrations

Fig. 2-2. The sculpture The Head of the Demon in painted alabaster, The Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia, 1890, courtesy of http://www.abcgallery.com/V/vrubel/vrubel14.html. Fig. 2-3. Mikhail Vrubel, Portrait of a Girl Against a Persian Carpet (detail), oil on canvas, 104cm x 68cm,1886, Museum of Russian Art (Tereshchenko Museum), Kyiv, Ukraine, courtesy of https://www.wikiart.org/en/mikhail-vrubel/portrait-of-a-girl-against-apersian-carpet-1886. Fig. 2-4. Mikhail Vrubel, The Demon Flying, oil on canvas, 158 x 430.5 cm 1889, The State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia, courtesy of http://darkclassics.blogspot.com/2011/02/mikhail-vrubel-flying-demon _9109.html. Fig. 2-5. Mikhail Vrubel, The Demon Crashed, oil on canvas, 139 x 387 cm, 1902, The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia, courtesy of Russian Art Gallery, http://russianartgallery.org/vrubel/index.htm. Fig. 2-6. Mikhail Vrubel, Savva Vrubel, The Artist’s Son Savva, oil on canvas, 138.5 x 430.5 cm, 1902, The State Russian Museum, SaintPetersburg, Russia, courtesy of https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wrubel-Portrait_of_Son1902.jpg.

Chapter Three Fig. 3-1. Fernand Khnopff, Frontispiece illustration for Josephin Peladan, Istar (La Décadence Latin, Éthopé.V), red chalk, 1888, Paris: G. Edinger, 1888. Bibliothèque nationale de France. Fig. 3-2. Félicien Rops, Coin de rue, quatres heures du matin (Parodie humaine) (n.d.) Pastel, chalks and watercolor on paper, 1878-1881, Private Collection. Fig. 3-3. Félicien Rops, Mors Syphilitica (n.d.). Etching, 1892, 224 x 152mm. Musée Félicien Rops, Namur.

Chapter Four Fig. 4-1. Rembrandt van Rijn, Self Portrait as Beggar Sneering, 1630, Etching, New York, Pierpont Morgan Library/ Art Resource, New York. Fig. 4-2. Émile Verhaeren, Cover for Verhaeren’s Rembrandt, 1904, Boulder, Collection of the University of Colorado, Norlin Library. Fig. 4-3. Rembrandt van Rijn, The Abduction of Ganymede, 1635, Oil, Dresden, Gemälde galerie/Art Resource, New York.

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Fig. 4-4. Rembrandt van Rijn, Man Pissing, 1631, Etching, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale/ Art Resource, New York. Fig. 4-5. James Ensor, Man Pissing, Ensor est un Fou, 1887, Etching, Private collection/Art Resource, New York. Fig. 4-6. Jules-Jean-Baptiste Dehaussy, Last Moments of Rembrandt, He Asks to See His Treasures Once More Before Dying, Salon of 1838, Oil, Location unknown, (photo: from Alison McQueen, The Rise of the Cult of Rembrandt, Amsterdam Univ. Press, 130). Fig. 4-7. Rembrandt van Rijn, The Night Watch, 1642, Oil, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum/Art Resource, New York. Fig. 4-8. Rembrandt van Rijn, The Night Watch, (detail), 1642, Oil, Amsterdam, Rijksmusem/Art Resource, New York.

Chapter Eight Fig. 8-1. Robert Schumann, Geistervariationen (1854) G. Henle Verlag, example 1: measures 18-19. Fig. 8-2. Robert Schumann, Geistervariationen (1854) G. Henle Verlag, example 2: measures 38-39. Fig. 8-3. Robert Schumann, Geistervariationen (1854) G. Henle Verlag, example 3: variation 3 measures 103-104. Fig. 8-4. Erik Satie, “The Son in the Stars”, Préludes (1891), Editions Salabert Paris, example 4: extract from "Son of the Stars," measures 28-29-30-31. Fig. 8-5. Alexandre Scriabine, Vers la Flamme (1914), Peters Verlag, example 5: Poem "Vers la Flamme" measures. Fig. 8-6. Serge Rachmaninov, Moment Musical op.16 n°2 (1896), “Composer Publishing House of Saint-Petersburg,” Example 6: Prelude Op 23 No 6 measures 4-5. Fig. 8-7. Serge Rachmaninov, Moment Musical op.16 n°2 (1896), “Composer Publishing House of Saint-Petersburg,” Example 7: Musical Moment No. 2 measures 1-4. Fig. 8-8. Anton Brückner, Erinnerung (1898), Doblinger Verlag, example 8: Erinnerung measures 41-42-43. Fig. 8-9. Gustav Mahler, Symphony n°5, Adagietto (1901-1902), transcription for the piano, Peters Verlag, example 9: Adagietto measures 88-89-90. Fig. 8-10. Gustav Malher, example 10: Adagietto measures 43-44-45. Fig. 8-11. Jean Sibelius, Rêverie op. 58 n°1 (1909), Breitkopf Verlag, example 11: Jean Sibelius, measures 5-6.

CONTRIBUTORS

Albert Alhadeff, University of Colorado, United States Jean-Pierre Armengaud, Université d’Evry-Saclas, France Nora Bukhs, Université Paris-Sorbonne, France Mario Finazzi, Independent Scholar, Italy Julia Friedman, California State University Long Beach, United States Rosina Neginsky, University of Illinois, United States Olga Skonechnaya, Paris-Sorbonne, France Natalia Vieyra, Taft University, United States

INTRODUCTION ROSINA NEGINSKY

The collection of essays Mental Illness in Symbolism consists of eight articles, five of them inspired by conference presentations, some given at the Congress of Comparative Literature in Paris in 2013, and others at the Conference of American Association of Comparative Literature in Seattle in 2015. These papers were presented in the frame of the Research Center on Symbolist Movement, Art, Literature and Music in Symbolism and Decadence (ALMSD, http://www.uis.edu/hosted-orgs/ALMSD/index.html), which was responsible for organizing the panels at those conferences. Two essays published in this collection, Nora Buhks' “Nabokov and Psychiatry: The Case of Luzhin” 1 and Olga Skonechnaya's “Russian Paranoid Discourse,”2 were previously published in Russian, and the third essay, my own, “The Hidden World of the Unconscious: Expressions of Underground Chaos in the Work of Mikhail Vrubel,” 3 was originally published in French. In this collection, these three essays appear in my translation and this is the first time that they are available to an Englishspeaking audience. All essays in the collection relate to the Symbolist movement, either directly or indirectly, and they all treat the issue of madness in art, literature, and music. The definition of madness that these articles use is quite broad and derives mainly from Michel Foucault's vision of madness, which he expressed in his book Folie et déraison. Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique (Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason). Jean-Claude Lanne summarized some of Foucault's ideas on madness and art in his article “Poésie et folie: le cas du futurisme russe” (Poetry and Madness: The Case of Russian Futurism)4 and this is directly applicable to essays published in Mental Illness in Symbolism. Lanne wrote: Madness, first of all, is a question of judgment, thus it is a relative concept. One is declared insane when his behavior, sentiment, discourse, actions betray a difference in relation to the social norm, the system commonly accepted and responsible for the smooth running of the society. When a

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Introduction specialist (a medical doctor) makes a judgment, it implies, for the one who is its object, the treatment, and a return to the “normality,” to the ordinary social life. In the artistic area, one is declared insane not only when his behavior can be distanced from the social norm (there are myriad examples in the history of art: Holderlin, G. de Nerval, Van Gogh, Vrubel, Garshin, etc.), but also, and mainly, when the one’s work (verbal and other) is distanced from some criteria commonly accepted which are the basis and definition of the poetical and of the esthetic system of the given time period. First of all, these are the specialists in the area of literature, the critics, who carry that judgment of value about the work, who stigmatize it as delirious, eccentric, absurd, extravagant, in short “mad.”5

Foucault's definition is also directly applicable to contemporaries’ perception of the Symbolist movement and its artistic expression in different media (visual arts, literature, and music). For example, and for the reasons that Foucault mentions, when the works of Western European Symbolists, articles about them, and the works of native-born Symbolists began to appear in Russia, many critics called the works of Symbolists insane and labeled those who produced them psychopaths. In one instance, Russian civic critic Boris Glinsky, in his article “Illness or Publicity” (“Bolezn' ili reklama”) published in The Herald of History in 1896, decried the famous Russian Symbolist journal The Northern Herald (Severny Vestinik) as a psychiatric asylum and all its members as mentally ill, these representing the flower of the first generation of Russian Symbolists and being the founders of the movement. Zinaida Vengerova, a journalist, translator, Russian literary critic and one of the first theoreticians of the Symbolist Movement, laughingly comments on it in a letter to her sister, the pianist Isabelle Vengerova: By the way, together with the latest issues of The Northern Herald, I will send you the issue of The Herald of History that contains a curious article about The Northern Herald written by B. Glinsky. Glinsky calls Luba [Gurevich, the editor of The Northern Herald] the landlady of the establishment for the mentally ill; all of us are the interns and the most hopeless is Minsky because he proclaims the publication of my book. I can be cured if I let myself be rescued from Minsky's and Volynsky's company, if my decadent articles are not published, and I am handed over to my respectable brother, Semen Afanasievich. Isn't it good? Now we call the publishing house an “establishment,” and each other psychopaths.6

The study of the Symbolist movement is sometimes perceived as a study of insanity, partially because it is a movement whose essence derives from the importance of the unconscious, the uncontrollable and irrational part of the human inner world, the world of Dionysus,7 which artists attempt to

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depict through various artistic forms and media. It is not accidental that in Plato’s Republic the poet is excluded from the ideal city, wherein rationality reigns. Plato describes the poet as a “madman,” full of “divine frenzy,” because he “destroys the reasonable part” of the soul.8 In the second part of the 19th century, the unconscious became a subject of study and of examination by medicine. The French neurologist and professor of anatomical pathology Jean-Martin Charcot, who worked at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, searched for ways to access the unconscious in order to cure his patients’ physical pains which he believed resulted from psychological trauma. Sigmund Freud, when he still was a student in Vienna, traveled to Paris to listen to Charcot's lectures, to meet him, and to see his public presentations of hypnosis applied to “hysterics,” namely Charcot's patients at Salpêtrière. Charcot's method consisted of attempting to access the subjects' unconscious through hypnosis, believing that it was a way to bring out the traumatic experiences and articulate them. According to him, remembering the origins of the pain and talking about them could liberate the patients from ongoing emotional pain and bring them a cure, not only mentally, but also for the physical manifestations of their mental distress. This is the method that Freud later employed in his psychoanalytic talk therapy. A number of Symbolist artists, among them Odilon Redon, witnessed those presentations, which then had an effect on their artistic imagination, and later, influenced their works. Barbara Larson’s book, The Dark Side of Nature: Science, Society, and the Fantastic in the Work of Odilon Redon (Refiguring Modernism) and some articles such as “L’hystérique, l’artiste et le savant” (The Hysteric, the Artist and the Scholar) by Jacqueline Carroy and "Révolte et folie visionnaire chez Carlos Schwabe: La Vague 1906-1907" (Revolt and the Visionary Folly in Carlos Schwabe: The Wave 1906-1907)” by Jean-David Lafond-Jumeau in the catalog of the exhibit L'Âme au corps9 certainly explore those issues. The Symbolist movement searched for ways to express the invisible reality, particularly the reality of the unconscious world; dark, mysterious, and unreliable. It was for this reason that Baudelaire and later Stéphane Mallarmé were so interested in Edgar Allan Poe’s tales that they translated them into French. For this same reason, Redon searched for the “visual language” to describe the indescribable, the life of the unconscious and the chilling feeling that some literary works (including Poe’s) awaken through dealing with these topics. The first part of this book consists of four articles on art and madness: “Psychiatric Photography, the Expression of Emotions, and Italian Symbolist Art: The Search for Self and Identity Crisis at the Turn of the

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20th Century” by Mario Finazzi,“The Hidden World of the Unconscious: Expressions of Underground Chaos in the Work of Mikhail Vrubel” by Rosina Neginsky, “'Tout n'est que syphilis': Venereal terror and the representation of women in fin-de-siècle Belgium” by Natalia Angeles Vieyra, and “Verhaeren on Rembrandt’s 'folie': 'S’il n’était un génie, on le prendrait pour un fou'” by Albert Alhadeff. The second part consists of three articles on literature and madness: “Nabokov and Psychiatry: The Case of Luzhin” by Nora Buhks, “Russian Paranoid Discourse” by Olga Skonechnaya, and “Sexual Neurosis or Creative Catalyst? Hysteria and Demonic Possession in Alexei Remizov’s Solomoniia” by Julia Friedman. The third and final part has only one article, “Mental Disorder and Creativity in Composers: The Performer's Gesture as a Pointer to traces of 'Madness'” by Jean-Pierre Armengaud, and its topic is music and madness. Finazzi's article “Psychiatric Photography, the Expression of Emotions, and Italian Symbolist Art: The Search for Self and Identity Crisis at the Turn of the 20th Century” analyzes the works of three Italian artists: Adolfo Wildt, a sculptor from Milan; Romolo Romani, a painter from Brescia, settled in Milan; and a woman artist, Adriana Bisi Fabbri. Finazzi suggests that they were interested in depicting human emotions of suffering and the tormented inner world of their subjects, partially because they were tormented souls themselves, and because they lived at a time when there was a fascination with the world of the unconscious, especially with its dark side. That fascination was reinforced in Darwin's, Charcot's, and Richer's publications, which stressed the importance of studying emotions in order to access and to understand the world of the unconscious. Charcot's public presentations of hypnosis and the growing fashion in psychiatric hospitals of taking photographs or making paintings of the mentally ill, purportedly for studying their unconscious through their emotions, were also quite popular and known to artists. Finazzi believes that the interest of the mentioned artists in depicting various emotions was partially inspired by the photographs and paintings of the mentally ill and that some of these artists used those works in order to create their own art. Neginsky's article “The Hidden World of the Unconscious: Expressions of Underground Chaos in the Work of Mikhail Vrubel” examines various representations of the image of the Demon by Russian Symbolist artist Mikhail Vrubel. His demon was originally inspired by Mikhail Lermontov's long poem The Demon, but eventually moved into its own original direction. The article closely studies how Vrubel’s hallucinations affected his choice of colors, shapes, and ornamentation in some of his representations of the Demon and led to the creation of a new Demon, different from the one that appears in Lermontov's poem.

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Vieyra's article “Tout n'est que syphilis: Venereal Terror and the Representation of Women in Fin-de-Siècle Belgium” explores the idea of madness in relation to the role of women who were perceived as carriers of venereal diseases responsible for madness. Vieyra examines visual works such as those of Belgian artists Fernand Khnopff and Felicien Rops, and especially Khnopff's front-piece illustration for Pelladan's novel Istar and Rops’s engravings Human Parody and Mors Syphilitic, which exemplify the responsibility put on women for being carriers of venereal diseases. She stresses how social and medical ignorance, labeling women as the only responsible parties for venereal diseases, contributed to the creation of an image of a femme fatale: a beautiful and seductive destroyer of men. In his article “Verhaeren on Rembrandt’s 'folie': 'S’il n’était un génie, on le prendrait pour un fou,'” Albert Alhadeff explores the Belgian culture at the turn of the century by analyzing the writings of Symbolist Belgian poet Emile Verhaeren, whose poetry was dedicated to the 17th century Dutch artist Rembrandt. Alhadeff demonstrates that these writings are particularly interesting because they express Verhaeren's world-perception which allows him to see Rembrandt's works from a Symbolist point of view and explains the reasons why his contemporaries, as well as later art critics, perceived Rembrandt as a madman. Adhadeff specifically uses the example of Rembrandt's painting Night Watch to demonstrate that Verhaeren sees this work as a precursor of Symbolism, since he believes that it depicts the unconscious as expressed through a dream. Adhadeff stresses that “Verhaeren qualifies Rembrandt as [a] madman, because of his unconventionality, his capacity to dismiss the social conventions and expectations, and the ability to live entirely in his own inner world, the world of an inner dream,” and that is what makes Rembrandt’s works diverge from “normality” and makes him a precursor of Symbolism. Nabokov's novel The Luzhin Defense is the topic of Nora Buhks' article “Nabokov and Psychiatry: The Case of Luzhin.” Her article is a study of the novel's main character, the chess player Luzhin, who Nabokov creates using the model of autism, the mental condition which psychiatrist Bleuler describes as “the escape from reality with, at the same time, relative or absolute predominance of the inner life.” Bukhs notes that Luzhin’s fear in front of the real world contributes to the development and growth of his imaginary world, which seems to him “understandable, harmonious, and subjugated to his will.” The article addresses a mental condition taken to the extreme as a reflection on the Symbolist movement, whose prerogative was based on the philosophy of withdrawal from physical reality and immersion within the inner world as the foundation for creativity and

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building a better world. The autistic Luzhin could be perceived as an example of a danger with such an attitude and a satire on Symbolism. Olga Skonechnaya's article “Russian Paranoid Discourse” is a study of how Russian Symbolist novels, such as those by Andrey Bely and Fedor Sologub, treat paranoia. Skonechnaya explains the particularity of madness in the Symbolist novel and stresses that “Symbolism distinguishes between two types of folly: the elevated prophetic folly whose role is to unveil the mysteries of existence; and the low folly which represents the supreme level of stupidity/silliness or the confinement to that absurd world.” Through an analysis of Russian Symbolist novels, she demonstrates how “the clinical folly can appear as a degeneration of the elevated folly into illness ... or as the opposite, a sort of hypertrophy of earthly thought, a hypertrophy of a limited intelligence, which in its impotency destroys its own limits (such is 'Peredonov’s mania').” Julia Freedman's article “Sexual Neurosis or Creative Catalyst? Hysteria and Demonic Possession in Alexei Remizov’s Solomoniia” examines Remizov's text “Solomoniia.” It is a study of the main character Solomoniia’s demoniac possession. Freedman explains that this text is a result of Remizov's interest in and knowledge of Jean-Martin Charcot's studies of “hysterics.” One of Freedman's questions is about the relationship between creativity and madness. By citing Remizov’s attestation that he connects his pain with his writing, Freedman implies that mental illness is often prompted by outside conditions and leads to uncovering the world of the unconscious, which Symbolists (and, following them, Surrealists) believed to be a foundation for the creative process. The last article in the collection is “Mental Disorder and Creativity in Composers: The Performer's Gesture as a Pointer to traces of 'Madness'” by Jean-Pierre Armengaud. Armengaud analyzes mental imbalance in composers such as Robert Schumann, Eric Satie, Alexander Scriabin, Serge Rachmaninov, Anton Brückner, and Gustav Mahler who lived and created in the late 19th and the early 20th centuries. He studies the insanity of these artists from the point of view of a performer of their works. He explains that: In general, the aspect of madness shows itself to the fingers of the pianist as an impossibility, a step beyond the musical project, the crossing of a red line, or even an aggression. . . . The pre-symbolism in Schumann . . . gives the music the power to access a meta-rational order, where the hands of the pianist are arbiters between the comprehensible and the incomprehensible, like symbolist painting would be between the visible and the invisible. . . .

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The collection of essays Mental Illness in Symbolism makes explicit the link between the Symbolist movement's artistic expression and madness. It complements the earlier studies of madness in the arts and especially in art, literature, and music that are part of the Symbolist movement or derive from its precepts.

Notes  1

Nora Buhks, “Nabokov i psychiatriia. Sluchai Luzhina” (“Nabokov and Psychiatry: The Case of Luzhin”), in Semiotika bezumiia, ed. Nora Buhks, Sorbonne, ParisMoscow: Russian Institute, 2005,172-193. 2 Olga Iu. Skonechnaya, “Paranoidal’ny roman russkogo simvolizma: Fedor Sologub, Andrei Bely, Universalii russkoj literatury, v. 5, in Collection of Essays, ed. Faustov A.A., The State University of Voronezh, Voronezh: “Nauchnaya kniga,” 2013, 63-77. 3 See Rosina Neginsky, “Inconscient et Clandestinité: l’expression du chaos souterrain dans la peinture de Vrouble,” in http://irphil.univ-lyon3.fr/accueilphilosophie/philosophie/recherche/publications/la-clandestinite-etudes-sur-lapensee-russe-582181.kjsp?RH=1326705502535, ed. Françoise Lesourd, 2011, 236-245. 4 Jean-Claude Lanne, “Poésie et folie: le cas du futurisme russe” (Poetry and Madness: The Case of Russian Futurism) in Semiotika bezumiia, ed. Nora Buhks, Sorbonne, Paris-Moscow: Russian Institute, 2005, 128-142. 5 Ibid, 130. See also Michel Foucault, Folie et déraison. Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique (Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason), Paris: Plon, 1961. 6 See Rosina Neginsky, Zinaida Vengerova: In Search of Beauty. A Literary Ambassador between East and West, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2004, 70. For the Russian version see, Rosina Neginsky. Pis'ma Z.A. Vengerovoi k S.G. Balakhovskoi-Petit, Revue des Etudes Slaves, Paris, LXVII/2-3, 1995, letter N 33, 499. 7 See Friedrich W. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, London: Penguin, 1993. See also Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Stories, New York: Signet Classics, 2006, and Madness and Creativity in Literature and Culture, eds. Corinne Saunders and Jane Macnaughton, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, Dionysus in Literature, ed. Branimir M. Rieger, Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1994. 8 See Corinne Saunders, “’The Thoughtful Maladie’: Madness and Vision in Medieval Writings,” in Madness and Creativity in Literature and Culture, eds. Corinne Saunders and Jane Macnaughton, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, 68. 9 L'Âme au corps, the catalog of exposition, Paris, National Galeries of Grand Palais (october 1993-janvier 1994).

PART ONE: MADNESS IN ART

CHAPTER ONE PSYCHIATRIC PHOTOGRAPHY, THE EXPRESSION OF EMOTIONS, AND ITALIAN SYMBOLIST ART: THE SEARCH FOR SELF AND IDENTITY CRISIS AT THE TURN OF THE 20TH CENTURY MARIO FINAZZI

In this article, I will suggest the hypothesis that a group of Italian late symbolist artists, especially interested in the representation of psychological states and moods, could have seen and taken inspiration from the illustrations of scientific texts about physiognomy and perhaps from the albums of psychiatric photography circulating in Italy at the end of the 19th century. On a secondary level, we will see how the research of those artists, pointed toward the definition of their individual identities in a growing mass society, in itself matches the onset of mental anomaly and neurosis. In 1898, in an article published in Emporium, the popular Italian magazine about art, science, and general culture, Giuseppe Antonini suggested that artists look at pictures of lunatics and psychiatric subjects to study human expressions better.1 For Antonini, the mentally ill were an unlimited source from whom to take inspiration, especially regarding the feelings of inherent pain and suffering, and “in each one of those, we will find some expressions of their emotional state so intense and lively, such suggestive and characteristic models, constituting a real treasure of observation for those artists that could be able to fix them on canvas and in clay.” In fact, looking at the psychotic subjects, it was possible to see and analyze “the muscular contractions of the face, of the trunk, of the limbs, the partial convulsions,

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the tremors, the paralysis, the breathing irregularities, the sighs, the crying, the sobs, the laments, the shouts, the peripheral vasodilator phenomenons, the pallor or the sudden reddening of the face, the quietness and the unusual and paroxysmic eloquence of despair.”2 These thoughts of Antonini’s were based on some ideas of Charles Darwin, who viewed the psychiatric hospital as an excellent place to study human emotions. In his work The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, Darwin explained that along with the study of children, who show emotions more easily, it is extremely important to study the insane, “as they are liable to the strongest passions, and give uncontrolled vent to them.”3 Moreover, in an essay about the physiognomy of pain, Paolo Mantegazza, a friend of Darwin’s and an Italian translator of his works, encouraged artists to visit hospitals often.4 There were many literary works or chapters of books at that time that investigated the psychiatric aspects of classical and renaissance art masterpieces; Jean-Martin Charcot and Paul Richer together wrote Les Démoniaques dans l’Art (1887) and Les Difformes et les Malades dans l’Art (1889), in which they scrutinized art of the past with the instruments of modern neurology. These texts, fully illustrated with drawings and photographs, were kept in the libraries of the Italian Academies of fine arts. Moreover, many Italian artists knew the French and English languages and traveled often in France and the United Kingdom. The treatise by Darwin about emotions was very popular in Italy after having been translated into Italian in 1878,5 just six years after the first English edition was published. It contained a very large set of photographs and drawings illustrating diverse kinds of emotions. Some of the photographs were incredibly impressive and a little morbid; they were mainly taken from a previous book by Duchenne de Boulogne6 and portrayed a man on whose face were applied electrodes to provoke intense facial expressions [Fig.1-1]. The photographer was Adrien Tournachon, the brother of the more popular Felix Nadar.7 Photography was yet a young technique, and people of the 19th century were still dealing with this cultural revolution as a way of representing reality. The accuracy in reproducing the visible reality, made possible through the photographic device, was now uniquely suitable for scientists to study cases and to illustrate their research. Photographs were also commonly used by Cesare Lombroso, the father of modern anthropological criminology to prove how the criminal attitude of an individual was a genetic factor strictly connected with the traits of his face. Lambroso’s major work, widely known in Italy and published in several editions, was a sort of atlas in which the different cases of criminal

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Fig. 1-1. Guillaume-Benjamin Duchenne, Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine

behavior were catalogued according to scientific principles [Fig.1-2].8 In addition, Genius and Madness was very popular.9 Here Lombroso provided an interpretation of the genius as a psychiatric abnormality. The scapigliato literatus Carlo Dossi wrote in La Riforma of March 11, 1872 that women who were enthusiastically interested in crime news could have read it pleasurably and easily.

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Fig.1-2. Cesare Lombroso, L'uomo delinquente [The Criminal Man] - Mad Criminals

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Beyond the scientific and popularizing literature, the production of photographs of alienated individuals in asylums was probably a considerable source of inspiration for artists. In the San Servolo Hospital in Venice, for example, Prosdocimo Salerio had utilized photography since the 1870s. The same was happening in the Asylum of Aversa with Doctor Gaspare Virgilio. However, a more structured case is the psychiatric hospital of San Lazzaro in Reggio Emilia, where there was a photographic laboratory and, from 1878, photography was frequently used to study patients. Emilio Poli, the first photographer of the hospital, made some albums with closeup photographs of patients [Fig.1-3]. Some photographs have notes about mental diseases, which were probably used by doctors as illustrations during lessons at universities or conferences. In 1892 Poli collected another album of photographs of both the heads and chests of the patients, so their gestures were better shown, as well as their facial expressions.10 Giovanni Morini edited another two albums in 1904–06. The San Lazzaro hospital was very popular in the early years of the 20th century, and this was represented at the 1900 Universal Exposition of Paris, as well as at the 1910 Bruxelles World Fair.11 Given those facts, we can presume that those photographs had been widely exposed and circulating publicly. In 1878, the professor Arrigo Tamassia welcomed the innovation photography brought in freezing alienated individuals’ expressesions, particularly the more pure and spontaneous ones. It was a way to use the medium of photography that the pioneering work of Duchenne de Boulogne and Darwin had suggested. Tamassia himself used to show some of those pictures in his classes on legal medicine in Pavia.12 In addition, such images were often used, even in conferences or presentations of psychiatric matters, because some directors of those hospitals were also professors in universities or head physicians.13 Artists who studied the facial expressions of alienated subjects to better represent human emotions of course looked too at the discipline of physiognomy, which was experiencing a revival phase. In 1876, Agostino Tebaldi drew a brief history of physiognomy, quoting Charles Bell’s The anatomy and physiology of expression as connected with the fine arts from 1844,14 and he concluded that physiognomy could be useful in two ways. On the one hand, some features of the facial expressions are linked to some aspects of the fixed character, and so it is possible to determine a cause-effect relationship between the two. On the other hand, we can put the expression in relation to the temporary feelings, thoughts, or states of the person’s mood.15 In another passage, the author wrote that the most interesting expressions are visible

The Search for Self and Identity Crisis at the Turn of the 20th Century

Fig. 1-3. Emilio Poli, Lunatics of the San Lazzaro Asylum (1890 c.)

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when two different passions trouble the mind of the subject, and it “is in the representation of these mixed feelings that artists can show their power; and painters and actors take delight in reproducing those.” Tebaldi also highlighted how, since ancient times, art had been using physiognomic devices to develop the most accurate analysis of different countenances.16 Following the path of the French physiologists, such as Charcot, Tebaldi wrote a book that investigated the expressions of altered states of mind in relation to art works of the past.17 Therefore, scientists tried to take from artists’ works data useful to the study of expressions, but they also gave the artists suggestions about representing madmen, as Charles Bell did in Anatomy of Expression. During the 19th century, some Italian artists were already portraying the interiors of asylums. These artists included the macchiaiuoli—a group of Italian painters whose research was similar to that of the impressionists. Among the macchiaiuoli was Telemaco Signorini who painted a scene of some mentally ill female subjects in a Florentine hospital, La sala delle agitate nell’ospizio del San Bonifazio in Firenze: it was 1865, far before Mantegazza and Antonini’s suggestions, and even before the writings of Jean-Martin Charcot about female hysteria. Some years after, a critic commended the painting for its veracity: [Signorini] went to the asylum to study scrupulously the madwomen one after the other: the one that punches the table, the one that put her forehead on the palm, the one that leans her head back looking up to the sky, the other huddled up on the floor, the idiots, the melancholy, the furious ones, not women anymore but misshapen, repulsive bodies, and he made a painting in which the quality of the execution seems not at the same level with the strong concept.18

Other artists later reprised the visual organization of the image Signorini later depicted, with the lunatics pictured from a distance. Angelo Morbelli, who is a good example, did so during the 1890s in his works about the Pio Albergo Trivulzio, a Milanese charitable institution for the eldery. As well, in 1895, Silvio Rotta painted Nosocomio, the San Servolo psychiatric hospital in Venice, which was much appraised when exhibited at the first biennial exhibition of Venice: critics highlighted especially the way the painter depicted “the crazies scattered in the courtyard of the hospital, caught in the diverse attitudes and expressions of their infirmity,” so exactly rendered that “a psychiatrist would recognize in them the signs of this or that form of mental illness.”19 In other cases, the artists looked at the symptoms of the patients with mental problems in a different way. For example, Giacomo Balla in 1903 painted I malati (The Patients) (1903),

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representing two ill persons while being cured through electricity from his friend Dr. Francesco Ghilarducci,20 while in La pazza (The Madwoman, 1905), he portrayed, utilizing the divisionist technique, an actual crazy woman, Matilde Garbini, who used to wander near his house.21 Sometimes, artists did look to medical sources in search of inspiration; the divisionist painter Gaetano Previati painted The Hashish Smokers in 1887, taking accurate information from the book Le estasi umane (Human Ecstasies), written in that same year by Paolo Mantegazza,22 in which ecstasy was compared with the altered states of drug consumers. Between the late 19th century and the early 20th, numerous European artists became more and more interested in expressing their inwardness and subjectivity. In fact, the number of self-portraits increased dramatically. This also meant great attention was paid to moods or states of the mind, a feature that we can find in some northern European painters, such as Edward Munch or James Ensor. In some cases, the expressions were represented through facial traits, extremely emphasized, and through dramatic close-up portraits or self-portraits. Many painters took a more introspective path, leaving behind any narrative. I will analyze especially the works of three late symbolist artists among whom this trend is more noticeable: Adolfo Wildt, Romolo Romani, and Adriana Bisi Fabbri. I contend there is strong visual proof that they looked to psychiatric photography as well as to the great amount of literature about the physiology of emotions and about criminal anthropology. Curiously, all three artists eventually had mental problems that were likely linked with their artistic research: Wildt had a heavy nervous breakdown, Romani had been cured in an asylum, and Bisi Fabbri never came to terms with her identity problems.

Adolfo Wildt Adolfo Wildt was a sculptor from Milan. He spent some of his life in Germany at the end of the 19th century, when Germany, especially secessionist Munich, was one of the more lively centers of European Symbolism. From 1900, though, he settled in Milan.23 He was very interested in the expressive possibilities of the human face since the beginning of his work; he had a taste for stressing facial expressions that could have come from certain expressionist painters of the Renaissance, especially from the Ferrara region, like Cosmè Tura, and from the German Secessionist style. A source of inspiration could have also been the odd sculptures of the Austrian artist Franz Xaver

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Messerschmidt, active in the 18th century. I have no proof that images of Messerschmidt’s work could have circulated in Italy by that time, but they certainly did in the German-speaking areas where Wildt could have seen them. From this point of view, the most impressive piece by Wildt is The Mask of Sorrow or Self-portrait, carved in 1908 [Fig.1-4]. From some late writings of the artist, we know that in those years he was passing through a very difficult nervous breakdown: “I tried to make a self-portrait, I made many of them, an infinite number, always destroying them as soon as I was finishing them.”24 Eventually, he realized The Mask of Sorrow or Selfportrait, a terribly powerful representation of his own face caught in an almost distorted expression of pain. For Wildt, it symbolized the exit from a terrible psychiatric impairment that he described in an autobiographical article in 1931, recalling his life and work after a great professional disappointment: Terrible weeks and months followed. Everybody was driven away around me. In my studio, everywhere I put my hands, there was the ruin. I was lost; I couldn’t find me anymore. I spent whole weeks closed in my studio, sleeping on the floor, crucified to my own pain.25

I contend that Wildt had studied some illustrations from Darwin’s book, such as from the chapter reserved for the analysis of several kinds of sufferance, each of which was illustrated with Duchenne’s pictures. Even Paolo Mantegazza’s writings could have served as inspiration, given that in his Fisiologia del dolore (Physiology of Pain) of 1880 he described all the physical features of the feeling of pain. Furthermore, I believe Wildt could have also known of the pamphlet the Italian novelist Antonio Fogazzaro wrote in 1901 after a lecture about the feeling of pain in the arts that he held in Turin the year before.26 Fogazzaro opened his text with the description of a sculpture by Vincenzo Vela of 1851, Grief, representing an afflicted seated woman, and then he composed an overview of suffering and despair, as represented through the art of the past, even through theater and music, concluding that the sudden and inexplicable sadness and melancholic pain of men had unconscious roots. In scientific literature an expressive model closer to Wildt’s mask of pain was probably the sketch in Charles Bell’s The Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression illustrating a suffering man.27 Wildt seems to have looked at more ancient sources, such as certain Hellenistic sculptures, including the ones that adorned the Great Altar of Pergamon, which were moved to Berlin and shown in 1901. Darwin himself had written of the

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Laocoon (the popular Hellenistic statue) and about the way Greek artists represented pain. He observed that the wrinkles were expanded in the whole forehead of the Laocoon, while an actual man only knits his brows. The artists prefer to idealize the subject and sacrifice its verisimilitude.

Fig. 1-4. Adolfo Wildt, Self-portrait or Mask of Sorrow (1908)

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Fig. 1-5. Romolo Romani, The Laugh (1903 c.)

Another marble sculpture, The idiot mask (1909 c.), represents the face of a man who laughs irrepressibly. We can recall that in those years the subject of the laugh or laughing man was frequently engaged not only by artists (see also Umberto Boccioni’s futurist painting The Laugh, 1910), but also by philosophers and intellectuals, such as Henri Bergson (Le rire [The Laugh], 1899), Luigi Pirandello (Umorismo [Humour], 1908), and even Sigmund Freud, who related humor to the unconscious (Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewußten [Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious], 1905). In Wildt’s Idiot Mask, the eyes of the man narrowed to slits, which could remind viewers of the expression of a mentally ill individual [Fig.1-5]. This was quite similar to the laughing man Romolo Romani drew in1903.

Romolo Romani During the same years, Romolo Romani focused his research on facial expressions. Born in Brescia, he eventually moved to Milan where the artistic scene was livelier. He realized mainly large drawings—though

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some late oil paintings are known—in which he portrayed imaginary heads and faces as caught in terrible and very expressive looks [Fig. 1-6]. Romani, as with many painters of his generation (he was born in 1884), began his career drawing caricatures for newspapers and magazines because it was a good source of income. Focus on observing the peculiarities of people to generate good and witty caricatures brought Romani to develop a real obsession with characterizing virtues and vices, which was also a concern of traditional physiognomy. Also among Romani’s favorite subjects were sensations, such as sight or hearing, which he drew in an almost abstract way. Greatly inspiring him were the sketches of Leonardo da Vinci, the grotesque heads especially. In those years, there was a solid revival of da Vinci among the Symbolist artists28—evidenced by the big books of drawings from the collection of the Albertina gallery in Vienna,29 copies of which Romani owned.30 The presence of a certain stylistic closeness to Wildt does not match any documented relationship or friendship among the two, even if they both, around 1905, used to live and work in Milan; some hints suggest, however, that they knew each other.31 Even if both Wildt and Romani stressed the expressivity of the facial traits, Romani was more interested in rendering the invisible, which could be a sound or an emotion. Often he added abstract or very stylized elements to the faces he drew to evoke the physical reality of thoughts or psychic forces expanding around the subject’s head like waves.32 Romani’s drawings reveal not only his interest in physiognomy but also in images of the mentally ill. Some of his works are reminiscent of the Monomaniacs, painted by Theodore Gericault. However, where the French painter was interested in the social status of the alienated, Romani wanted to extract from the expressions of them some ideal symbol of moral attitudes. Romani studied Expression of Emotions by Darwin; several versions of drawings La Rivolta (The Revolt) and L'impassibile [The Unperturbed one] are very similar to the muscular heads illustrating a part of Darwin’s book, especially the ones taken from Bell [Fig. 1-7, Fig. 1-8]. Il Vecchio [The Old Man] and a picture of the volunteer photographed by Duchenne have a similar silhouette. It is possible that some of the characters he drew, especially the vicious ones, could have been partially taken from the Lombroso’s albums about criminals; for his drawing The Prostitute, he could have looked at the photographic portraits of prostitutes collected and published by Lombroso.33

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Fig. 1-6. Romolo Romani, The Laugh (1903 c.)

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Fig. 1-7. Romolo Romani, The Unperturbed one (1907 c.)

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Fig. 1-8. Muscular Head From Charles Bell's Philosophy and Anatomy of Expression

I conjecture Romani had knowledge of the huge asylum of Mombello, near Milan, where Giuseppe Antonini was the director. He likely also saw photographs shot during the 19th century in British lunatic asylums; it is possible that he saw them at a World Fair or in a magazine. Moreover, his friend Osvaldo Lissoni was a professional photographer and could have shown to Romani some photographic sources we ignore. As the majority of Romani’s documents was lost during the war, it is extremely complicated to present a complete picture of his actual sources of inspiration.34 However, there is a strong resemblance between his Il risentimento (The Grudge) and the picture of a mentally ill individual taken in 1869 in the lunatic asylum Stanley Royd Hospital near Wakefield [Fig. 1-9, Fig. 1-10].

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Fig. 1-9. Romolo Romani, The Grudge (1905 c)

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Fig. 1-10. Henry Clarke, A patient in a restraint chair at the West Riding Lunatic Asylum, 1869

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There is also an abstract phase of his work that, according to certain art historians, has been related with his mental disease; in fact, Romani had mental health problems major enough to constrain him in an asylum in his hometown of Brescia for a long period before his death in 1916. Secondary sources tell us his disease was possibly a rare form of tuberculosis that was neglected and crossed with symptoms of mental illness, such as depression and apathy.35 Moreover, a late witness—Enrico Castello, alias Chin, a younger artist whose studio was in the same building as Romani’s—links the worsening of his mental health with the difficulty finding a satisfying expressive output of his artistic research, especially with colors (Romani drew in black and white in the majority of his works): By then, he was struggling desperately in the tentacles of his ailment. He broke his pastels furiously, he looked into the fresh crack as to search for the light that he dreamed of, that he wanted, then he threw away the colours, discouraged.36

The text by Chin is adulterated by a poetic style, partially nostalgic and thus not completely reliable as a source, but it is surely evocative. Romani suffered the opposition between his strong creative ambition and the provincial environment where he lived, and that could have negatively contributed to his mental imbalance, a typical problem for Italian artists of the time.

Adriana Bisi Fabbri The last case study is Adriana Bisi Fabbri, a very underrated artist, too often recalled only as being Boccioni’s cousin; from her life and work came to light the problem of defining gender and the social identity of the artist, specifically of the artist-woman, in the early 20th century. Bisi Fabbri was obsessed with depicting her own image. She made dozens of self-portraits of every size and with every medium—oil paintings, drawings, etchings, photographs—and in diverse poses and manners: like a pre-Raphaelite, a male-dressed emancipated woman, a character of her caricatures, a femme fatale, a Renaissance knight, an androgynous creature, and many others. Many of her self-portraits have the same close-up cut of Romani’s heads, and in many works of Bisi Fabbri the stylistic influence of Romani is undeniable, especially when comparing the Portrait of Vittore Grubicy de Dragon by Romani [Fig. 1-11] with some of the expression heads by Bisi Fabbri.37

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Fig. 1-11.Romolo Romani, Portrait of Vittore Grubicy de Dragon (1905)

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Fig. 1-12. Adriana Bisi Fabbri. Self-portraits (1913)

The most surprising self-portraits of Bisi Fabbri are from a 1913 series in which she portrayed herself while acting expressions of fear, of joy, of pain, and more. The hair forms a sinuous, almost abstract, linear flux around her head to develop, as Romani did, a stylistic device distinctive of some European Symbolist artists, including Edward Munch [Fig. 1-12]. The hair was meant to suggest, in line with some spiritualistic and theosophical theories that were very popular at the time, the existence of psychic waves inherent in the emotional aura in humans and thoughtforms. The drawings were realized exactly after a group of photographs— shot by the husband Giannetto Bisi, who had a hobby of experimental photography—in which Bisi Fabbri simulated those dramatic expressions

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Fig. 1-13. Giannetto Bisi, Portraits of Adriana Bisi Fabbri

[Fig. 1-13]. The artist emphasized the close-up cut, focusing especially on the face and obtaining a weird and unexpected effect. Moreover, the use of the photographic medium to freeze expressions or poses to be used as a model for drawings and paintings leads us to the case of Charcot and his

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attempt to structure a process of picturizing so-called “hysteria”— classifying a large range of the behaviors of women considered socially anomalous, albeit with due differences. This compulsive use of the self-portrait is not common to many other artists in that measure. Only Giacomo Balla painted many self-portraits to underline the states of his soul, but his self-portraits were more joyful expressions of inner feelings, in line with the Futurist aesthetic theory.

Fig. 1-14. Adriana Bisi Fabbri, Pazzia (Madness)

Only in two sketches entitled Madness [Fig. 1-14], though, can we find a very strict similarity with the illustrations of the book of Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol about mental illness, especially the one representing a mentally ill individual in the same curled-up position.38 Probably, they were meant to be preparatory studies for the large painting about the

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capital sins. The other works of Bisi Fabbri instead seem to cite the photographs of the mentally ill and criminals in a personal and theatrical way. Beyond the resemblance of Bisi Fabbri’s drawings to late 19th century psychiatric imagery, it is worth noting how she suffered from a form of social distress; the risk of losing one’s own individuality in an increasingly overpopulated environment as the metropolis was also a concern of her husband, the journalist Giannetto Bisi. In 1907 he wrote an article about Milan—“Omarini automatici,” which could be translated as automatic little men—highlighting the depersonalizing role of the metropolis and emphasizing individuality to fight the danger of leveling, hence justifying the rise and the popularity of the myth of the Übermensch.39 He compared the individuals living in the metropolis to puppets: And this is what I felt in Milan, more and earlier than every other thing: the triumph of the collectivity… and the dethronement of the individual. This is what the civilization brings. It merges the man with the other men. It blurs the individual profiles and dissolves them in the cluster of a single cloud that ascends, bright, to the sky. And the big cities are the melting pot where the souls are amalgamated in one. Is it sad to acknowledge this dethronement of the individual? This dissolution of it into the mass? Maybe, but we could be comforted by the thought that right now the birth of the superman is waited for, and the coming of the superman is sung … It is not strange at all that superman is exalted right when men often accustom many times to become a little automatic man.40

Then, he complained, “I do nothing but observe the terrible assimilating power of the big city against the individual. I said assimilating, but I could have said devouring. Actually Milan is a city that eats men: a colossal forge that feeds its flames with human flesh.”41 Bisi’s point of view about the crowd was absolutely negative and pessimistic, contrary to the positive and optimistic ideas of socialists; it was the political fear of the uncontrollable and irrational behavior of the crowd that was growing in the middle class and that Gustave Le Bon defined so lucidly in his Psychology of Crowds, foreseeing the advent of 20th century fascisms.42 A similar malaise towards the multitudes, typical of the modern city dweller, was also the core of the dark tale The Man in the Crowd by Edgar Allan Poe. In this tale set in London, the main character categorizes obsessively the different types of people in the crowd, only studying their physical and facial appearances and focusing directly on their expressions of countenance, guessing their feelings, vices, and social roles.43 Poe was widely read in Italy, probably through Baudelaire’s translation, as well as illustrated by many artists.

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More than by those sources or the ideas of Charles Baudelaire about modern life in the metropolis, the thoughts of Bisi were probably influenced by Nietzsche, whose works were extremely popular among Italian symbolists. I heavily suspect—though I have no proof at the moment—that Bisi had also heard of the ideas of Georg Simmel and especially of The Metropolis and Mental Life, written in 1903, even if, at that time, the book existed only in German. In fact, Simmel developed in this book all the themes that Bisi wrote about in his article, from the reference to Nietzsche to the idea of the “the resistance of the individual to being leveled, swallowed up in the social-technological mechanism.”44 Of course, Bisi could have read about it in some magazine or newspaper. Adriana Bisi Fabbri and her husband used to share much time and many thoughts together, as proven by several letters and drawings where she portrayed her husband while working and writing, and it is certain that they shared also that pessimistic consideration about life in the modern, overcrowded metropolis. In one letter to her husband, dated December 1911, when she was in Rome for the opening of her solo show, she wrote, “at Corso Street is hell, you can’t even walk, the wealth showed off is so great that you feel miserable. All the people in the carriages with big furs and big bunches of flowers. I feel so little and alone, if I hadn’t art inside myself, I would kill myself.”45 In this light, the very high number of self-portraits could be considered a search for her own identity and a desire to preserve her individuality in the face of the risk of being leveled in the homogenized multitude of the crowd; the result is a fragmented kaleidoscope in which she saw herself one after the other as an artist or mother or independent woman and as having different moods. Beyond this aspect, which she shared with other artists of her time, Bisi Fabbri struggled with being an artist and a woman at once. In many letters to the family, or to her husband, she complained of the irreconcilability of the two roles, as she loved both so much.46 She would die young, stricken by the Spanish flu in 1918, and even if she had no explicit episodes of a mental disorder, her failure to define her identity is very emblematic from a psychological point of view.

Conclusion At the end of this research, we do not have irrefutable proof that those artists looked at psychiatric pictures or texts from which to take inspiration. Certainly, the large number of books, drawings, and photographs of faces and psychiatric subjects had to widely inform the

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imagination of some artists, especially those more interested in studying the inner self. The close-up “shot” of the face is very often the same as in the photographic albums of treatises about criminal psychiatry or of insane asylums. Obviously, those of the latter have a colder and more scientific approach, or an objective and impartial point of view. Conversely, artists often share through those portraits their tragic inner experiences with combining their sensitive fragility with the modern industrial world that was being established. In this context, the expression of the inner states of the soul, of the moods, no longer has a narrative function, as in the art of the past, but becomes an instrument to strengthen one’s own identity against the crowd. It is a fascinating circumstance that these three artists I have presented as case studies showed symptoms of neurosis, as provoked by their difficulty in becoming accustomed with modern society, both as men or women and as artists. It was a game of masks between the self and others which was unbearable for over sensitive individuals. It was also a game of masks between normality and derangement—the tragedy of being one, nobody, and one hundred thousand—that some years later would inspire Luigi Pirandello’s novel Uno Nessuno Centomila.

List of Illustrations Fig.1-1. Guillaume-Benjamin Duchenne, Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine, TAV.7 (Illustration from Duchenne’s book). Fig. 1-2. Cesare Lombroso, L'uomo delinquente [The Criminal Man] Mad Criminals (Illustration from Lombroso’s book). Fig. 1-3. Emilio Poli - Lunatics of the San Lazzaro Asylum (1890 c.) (Archive of the former Psychiatric Asylum San Lazzaro - Archivio ex Ospedale psichiatrico San Lazzaro, Reggio Emilia, Italy). Fig. 1-4. Adolfo Wildt. Self-portrait or Mask of Sorrow (1908), (Civic Museums of Forlì, Italy). Fig. 1-5. Adolfo Wildt. The Idiot Mask (1909 c.), (“Vittoriale degli Italiani” Foundation, Gardone Riviera, Brescia, Italy). Fig. 1-6. Romolo Romani. The Laugh (1903 c.), (Brescia Musei Foundation, Brescia, Italy). Fig.1-7. Romolo Romani. The Unperturbed one (1907 c.), (Brescia Musei Foundation, Brescia, Italy). Fig. 1-8. Muscular Head From Charles Bell's Philosophy and Anatomy of Expression, (Illustration from Bell’s book).

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Fig. 1-9. Romolo Romani. The Grudge (1905 c). Fig. 1-10. Henry Clarke. A patient in a restraint chair at the West Riding Lunatic Asylum, Wakefield, Yorkshire, 1869, (Wellcome Library, London, UK). Fig. 1-11. Romolo Romani. Portrait of Vittore Grubicy de Dragon (1905), (Brescia Musei Foundation, Brescia, Italy). Fig. 1-12. Adriana Bisi Fabbri. Self-portraits (1913), (Private Collection) Fig. 1-13.Giannetto Bisi. Portraits of Adriana Bisi Fabbri, (Private Collection). Fig. 1-14. Adriana Bisi Fabbri. Pazzia (Madness), (Private Collection).

Notes 1

Giuseppe Antonini, “I sussidi della psicopatologia nell'insegnamento dell'anatomia artistica [The use of psychopathology in teaching art anatomy]”, Emporium, VIII, n.47, November 1898, 391–399. Translations from Italian are done by the author unless noted otherwise. Titles of Italian articles and books are translated in English between square brackets. 2 Antonini, Op. Cit., 398. 3 Charles Darwin, The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals (London: John Murray, 1872), 13. Darwin was helped in this by his acquaintance J. Chricton Browne, the director of the asylum for the insane of Wakefield. 4 Paolo Mantegazza, Fisiologia del dolore (Firenze: Felice Paggi, 1880), 417. Mantegazza wrote: “Most common errors come with not observing nature enough and it is for this reason that I recommend to the artists to visit often the rooms of the hospitals.” 5 Charles Darwin, L'espressione dei sentimenti nell'uomo e negli animali / Carlo Darwin ; prima versione italiana col consenso dell'autore per cura di Giovanni Canestrini e di Franc. Bassani (Torino: UTET 1878). 6 Guillaume-Benjamin Duchenne de Boulogne, Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine, ou Analyse électro-physiologique de l'expression des passions (Paris: Vve J. Renouard 1862). 7 About the relationship between photography and the treatises on physionomy see: Phillip Prodger, Darwin’s Camera: Art and Photography in the Theory of Evolution (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) 157-204. 8 Cesare Lombroso, L'uomo delinquente in rapporto all'antropologia, alla giurisprudenza ed alle discipline carcerarie [The Criminal Man in relation with Anthropology, Law and Correctional Regulations] (Milano: Hoepli, 1876). The book was published in several editions, and each one was augmented more than the previous one. 9 Cesare Lombroso, Genio e follia [Genius and Madness] (Milano: Gaetano Brigola, 1862). 10 Verusca Fornaciari, “'Fotografando il manicomio'. L'archivio fotografico dell'Istituto psichiatrico San Lazzaro di Reggio Emilia” [“'Photographing the

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Mental Asylum'. The Photographic Archive of the Psychiatric Institute San Lazzaro in Reggio Emilia”], in: Sandro Parmiggiani (ed.), Il volto della follia. Cent'anni di immagini del dolore [The Face of Madness. 100 Years of Pictures of the Pain] (Milan: Skira, 2005), 108-109. 11 Ibid., 109-110. 12 Cfr. Arrigo Tamassia, “La fotografia del nostro manicomio [Photography in our Asylum]”, in Gazzetta del frenocomio di Reggio, IV, n.1-2, 1878, 8-12. 13 See: Pina Lalli, “O specchio, specchio delle mie brame... dimmi qual è la verità: dal manicomio, la sua realtà [Mirror, Mirror...tell me the truth: from the asylum, its reality]”, in Immagini dal manicomio. Le fotografie storiche del “S.Lazzaro” di Reggio Emilia 1892-1936 [Images from the Mental Asylum. Historical Photographies from S. Lazzaro in Reggio Emilia 1892-1936], edited by Pina Lalli (Reggio Emilia: AgeGrafico-Editoriale, 1993), 15. 14 Agostino Tebaldi, “La fisionomia nella scienza e nell'arte dopo i recenti studi [Physionomy in Science and Art after the Recent Studies]”, in La Nuova Antologia, 32, july 1876, 554-573. 15 Ibid., 560-561. 16 Ibid., 566-567. 17 Agostino Tebaldi, Fisionomia ed espressione studiate nelle loro deviazioni, con una appendice sulla espressione del delirio nell'arte [Physionomy and Expression studied in their deviations, with an appendix about the expression of delirium in art], Verona-Padova: Drucker & Tedeschi 1884. 18 Camillo Boito, “Rassegna artistica - La pittura nuova in Firenze [Art Review – New Painting in Florence]”, in Nuova Antologia, v.22, february 1873, 494. 19 Pompeo Dini, “L'esposizione internazionale di belle arti in Venezia. La Pittura. Gl'Italiani. II [The International Exhibition of Fine Arts in Venice. Paintings. Italians. II]”, in Natura e arte, n.23, 1 november 1895, 885. 20 Ghilarducci was the first in Italy to develop electrotherapy for nervous pathologies. He had been in Paris in 1888, where he attended the school of Charcot at Salpetrière. Cfr. Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani [Biografic Dictionary of Popular Italians], s.v. “Ghilarducci, Francesco.” Also, check Christine Poggi, “Figure della follia nell'arte futurista [Figures of Madness in Futurist Art]”, in: Sapere e Narrare. Figure della Follia [To Know and to Tell. Figures of Madness], edited by M. Bresciani Califano (Firenze: Leo S. Olschki, 2005), 108. 21 See: Christine Poggi, “Picturing Madness in 1905. Giacomo Balla's “La Pazza” and the Cycle “I Viventi””, in Res. Anthropology and Aesthetics, 47, 2005, 38-68. 22 Luigi Chirtani, “L'Esposizione di Venezia. Ciò che manda Milano – Favretto e Bressanin”, in L'Illustrazione Italiana, XIV, n.14, 3 april 1887, 251. 23 Paola Mola (editor), Wildt. L'anima e le forme (Milano: Silvana Editoriale, 2012), 135. 24 See the letter written in 1915, addressed to the painter Carlo Siviero, but published in Il Messaggero (17 march 1931). Cfr. Lorella Giudici, “Antologia di scritti”, in Elena Pontiggia, Adolfo Wildt e i suoi allievi. Fontana. Melotti, Broggini e gli altri (Milan: Skira, 2000), 205-206. 25 “ Adolfo Wildt parla della sua vita e della sua arte [Aolfo Wildt tells about his

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Life and Art]”, in: Il Secolo XX, Milano, Marzo 1928. Now in: Lorella Giudici, “Antologia di scritti”, op. cit., 206-208. 26 Antonio Fogazzaro, Il dolore nell'arte [Pain in Art] (Milano: Baldini, Castoldi & C., 1901) 27 See: Charles Bell, The anatomy and Philosophy of Expression (London: John Murray, 1844), 157. 28 Isa Bickmann, Leonardismus und symbolistische Ästhetik: Ein Beitrag zur Wirkungsgeschichte Leonardo da Vincis in Paris und Brüssel [Leonardism and Symbolist Aesthetic: An Essay about the Historical Influence of Leonardo Da Vinci in Paris and Bruxelles] (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1999). See also, for a survey more focused on literature: Sandra Migliore, Tra Hermes e Prometeo. Il mito di Leonardo nel decadentismo europeo [Between Hermes and Prometeus. The Myth of Leonardo in European Decadentism] (Firenze: Olschki, 1994). 29 Ios Schönbrunner and Ios Meder (editors), Handzeichnungen alter Meister aus der Albertina und anderen Sammlungen (Wien: Gerlach & Schenk, 1896). 30 The elder stepbrother of Romani, a painter himself, encouraged Romolo to practice drawing after the Albertina masterpieces. Cfr. Giorgio Nicodemi, Romolo Romani (Como: Casa editrice Pietro Cairoli, 1967), 25-26. The book by Nicodemi remains the best one about Romani because it is closest one to primary sources. However, there is another valuable source: Renato Barilli, Silvia Evangelisti, Bruno Passamani (editors), Romolo Romani (Milano: Mazzotta, 1982). 31 Guido Ballo, for example, wrote that Umberto Boccioni did know Romani in 1908—Romani signed the Futurists Manifesto at the very beginning, but he canceled his subscription very soon—and both used to visit together Wildt's atelier in Milan. Cfr. Guido Ballo (editor), Boccioni a Milano [Boccioni in Milan] (Milano: Mazzotta, 1982), 21; 23; 31. Cfr. also: Guido Ballo, Preistoria del Futurismo [Prehistory of the Futurism] (Milano: Maestri Arti Grafiche, 1960), 122. 32 This places his work in in dialogue with the concepts of thought-forms and auras from Theosophy—extremely popular in Italy at the time—and with some theories about the possibility of seeing the otherwise invisible, taken from occultism and spiritualism. 33 As Lombroso scientifically classified different kind of criminals, so did Romani: he used to gather his drawings into thematic series that were often about criminals and negative social attitudes. For example, a sequence was Egotist – Ignorant – Prostitute – Skeptic – Delinquent. Another one was Hangman – Thief – Prostitute – Procurer – Strikebreaker. And so on. Cfr. Nicodemi, Romolo Romani, op. cit., 73-74. 34 Cfr.: Nicodemi, Romolo Romani, op. cit., 21-22. 35 Cfr. Nicodemi, Romolo Romani, op. cit., 56. 36 Enrico Castello, “Ricordo di Romolo Romani [In memory of Romolo Romani]”, in: Colosseo, VIII, 1934, 181. 37 I came to this conclusion because in Bisi Fabbri’s letters of 1905-1907, when she could have seen the works of Romani, or even have met him, she didn't mention him at all. Moreover, the works of Bisi Fabbri that more recall of Romani's ones

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are dated about 1913, while Romani's Portrait of Grubicy de Dragon was realized and showed in 1905. Probably Bisi Fabbri saw that drawing published on the pages of a feminist magazine in 1912. Cfr.: Cronaca d'Oro. Rivista mensile illustrata dell'alta società [Golden Chronicle. Monthly Magazine Illustrated of the High Society], III, 27, Marzo – Aprile, 1912, 15. 38 Cfr. Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol, Des maladies mentales considérées sous les rapports médical, hygiénique et médico-légal (Paris: Paul Renouard pour J.-B. Baillière; Londres: Lyon et Leipzig, 1838), XIII. 39 Giannetto Bisi, “Omarini automatici (Fantasia milanese) [Little Automatic Men (Milanese Fantasy)]”, in Natura ed Arte, XVI, n.11, 1 May 1907, 745-749. 40 Ibid., 748. 41 Ibid., 746. 42 Gustave Le Bon, Psychologie des foules (Paris: Alcan, 1895). The book was translated in Italian only in 1927, but many Italian artists and intellectuals could read French. 43 However, I think that physiognomy revival, as well as Lombroso's classifications, are related to the terrible growth of the industrial city. As observed by Mary Cowling, “the encoding of human types through physiognomy, in art as in life, was a means of bringing order into an ever-increasing, even bewildering variety of human types and social classes”. Cfr.: Mary Cowling, The Artist as Anthropologist: The Representation of Type and Character in Victorian Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), xix 44 Cfr.: Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis of Modern Life” in: Donald Levine (ed.), Simmel: On individuality and social forms (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1971), 324. 45 Cfr.: Wilma Malvi, “Autoritratto [Self-portrait]” in: Nuove Tendenze. Milano e l'altro futurismo (Electa: Milano 1980), 24. 46 She wrote to Giannetto Bisi, on November 18th 1905: “But I will work to death, I don't want to be a woman...do you understand? And when these chains that imprison me will be broken...then I will fly high, high”. And in another letter, from December 6th, she complained about having to share her day between art and housework. Cfr. Luigi Sansone, Adriana Bisi Fabbri 1881 – 1918 (Milan: Mazzotta, 2007), 18-19.

CHAPTER TWO THE HIDDEN WORLD OF THE UNCONSCIOUS: EXPRESSIONS OF UNDERGROUND CHAOS IN THE WORK OF MIKHAIL VRUBEL1 ROSINA NEGINSKY

At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, Western European and Russian artists and writers were fascinated by the idea of the unconscious; they sought ways to understand and to represent it. For them, the life and world of the unconscious meant the manifestation of the soul. As the only eternal part of the human being, the soul is able to give birth to feelings and impressions as embodiments of a true reality, imperishable, contrary to the perishable physical world. For these turn-of-the-century artists and writers, then, their role was to reproduce or to record, with help of the art, the hidden reality of the unconscious, the embodiment of the inner life. Gustave Moreau and J-K Huysmans in France, Dante Gabriel Rossetti in England, and many others artists, poets, and writers of the second part of the 19th century were often intrigued with the world hidden within us and they searched for ways to represent and depict it. This was also the case with Russian painter Mikhail Vrubel, albeit with a considerable difference; whereas the majority of artists aspired to represent consciously the reality of the unconscious, Vrubel was doing so unconsciously. Vrubel began his artistic career before the official “arrival” of the Symbolist movement in Russia. He knew little to nothing about the European Symbolist movement. Nonetheless, his works fascinated those who would come after him, who would consciously profess the philosophy of the unconscious and would be called Symbolists. Alexander Blok, Valeri Briussov, and Maximilian Volochine wrote about Vrubel. They classified him as a Symbolist like themselves. From that point on, Vrubel was perceived as a Russian Symbolist painter. It is a legitimate label, because he was an artist of the unconscious, although, contrary to the majority of his fellow Symbolist artists, as stated above, he was an

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unconscious painter of the unconscious, this being why his works are so powerful. Toward the end of his life he lost his mind and was confined to a mental institution. For this reason, Russian psychoanalysts who were interested in the relationship between madness and art thoroughly studied his case. In her article “A Specter Haunts Europe: The Symbolist Demon,” Nicoletta Misler notes that Vrubel launches the seductive and desperate call to future generations of artists, the call which was not welcomed by everybody, and if it were, it would come in a particular manner… almost at the level of their unconscious, revealing itself in the works in which the content is located in the primordial psychological layers, between the myth and the fable, awakening and sleep.2

In this article I would like to examine the works of Vrubel, which partially uncover his hidden world, chaotic and mad. To do so, I will concentrate specifically on different versions of the image of the Demon, the image which—like Salome for Gustave Moreau and Hérodiade for Mallarmé—accompanied Vrubel as an obsession for the bulk of his life. I will focus on three regular features of Vrubel’s art: ornamentation, color and distortion. These elements allow us to see into Vrubel’s secret world. In 1889 Vrubel settled in Moscow after the famous art patron Savva Mamontov invited him to come to live in his home. It is the first time in his life that Vrubel found himself at the center of the Russian artistic world, which he was able to see through Mamontov’s circle. From the moment he arrived in Moscow, he received an important number of commissions. One of the most important came from the Kouchnerov publishing house, which commissioned a series of illustrations for the commemorative edition of Lermontov’s works. This commission was a result of Vrubel’s first image of the Demon, The Head of the Demon, which he painted with watercolor in 1889. Vrubel’s interest in Lermontov began at the age of thirty. From the first reading of Lermontov’s long narrative poem The Demon, Vrubel became fascinated by the personage of the Demon—and remained obsessed until the end of his life. Nonetheless, similar to Odilon Redon, Vrubel did not believe in illustration. In a letter written to the poet Ludmila Vilkina, Vrubel explains that he “decided to totally separate from [his] creativity everything that could affect it artificially. First of all is the case of illustration.”3 Despite a very strong impression that Vrubel had of Lermontov’s poem, after reading it Vrubel used the poem only as a point of departure in order to create his own Demon, one very personal and

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completely different from Lermontov’s. The most striking images are not “the illustrations” that Vrubel created for the commemorative edition of Lermontov’s works, but the images of the Demon through which Vrubel expressed the mystery of his soul; such as The Demon Seated, The Demon Flying, and The Demon Crashed. These best represent Vrubel’s hidden world, probably in aspects that he was not consciously aware of himself.

Fig. 2-1. Mikhail Vrubel, The Demon Seated, oil on canvas, 1890

Lermontov’s Demon is partially inspired by Milton’s Paradise Lost and, similar to Milton’s hero, Lermontov’s Demon is the fallen angel exiled from Paradise. The Demon’s eternal life deprived of meaning and love fills him with bitterness. He hopes that his love for Tamara will resuscitate his soul, saving him from his earthly immortality, lonely and empty, and allow him to return to the ideal world that he, like Adam and Eve, has lost. Lermontov’s Demon is evil. In order to have Tamara for him alone, he kills her fiancée just before their wedding, he seduces her with lies, and he kills her in order to give her an eternity keeping him company forever on earth—an eternity that she did not choose and did not aspire to. It is the Demon’s ego, the main evil of the human being, which makes him the fallen angel and does not allow him to return to the divine eternity. Love for Tamara is his test through which, by overcoming his ego, he has an opportunity to free himself from himself and then to return to the Paradise. His chance is to be saved by the eternal feminine, Ewig Weibliche, embodied in the love that he should give to Tamara. But he misuses this

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chance and as a result he misses his opportunity. The loss of Tamara, saved from him by angels who come for her to take her to the divine eternity, takes away the momentary joy that he feels hoping to have her for eternity keeping him company on earth. His evil nature, nasty, destructive, and filled with desire for revenge, reappears with greater strength: In front of her, he was standing again. But, oh Lord, who would recognize him? How evil was his glance, Filled with deadly venom, With hatred that does not know limits. The cold of the tomb was emanating From his immobile face… And the defeated Demon cursed His dreams full of folly. And again he rested there, haughty, Lonely in the world as before, Deprived of hope and love…4

Before starting work for the Kouchenerov publishing house, Vrubel painted The Demon Seated in 1890 [Fig. 2-1], the most finished and the most celebrated of his demons. At the same time he created the sculpture The Head of the Demon [Fig. 2-2] in painted alabaster. The face of this sculpture has a striking resemblance with the Russian Symbolist poet Alexandre Blok and with Vrubel himself. According to Vrubel’s contemporaries, there existed an important number of Demon variations, which did not survive; either because Vrubel destroyed them or because they simply disappeared. Working on The Demon Seated, Vrubel wrote to his sister: It has been already one month that I have been painting my Demon. I mean not that immense Demon that I will paint with time, but something that is ‘demonic’: this is the silhouette half naked, one winged figure, young, immersed in melancholic reveries. The figure is seated with arms embracing its knees and looking at the clearing filled with blooming trees whose branches, folding under the weight of flowers, are tending toward it.5

The Demon Seated painting represents a human figure, young and androgynous despite its muscular body. There is great femininity in the way the head is represented, particularly with the long hair and in the face, which the viewer sees from the side, with huge eyes filled with kindness and innocence. The Demon is immersed in profound thoughts, fixing his glance on the distant unknown. He is in love and filled with hope.

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Fig. 2-2. Mikhail Vrubel, The Head of the Demon, sculpture in painted alabaster, 1890

The colors in this painting are strange. The demon’s body is painted in green and black while his lower half is wrapped in a blue veil. The left side of the painting, behind the pensive figure of the Demon, carries decorative elements. It looks like a garden filled with gigantic flowers, magical and unreal. On the right, there is an enormous flower with fantastic features. The flowers and plants in the painting almost look like des Esseintes’ flowers: “His goal was reached: almost no flower looked real.”6 They look like Lalique jewels. Behind him, the sun’s phantasmagorical reflections are very distinct. They look like golden clouds on the background of the brown sky, just as strange as the rest of the colors. In the background of the painting are reflections of the setting sun, thus creating the impression of twilight.

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Using Lermontov as a point of departure, Vrubel created his own Demon. This is not the demon of evil. Vrubel affirmed that Demon was neither evil genius nor Satan but, as it meant in Greek, “soul” or “spirit.”7 Thus, Vrubel painted the soul. When Mikhail Guerman cites B. Engelhardt he writes that “in his novels, first of all, Dostoevsky posed and resolved the purely aesthetic problems. But the material he used was original; his heroine was an idea,” and then Guerman adds: “It is possible to say as much about Vrubel.” 8 In his Demon Seated Vrubel is painting the spirit; that is the reason why the figure is androgynous. This spirit is exhausted by its passion and it contemplates the world with both sadness and understanding. Guermon affirms that Vrubel’s Demon is a hero whose destiny consists only in contemplating the world of his own soul.… The Demon is a fallen angel; his inner essence contains a great kindness, and his power does not give him any satisfaction. It only weighs on him as a curse. . . . Vrubel’s Demon is crushed by his own passion. It is not Lermontov’s romantic passion. This is the passionsuffering which resembles the instrument of mortification which leads toward solitude.9

Ornamental features like the flowery background are often seen in Vrubel’s paintings. We can see it in Portrait of a Girl Against a Persian Carpet (1886) [Fig. 2-3], in The Oriental Tale (1886), in Fortune-teller (1895), in Lilacs (1900) wherein the lilacs of the background become predominant over the portrait of the little girl, and in Pearl (1904), which seems to step out of Lalique’s jewels. Thus in Vrubel’s works “the ornamental decoration does not limit itself in being the painting’s background, but it becomes the organic element of the painting, and often devours the subject itself.”10 In 1902 Vrubel found himself in a private psychiatric clinic intuitively founded on methods which today we would call “anti-psychiatric.” Nicoletta Misler provides a description: It was located in a small villa with a park in Moscow’s suburbs. It was organized in such a way that even the medical pavilions were comfortable and home-like. Patients and the doctor’s family ate together at a large table. Treatment consisted of very long informal conversations that Fiodor Arsenievich Ussoltsev, the psychiatrist in charge of the clinic, held personally with each patient. During the holidays, there were receptions with invited artists, musicians, and literary people; patients played tennis, painted, drew, and danced a great deal.11

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Fig. 2-3. Mikhail Vrubel, Portrait of a Girl Against a Persian Carpet, detail, oil on canvas, 1886

Similar to his colleague Pavel Karpov, Ussoltsev was particularly interested in the connection between creativity and madness. He was especially attentive to Vrubel and, when Vrubel had his attacks, Ussoltsev immediately brought him drawing and painting materials. Ussoltsev left us testimonies about Vrubel’s creative process, particularly how a single

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decorative detail was able to take possession of the artist in an almost magical way: Vrubel never did preparatory sketches, but after having traced a few jagged lines, he would immediately begin to draw in detail the corner of the future painting, and often he would start with ornament, with a decorative detail, something for which he had an absolute preference.12

Fig. 2-4. Mikhail Vrubel, The Demon Flying, oil on canvas, 1889

Nicoletta Misler notes that “Ussoltsev also describes how Vrubel was able to abandon his drawing that he started, or, just the opposite, to come back several times to the same older drawing until the image would become a pure decorative entanglement.”13 Pavel Karpov, Ussoltsev’s colleague who collected an important number of drawings by the mentally ill, including Vrubel’s drawings, writes that “the obsession with ornament is a constant element in the drawings of the mentally sick, they take the geometrical abstract shapes or the free shapes, almost organic, which seem to be the exact transcription of the hallucinatory images.”14 Karpov shows that ornament is associated with hallucinatory images or simply with some kind of imaginary images, the projection of the unconscious, which allows the artist to escape the real world and to create—unconsciously in the case of Vrubel—the imaginary, which reflects his hallucinatory inner world. It is known that at the end of the 19th century, some artists, poets, and writers believed that hallucinations were able to play a decisive role in the creative process by creating the imaginary world as a new reality. “In vino veritas” was the motto of many artists in Russia, in France, and in England. Many were taking opium and drinking alcohol to produce different forms of hallucinations. Vrubel, however, did not create his ornamentation under the effect of drugs or alcohol. His attraction to ornamentation was instinctive. The images arose in him naturally from his

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unconscious in order to create a new reality, a new world that coincides with the message contained in his works.

Fig. 2-5. Mikhail Vrubel, The Demon Crashed, oil on canvas, 1902

Thus, although Vrubel created his Demon Seated in 1889, long before being confined to a psychiatric clinic, in his painting the ornamentation is present in order to underline the Demon’s belonging to a different reality, to the world of dreams. These are the fantastic projections of the subconscious, the artistic visions or hallucinations that Vrubel projected onto the canvas, creating the imaginary world, the reality different from the one that surrounded him. The ornamentation is the unconscious sublimation of his inner world, the unconscious way to create a new reality. The Seated Demon is also impressive for the figure’s colors. He is painted in green and in black; he is covered with a blue garment. These colors do not reproduce the reality of the human figure. Like in Gustave Moreau’s paintings, the colors express the emotions and thoughts associated with them. They do not aspire to reflect the effective reality. For example, the black color associated with mourning and death symbolizes the dark nature of the Demon’s soul, his dark side, the fallen Angel, whereas the green color, the color of hope, means the passage of the Demon from the state of the loneliness and suffering to hope, which is reflected in the color and in the glance of the Demon. Blue, the color of purity, covers half of the Demon’s figure. This color symbolizes rebirth, the return to eternal life because the hope was able to purify his soul. Moreover, by creating a contrast, these colors contribute to forming the world of dreams. In 1889 Vrubel painted The Demon Flying and in 1902, just before he first entered the clinic, he painted The Demon Crashed. These are strange works. Vrubel painted The Demon Flying under the appearance of a bird,

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the spirit flying above the earth, endowed with a human head with a black face, fine features, and huge eyes.

Fig. 2-6. Mikhail Vrubel, Savva, the artist’s son, oil on canvas, 1902

This painting is inseparable from The Demon Crashed. The Demon Crashed represents the deformed body of a bird after crashing, with broken wings and a face expressing non-belonging as the spirit is ready to leave the body. For Vrubel, “one of the metaphors for the Demon is the fragility of the crashed bird with broken wings.”15 We can see this image in the preparatory sketches. It represents the final metamorphosis of the increasingly violent anatomical distortion of the human body, when the Demon’s distended thorax converts into the rib cage of a bird. The broken, bent wings conflate into arms, and their reversed joints intersect in order to frame the face. 16

At the same time, the face of the Demon shows the peace that he finally seems to have found. His fall on earth and the love that he feels, the reason for his suffering, renew his soul, bring him peace, and return him to eternity and God. Guerman wrote that “Vrubel created an image of death

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in the form of life.”17 He created an image of death in which life does not stop; it continues and forces him to go through catharsis and purification. This image makes us think about the painting Beata Beatrix of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. In this painting Rossetti paints the portrait of his diseased wife, Elizabeth Siddal, endowing her with features of Dante’s Beatrice at the moment of her passage from the earthly to the eternal, as she goes through the catharsis that takes place at the time of the passage. The Demon does not die, but he is freed from eternal life on earth, and finally gains the right to return to the kingdom of God in order to find peace and spiritual eternity, this time real, of divine nature. Just before Vrubel finished working on The Demon Crashed, he painted a portrait of his one year old son, Savva, who was born with a physical irregularity known as a harelip. This painting represents the face of the boy with the huge blue eyes of an adult and with a deep soul, transparent through his eyes and showing us that he understands everything. At the same time, the physical irregularity of the child is very much stressed, and this can be seen as a reflection or further distortion of the original distortion, manifesting itself as a silent cry of his child’s illness. In this same way the contrast that Vrubel creates between the distorted body of the Demon and his spirit, finally mature enough to be forgiven and be able to regain the lost paradise, shows Vrubel’s contempt for anatomical precision as well as his revolt against physical limitations. Vrubel’s Demon is fundamentally different from Lermontov’s. Lermontov’s Demon returns to his detestable, lonely, and earthly immortality, whereas Vrubel creates the Demon matured by love and suffering. He loses the earthly immortality deprived of hope and love, and, through his soul’s maturation by love, is able to return to the divine immortality filled with the peace that he originally lost. Vrubel elaborates the aesthetic code and artistic style geared toward the expression of his hidden, subconscious world, possibly unknown to himself. But thanks to this code, he establishes a connection with the next generation of artists, who recognized him as one of their kind.

List of Illustrations Fig. 2-1. Mikhail Vrubel, The Demon Seated, oil on canvas, 114 x 211 cm, 1890, The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia, courtesy of Russian Art Gallery, http://russianartgallery.org/vrubel/index.htm. Fig. 2-2. Mikhail Vrubel, the sculpture The Head of the Demon in painted alabaster, The Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia, 1890, courtesy of http://www.abcgallery.com/V/vrubel/vrubel14.html.

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Fig. 2-3. Mikhail Vrubel, Portrait of a Girl Against a Persian Carpet (detail), oil on canvas, 104cm x 68cm,1886, Museum of Russian Art (Tereshchenko Museum), Kyiv, Ukraine, courtesy of https://www.wikiart.org/en/mikhail-vrubel/portrait-of-a-girl-against-apersian-carpet-1886. Fig. 2-4. Mikhail Vrubel, The Demon Flying, oil on canvas,158 x 430.5 cm 1889, The State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia, courtesy of http://darkclassics.blogspot.com/2011/02/mikhail-vrubel-flying-demon _9109.html. Fig. 2-5. Mikhail Vrubel, The Demon Crashed, oil on canvas, 139 x 387 cm, 1902, The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia, courtesy of Russian Art Gallery, http://russianartgallery.org/vrubel/index.htm. Fig. 2-6. Mikhail Vrubel, Savva Vrubel, The Artist’s Son Savva, oil on canvas, 138.5 x 430.5 cm, 1902, The State Russian Museum, SaintPetersburg, Russia, courtesy of https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wrubel-Portrait_of_Son1902.jpg.

Notes 1

This article was originally published in French. See Rosina Neginsky, “Inconscient et Clandestinité: l’expression du chaos souterrain dans la peinture de Vrouble,” http://irphil.univ-lyon3.fr/accueil-philosophie/philosophie/recherche/ publications/la-clandestinite-etudes-sur-la-pensee-russe-582181.kjsp?RH=13 26705502535, ed. Françoise Lesourd, 2011, 236-245. Translated from French by Rosina Neginsky. 2 Misler Nicoletta, « Un spectre hante l'Europe : le Démon du Symbolisme », in : Le Dialogue des Arts dans le Symbolisme russe, ed. Jean-Claude Marcadé. l'Age d'Homme, Lausanne, Suisse, 2008, 72. 3 Guerman M., Mikhaïl Vroubel. L'Annonciateur des Temps Nouveaux, Editions Parkstone/Aurora, Bournemouth, England, 1996, 25. 4 Mikhaïl Lermontov, Le Démon. Conte oriental, traduit du russe par Louis Jousserandot, Paris, La Renaissance du Livre, 150-151. In Russian, see Ʌɟɪɦɨɧɬɨɜ Ɇ. ɘ., ɉɨɷɦɵ, ɬɨɦ II, ɢɡɞɚɬɟɥɶɫɬɜɨ Ⱥɤɚɞɟɦɢɢ ɇɚɭɤ ɋɋɋɊ, ɆɨɫɤɜɚɅɟɧɢɧɝɪɚɞ, 1962, 538-539 (ɉɪɟɞ ɧɟɸ ɫɧɨɜɚ ɨɧ ɫɬɨɹɥ,/ɇɨ Ȼɨɠɟ! -- ɤɬɨ ɛ ɟɝɨ ɭɡɧɚɥ?/Ʉɚɤɢɦ ɫɦɨɬɪɟɥ ɨɧ ɡɥɨɛɧɵɦ ɜɡɝɥɹɞɨɦ,Ʉɚɤ ɩɨɥɨɧ ɛɵɥ ɫɦɟɪɬɟɥɶɧɵɦ ɹɞɨɦ/ȼɪɚɠɞɵ, ɧɟ ɡɧɚɸɳɟɣ ɤɨɧɰɚ). Translation from Russian is by Rosina Neginsky. 5 Guerman M., op. cit., 52. 6 Huysmans J.-K., À rebours, G.-Flammarion, Paris, 137. 7 Guerman M., op. cit., 52. 8 Ibid., 57. 9 Ibid., 56.͒

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Misler N., « Un spectre hante l'Europe : le Démon du Symbolisme », op. cit., 78. Ibid., 79.͒ 12 Ibid.,7.͒ 13 Ibid.,79-80. 14 Ibid.,7. 15 Ibid., 77. 16 Ibid. 17 Guerman M., Ibid., 137.͒ 11

CHAPTER THREE “TOUT N’EST QUE SYPHILIS”: VENEREAL TERROR AND THE REPRESENTATION OF WOMEN IN FIN DE SIÉCLE BELGIUM NATALIA VIEYRA

In the nineteenth century, overcrowding and unsanitary living conditions produced by industrialization contributed to the spread of numerous infectious diseases in cities across Western Europe. Massive outbreaks of smallpox, typhus, influenza, typhoid, Asiatic cholera, and scarlet fever wreaked havoc on urban centers, while diseases like whooping cough, measles, and tuberculosis killed thousands annually without ever becoming epidemic.1 Yet arguably, none of these illnesses engendered a public panic equivalent to that inspired by la grande vérole—the virulent, sexually-transmitted scourge of syphilis. In rapidly urbanizing Europe, a steep increase in prostitution accelerated the spread of the virus, fueling public distress concerning venereal disease. The mysterious symptomalogy of syphilis, with its array of frightening physiological presentations, oscillating disappearances and reappearances, and degenerative psychological effects, rendered the disease one of the most terrifying in the public imagination. In 1836, the renowned French hygienist Alexandre ParentDuchâtelet testified to the pervasiveness of venereal terror, declaring, “syphilis is among us, our neighbors, it is in the universe.”2 By the fin de siècle, the disease had become enmeshed in a complex cultural discourse involving questions of nationalism, gender, religion, and class that formed the basis for a deeply pervasive culture of misogyny. As Des Esseintes concludes in J.K. Huysmans’s À rebours (1884), “it all comes down to syphilis.”3 Though the figure of the prostitute and her role in shaping Western culture during the nineteenth century has been the topic of numerous art

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historical studies,4 a serious attempt to unravel how fears concerning venereal illness entered a visual language has not yet been attempted. This paper will examine the visual codes used by the Belgian Symbolists Fernand Khnopff and Félicien Rops in order to consider how the ubiquity of syphilis and other venereal diseases shaped the representation of women at the fin de siècle. Though these concerns were by no means unique to Belgium, the small country was the first in Europe to experience the Industrial Revolution and the numerous social problems that accompanied modernization.5 Furthermore, Belgium played host to a remarkable creative renaissance in the final decades of the nineteenth century, providing the basis for an interesting case study. A close reading of Fernand Khnopff’s frontispiece illustration for Joséphin Péladan’s novel, Istar (1888) [Fig. 3- 1] and two etchings by Félicien Rops will provide a fertile site with which to analyze the intersection of femininity and venereal disease within Belgian Symbolism.

Regulation and Venereal Terror In order to fully comprehend how the pervasive presence of syphilis shaped the depiction of women in fin de siècle Belgium, an overview of the disease as it was understood in the nineteenth century is critical. Until the twentieth century, the majority of information concerning venereal disease relied on faulty medical assumptions and experiments of unreliable empiricism. Aside from a certainty that these illnesses were sexual in origin, syphilis and gonorrhea remained deeply misunderstood in the nineteenth century. Sex with a menstruating woman, too much or too little sex, sex with a woman after a night of heavy drinking, and too much asparagus were all alleged causes of venereal diseases in men.6 Consequently, the virus was associated with indulgence and decadence of all forms, including rich food, consumption of alcohol, and excessive gaiety. The following passage by renowned French venereologist Philippe Ricord7 deserves to be quoted at length, for it clearly outlines the nineteenth-century “prescription” for the contraction of venereal disease: A pale lymphatic woman, blond rather than brunette, and as leuchorrhic8 as possible. Dine with her; begin with oysters and continue with asparagus, drink a good many dry white wines and champagne, coffee, liquor. All this is well. Dance after your dinner and make your partner dance. Warm yourself up, and drink a good deal of beer during the evening. When night comes, conduct yourself bravely; two or three acts of intercourse are not too much, more still the better. [Upon] waking do not fail to take a long

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By Ricord’s account, the female body acts as the primary site of venereal danger, with morally decadent behaviors, such as the consumption of rich food, drinking, and excessive gaiety, compounding the risk of infection. This argument is echoed in the writings of numerous physicians, including one who warned that, “beyond doubt . . . even the natural secretions of females who have promiscuous intercourse with men, who pay no regard to cleanliness and who destroy their health, strength, and life, by excessive drinking, become so acrid, that few can commerce with them with impunity.”10 This notion, that even the “natural” bodies of morally illicit women were infectious, served to pathologize the body of the prostitute in the medical discourse of the nineteenth-century.11 Subsequently, attempts to curb the spread of infection focused on controlling the female body, beginning with the regulation of prostitution. In general, prostitution was viewed as an unfortunate but unavoidable aspect of life in the modern city. Along these lines, Parent-Duchâtelet famously declared, “prostitutes are as inevitable in an agglomeration of men as sewers, cesspits, and garbage dumps.”12 The regulation of prostitution sought to control this “necessary evil” in order to preserve public health and safety. In 1810, Paris was the first city to introduce an official system of regulation. The system required that all prostitutes register with a national squad and submit to regular medical examinations to ensure their gynecological health. If infection was suspected, they were arrested, jailed, and submitted to compulsory medical treatment until their symptoms subsided.13 The Parisian system of regulation, with its emphasis on the female body as the source of venereal infection, was admired throughout Europe. During and following the Napoleonic Wars, several countries incorporated elements of the ‘French System’ into their own policies, including Belgium in 1844.14 In Brussels, the regulation of prostitution was far more rigid than in Paris, leading to the use of the phrase “hyper-regulation” by several historians.15 The supervision of brothels and prostitutes was entrusted entirely to the municipal police, and officers were permitted to judge and imprison prostitutes without judicial oversight. As in France, Belgian prostitutes endured compulsory medical inspections, occurring on a twice-weekly basis. Prostitutes exhibiting symptoms of disease were sent to the “venereal diseases police unit” at Saint Pierre’s Hospital, where they were incarcerated until they received a clean bill of health.16

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The Born Prostitute Yet by the fin de siècle, the number of officially recognized brothels was dwindling, while illegal prostitution continued to flourish.17 “Venereal peril” had reached a fever pitch in Belgium.18 Though there was a significant amount of confusion distinguishing the symptoms of primary and secondary syphilis with that of gonorrhea and other illnesses, by the late nineteenth century, several distinct manifestations of the disease had been recognized. Most significant to this discussion is the recognition of congenital and hereditary syphilis. In this form, syphilis is passed from mother to child in utero or through the break milk, causing a slew of distressing symptoms, including deformed teeth, blindness, sores and lacerations on the flesh, and mental afflictions.19 The identification of hereditary syphilis exacerbated anxieties concerning its spread, and the disease became further enmeshed in nationalistic fears surrounding the notion of societal degeneration. The panic resulted in the organization of two much-demanded international conferences in 1899 and 1902 devoted to addressing the problem and alerting the greater European medical community to the seriousness of the epidemic. Both were hosted in Brussels by the venerologist Dr. Dubois-Havenith and members of the Belgian Academy of Medicine.20 In the same decade, an organization was established that proposed to educate the public on the scourge of syphilis through what Alain Courbin has described as “an obsessive propoganda” of a “terrifying danger.”21 By the end of the nineteenth century, the concept of hereditary syphilis entered a broader public consciousness. In Huysman’s À rebours, Des Esseintes describes the passage of the disease through generations: And he had a sudden vision of the human race tortured by the virus of long past centuries. Ever since the beginning of the world, from sire to son, all living creatures were handing on the inexhaustible heritage, the everlasting malady that has devastated the ancestors of the men of to-day, has eaten to the very bone old fossil forms which we dig up at the present moment. Never wearying, it had travelled down the ages, to this day it was raging everywhere, disguised under ordinary symptoms of headache or bronchitis, hysteria or gout…22

The identification of hereditary and congenital syphilis quickly gave rise to the notion of a “born prostitute.”23 This idea, that a woman could be born infected, having contracted congenital syphilis in the womb, seemed to create a logical parallel to the doctrine of original sin. As Cabanes has suggested, this medieval religious doctrine was made scientific through the

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discourse surrounding venereal disease.24 Bearing the brunt of responsibility for the transmission of syphilis, prostitutes were viewed as daughters of Eve, imagined to be inherently evil, sinful, and diseased. This deeply misogynistic notion pervaded nearly all aspects of Western European culture and profoundly impacted artistic and literary representations of women at the fin de siècle. In this vein, Khnopff and Rops exhibited a deep interest in exploring the female body as a site of disease, deformity, and contagion.

Belgium at the fin de siècle During this same period of venereal terror, Belgium found itself in the midst of an astonishing artistic renaissance. Beginning in the 1880s, the young nation witnessed a flourishing of literary activity in both French and Flemish, with the Symbolist authors Georges Rodenbach, Emile Verhaeren, and Maurice Maeterlinck at the creative forefront.25 These literary developments coincided with the publisher Octavius Maus's founding of Les XX (or Le Vignt), a group of twenty Belgian artists exhibiting annually in the Francophone capital of Brussels. Les XX represented the diversity of Belgian artistic movements and styles, with the Symbolist artists Rops and Khnopff assuming active roles. Additionally, international artists were invited to show their works in each exhibition. The participation of many prominent European artists, including Camille Pissarro, Claude Monet, Paul Cezanne, Vincent van Gogh, Berthe Morisot, James McNeill Whistler, Georges Seurat, and Paul Gauguin, speaks to the importance of Belgium as an artistic center at the fin de siècle.26 An important characteristic of the Belgian cultural scene during this period was the fertile creative exchange which developed between its artistic and literary figures. Many poets and writers were intensely active in the arts, maintaining close working and personal relationships with painters and sculptors.27 Some ventured into criticism, like Emile Verhaeren, who wrote extensively on Symbolism in the plastic arts.28 In turn, the members of Les XX often collaborated with the Symbolist poets—George Minne, for example, provided the illustrations for Maurice Maeterlinck's collection of poems, Serres Chaudes (Hot Houses) of 1889. Testifying to this close relationship between the fine arts and literature, Minne said of his friend Maeterlink, “we sometimes communicate so well that it actually seems to me that I produced Princess Maleine myself, with either a chisel or a pen, I cannot remember!”29 This collaboration amongst the arts in Belgium had a profound impact on the revival of interest in graphic and book design at the fin de siècle.30

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Fernand Khnopff was particularly active in this regard, producing numerous illustrations and frontispieces for works of literature and magazines over the duration of his career. As Sophie Van Vliet has noted, his early designs demonstrated a fairly conventional relationship between word and image.31 However, by 1889, Khnopff exhibited a radical shift in his approach to literary illustration, encapsulated within his manner of titling. Forgoing the pronoun d’après (as used in his 1883 homage to Gustave Flaubert, D’après Flaubert: La Tentation de Saint Antoine), Khnopff adopted the use of the prefix, avec. 32 This subtle change indicated an intellectual collaboration between artist and author, challenging the traditional subordination of the image to the printed word. In 1889, Khnopff exhibited several literary works, including the frontispiece drawing for Istar, which he titled, Avec Joséphin Péladan.33 Within this context, Khnopff’s commissions and literary-inspired works can be understood as artistic complements to their sources, rather than slavish, mimetic illustrations.

Khnopff’s Istar Though Khnopff worked closely with numerous authors and poets, the literary works of Joséphin Péladan, founder of the Salon de la Rose +Croix, had the most profound impact on the former’s Symbolist aesthetic. In 1884., Khnopff created two designs for Péladan's novel Le Vice Suprême. However, both were rejected, and the commission was awarded to Péladan’s favorite artist, Félicien Rops. Four years later, Khnopff completed frontispiece designs for two of Péladan’s novels, Femmes honnêtes and Istar.34 Although Khnopff secured these two commissions, it appears that Péladan still owed his allegiance to Rops. In 1888, Peladan wrote to Rops, stating apologetically, “I mistakenly believed that your works would take so long that I asked F. Khnopff to provide my frontispieces.”35 In the end, Rops did in fact provide an illustration for Istar—the title page of Édinger’s 1888 edition features a small drawing of a nude woman, presumably a Perseus-type figure, carrying the head of a gorgon and wielding an enormous, phallic sword. It was perhaps due to this artistic rivalry with Rops, an artist renowned for his highly erotic and often pornographic illustrations, that Khnopff produced an image of unprecedented sensuality with his frontispiece illustration for Istar. Ultimately, it appears that Édinger may have deemed Khnoff’s frontispiece too explicit—the illustration was cropped from the waist down for the cover, obscuring the more sexually graphic elements of the

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composition. However, in 1889, Khnopff displayed the drawing for Istar at the exhibition of the Société de Trente-trois, a group of French artists exhibiting annually in Paris who had adopted a model similar to that of Les XX by inviting international participants each year.36 Employing a quintessentially Symbolist aesthetic rich in mystery and suggestion, Khnopff avoided a narrative illustration, electing to create a multilayered image that drew from myriad iconographic sources37 in order to evoke Istar’s central themes of Satanism, moral degeneration, sexual deviancy, and the Occult.38 The critics immediately grasped the Symbolist inflections of Khnopff’s works, declaring that the illustrations were, “Baudelaire in paint!”39 Péladan himself was immensely pleased with Istar, describing it in the following terms: Nude against a column on the pillory, hands bound to a bronze placard hearing the words calibani justitia, Istar, the incarnation of the Chaldean Venus, has fainted or is dead, her eyes closed, mouth sealed, her noble body still bright, the soul gone: on the abdomen an old hag, provincial medusa, whose tresses are made of octopus tentacles, flattens itself, sordid and profane, on the divine lap… Khnopff has entered a path in which he will create marvelous things—the emotional nude, that is to say, the expression of the model apart from its movement.40

Drawn in a sensual red chalk, this intensely erotic image features a vertical female nude, her body frontally exposed to the viewer. She is a modern rather than classic nude and her naturalistic features suggest that Khnopff may have drawn her from life. As Péladan suggests, she appears bound to a pillory with her hands restrained beneath a sign that reads “Calabani Justitia,” the proclamation of an obscure indictment.41 The viewer is drawn to the ecstatic expression of the woman’s delicately rendered face, eyes nearly closed, mouth slightly open. Her long, sensuous tresses cascade down her back, drawing the eye to her torso, where a grotesque transformation takes place. At the navel, the figure’s fleshy abdomen appears to burst open as the writhing, snake-like tentacles of a horrifying creature pour forth from beneath flaps of skin.42 Described by Péladan as a medusa, the creature plunges its tentacles43 into the flesh of her pelvis, simultaneously evoking birth and intercourse.44 Contrasting the purity of the woman’s unmarked body with the grotesque image of the medusa, Khnopff suggests the clandestine danger of venereal illness—the disease most often appeared without external symptoms in female sufferers. Additionally, the terrifying mouth, lined with jagged teeth and stretched open in a ghastly scream, alludes to the female sexual organ. The ability of Khnopff’s Istar to both compel and repulse the viewer closely

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recalls Des Esseintes’s vision of the syphilitic woman in Huysman’s À rebours: Then he noticed the terrifying irritation of the bosoms and of the mouth, discovered on the skin of the body stains of bistre and copper, and recoiled in horror; but the woman's eye fascinated him, and he crept slowly, reluctantly towards her, trying to drive his heels into the ground to stay his advance, dropping to the earth, only to rise again to go to her… An agony of terror set his heart beating wildly, for the eyes, the dreadful eyes of the woman, had become pale, cold blue, terrible to look at. He made a superhuman effort to free himself from her embraces, but with an irresistible gesture she seized and held him, and haggard with horror, he saw the savage Nidularium blossom45 under her meagre thighs, with its sword blades gaping in blood-red hollows.46

By choosing to portray Istar as an Eve cast out of Eden, Khnopff emphasized the inherently diseased sexuality of the modern woman in a world plagued by syphilis. Though the serpent has been the traditional iconographic attribute of Eve for centuries, artists in the nineteenth century displayed a marked interest in the image of the snake. The representation of Eve and her cohort were immensely popular within the art and literature of both Symbolist and academic circles. The strange creature of the snake, whose slithery body seemed to suggest both phallic and vulvic connotations, lent itself well to representations of diseased or abnormal female sexuality. According to Bram Dijsktra, among the terms to describe a woman’s appearance in the literature of this period, none were more overused during the late nineteenth century than “serpentine,” “sinuous,” and “snakelike.”47 Amongst the painters of the French Salon and the English Academy, Gustave Flaubert’s novel Salammbô provided a wealth of inspiration for titillating paintings. In this novel, the main character performs a lascivious dance with a massive python replete with innuendo. Within Symbolist circles, it was perhaps Franz von Stuck, a German Symbolist painter, who most effectively employed the snake as a manifestation of feminine evil. Likewise, Odilon Redon explored the topic in his painting, the Green Death, where a skeletal figure appears crushed in the coils of a massive green python. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the motifs of Eve and the snake were rapidly assumed into the visual language that engaged ideas of feminine evil and disease. As this monstrous medusa emerges from Istar’s womb, the common notion that sexual deviancy begets further physical abnormality, disease, and madness is reinforced.

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“The delicious work of the etcher” As with the book arts revival that engendered Khnopff’s Istar, a renewal of interest in printmaking developed in Belgium from the midcentury onward, beginning with the European etching revival of the 1860s. Driven by the efforts of artists and publishers to encourage the acquisition of original works of art in a burgeoning bourgeois consumer market, the etching revival culminated in 1862 with the formation of the Société des Aquafortistes in Paris.48 In Belgium, three etching societies were founded by the 1880s. In 1869, the Countess of Flanders (1845–1912), an etcher from the royal household, sponsored the formation of the Société Internationale des Aquafortistes (International Etching Society), followed by the Vereeniging der Antwerpsche Etsers/Association des Aquafortistes Anversois (Antwerp Etching Society) in 1880 and The Société des Aquafortistes Belges (Society of Belgian Etchers) in 1886. Though these societies were mostly comprised of amateurs and print enthusiasts seeking official sanction and recognition for the etching medium, several members of Les XX contributed to their portfolios, including Rops and Khnopff.49 Following his appointment as president of the Société Internationale des Aquafortistes, Rops described his aspirations for the future of etching in Belgium: I dream of all kinds of noble, patriotic and grotesque things: the renewal of etching in Belgium, the creation of a national collection of etchings, and I get it into my head to turn this little Belgium, so well placed between England, France and Germany, into a publishing centre like Leipzig.50

For Rops and many others, the development of printmaking in Belgium was critical to the establishment of the young nation as a cultural center in Europe. The French poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire displayed particular enthusiasm concerning the artistic potential of the etching medium. In 1862, he published two essays on the subject, “L’eau forte est à la mode” and an expanded version, “Peintres et aquafortistes,” following the publication of the Société’s first portfolio.51 For Baudelaire, the relative ease and spontaneity afforded by the etching process freed the artist from technical restraints, allowing the artist’s imagination and “most intimate personality”52 to flourish. Baudelaire stressed the importance of the medium, arguing that the imaginative effect of the print was not simply a product of the artist’s individual talent, but in fact dependent on the special qualities of etching.53

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Furthermore, etching was less burdened by the strictures of academic convention, allowing artists and collectors to experiment with unconventional subject matter. As the art critic Charles Blanc observed, prints were better stored away in a portfolio, rather than hung on a wall or kept under glass. Prints that were inappropriate for public display, such as erotica, would have been examined only occasionally in the privacy of the owner’s cabinet de travail, safe from the detrimental effects of light and the prying eyes of the family.54 It is perhaps for these reasons that Félicien Rops gravitated towards etching as a fertile medium for creative expression. Described by Baudelaire as “the only true artist” in Belgium,55 Rops’s oeuvre reads like an encyclopedia of nineteenth-century misogyny, ranging from the humorous to the pornographic. The private nature of etching enabled Rops to explore unusual and even deviant subject matter, particularly with regard to the representation of women. It was also financially lucrative. In a letter to his father, Rops discussed the economic potential of the book arts and printmaking industries: I believe and maintain that the publication of prints or of illustrated books is [the] best means for a young artist to become known and to earn money: While a painting is unique, books and prints are published by the thousands and can make your name known.56

For Rops, “the delicious work of the etcher”57 depended in part on the taste of the bourgeois public for artistic and commercial success. It is therefore unsurprising that Rops dedicated a large portion of his printed work to the exploration of feminine sexuality, prostitution, sexual deviance, and the femme fatale. During this era of venereal terror, such themes weighed heavily on the minds of the French and Belgian public and likely informed the tastes of print collectors in the fin de siècle.

Rop’s Human Parody and Mors Syphilitica Of interest to the discussion of venereal illness is an etching entitled Human Parody (1878–1881) [Fig. 3-2]. The scene transpires on a narrow urban street, suffused with the eerie luminescence of the gas lights that glow faintly above doorframes. In the foreground, a skeletal figure, apparently a prostitute, appears attired in a fashionable ensemble. A shadowy gentleman in an elegant frock coat, top hat, and cane, appears to pursue the skeletal apparition. The female figure’s body is concealed by a long red shawl and her bare, spindly legs and high-heeled shoes are hidden from the gentleman’s view by a stylish bustle. While the gentleman is mesmerized by her pretty, doll-like face, the viewer of the print is able to

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recognize her duplicitous façade—a cackling skull lurks behind the attractive mask. Rops’s use of fashionable attire to mask his figure’s unfortunate condition refers to the perceived ability of women to construct, manipulate appearances, and deceive by using sartorial signs, while her painted face references the use of cosmetics to conceal the symptoms of syphilis.58 Additionally, Rops cleverly implicates the audience as among the deceived, preventing the viewer from fully conceiving the figure of his female reaper. Though her upper half is skeletal, her exposed legs remain covered in flesh. The message of the print is clear—death, in the form of venereal disease, lurks under the surface of a beautiful woman. Several years later, Rops explored the theme of venereal peril even more overtly in his etching, Mors Syphilitica (1892). Mors Syphilitica or “the syphilitic death” features woman as the literal embodiment of death. In the etching, another skeletal female figure emerges from a shadowy doorway. Her provocative demeanor suggests that she is a prostitute, perhaps waiting for a client to enter her boudoir. Shrouded in diaphanous garments, her breasts and navel are visible. The fabric draped over her arm seems to create a batlike wing, giving her the appearance of a frightening creature. Skull-like and terrifying, her face looms from out of the shadows, beckoning callers to approach. Her eyes seem to bulge out of their sockets and her pointed teeth are bared like those of a vampire. Behind her back, she holds the scythe of death. By presenting woman as the embodiment of syphilitic death, Rops reinforces the notion that female sexuality is inherently pathological.

Conclusion Misguided theories concerning venereal disease persisted until the First World War, when the spread of syphilis and gonorrhea on battlefields engendered a dire need to educate soldiers concerning its contraction. During this period, a variety of public service posters were produced in order to raise awareness of the dangers of venereal disease, many of which continued to incorporate serpentine imagery, like that utilized in Khnopff’s Istar, in order to signpost the dangers of fraternizing with a “modern Eve.” Even as late as 1945, Rops’s Mors Syphilitica was incorporated into the frontispiece of Propos sur la syphilis et son histoire (On Syphilis and its History) by B. Dujardin, a text concerning the history of syphilis. These examples testify to the lasting cultural currency of the imagery employed by Khnopff, Rops, and others. In part because of their iconographic success, the works of Fernand Khnopff and Félicien Rops provide a unique

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and indispensable opportunity to study anxieties surrounding feminine sexuality and venereal disease in late-nineteenth-century Belgium.

Fig. 3-1. Fernand Khnopff, Istar, red chalk (1888)

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Fig. 3-2. Félicien Rops, Human Parody, etching (1878–1881)

Venereal Terror and the Representation of Women in fin de siécle Belgium

Fig. 3-3. Félicien Rops, Mors Syphilitica, etching (1892)

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List of Illustrations Fig. 3-1. Fernand Khnopff, Istar, red chalk (1888). Fig. 3-2. Félicien Rops, Human Parody, etching (1878–1881). Fig. 3-3. Félicien Rops, Mors Syphilitica, etching (1892). .

Notes  1

Bruce Haley, The Healthy Body and Victorian Culture (Cambridge, MA. and London: Harvard University Press, 1978), 6, 8. For essays on disease in the nineteenth century, see Gabriel P. Weisberg, Elizabeth K. Menon and Sharon Hirsh in In Sickness and in Health: Disease as Metaphor in Art and Popular Wisdom (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2004). 2 Alexandre Parent-Duchâtelet, quoted in Jean-Louis Cabanes, “Invention(s) de la syphilis,” Romantisme 94 (1996): 90. 3 “Tout n’est que syphilis.” J.K. Huysmans, À rebours (Paris: G. Charpentier et Cie, 1884), 123. 4 Notable examples include Charles Berheimer, Figures of Ill Repute: Representing Prostitution in Nineteenth-century France, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997) and Hollis Clayson, Painted Love: Prostitution in the French Art of the Impressionist Era, (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2003). 5 Alexander Murphy and Carl Strikwerda, “Brussels and the Belgian Avante-Garde in Historical and Geographic Perspective,” in Les XX and the Belgian Avantgarde: Prints, Drawings, and Books, ca. 1890, ed. Stephen H. Goddard (Lawrence: Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, 1992), 19. 6 See Mary Spongberg, Feminizing Venereal Disease: The Body of the Prostitute in Nineteenth-century Medical Discourse (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 34. 7 Philippe Ricord (1800–1889) was a French venerologist renowned for his clinical research on syphilis and gonorrhea. His ideas were respected throughout Western Europe. 8 Leuchorrhic is a medical term that indicates a feminine discharge. 9 Philippe Ricord, quoted in Spongeberg, 40. 10 Dr. Burder, quoted in Spongeberg, 33. 11 Spongeberg, 33. 12 Alexander Parent-Duchâtelet, quoted in Mary Spongeberg, 38. For a detailed history of Parent-Duchâtelet’s work and prostitution in France, see Alain Corbin, Women for Hire: Prostitution and Sexuality in France after 1850 (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: Harvard University Press, 1990). 13 Mary Hunter, “Ladies in Waiting: Time and Gynecology in Toulouse-Lautrec's Rue des Moulins (1894)” (Paper presented at the Birkbeck Forum for NineteenthCentury Studies, Birkbeck, England, June 4, 2014).

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14 Jean-Michel Chaumont, “The White Slave Trade Affair (1880-1881): a scandal specific to Brussels?,” Brussels Studies 46.24 (January 2011): 2. 15 See Alain Corbin; Jean-Michel Chaumont, 2; Colette Huberty and Luc Keunings, “La prostitution à Bruxelles au 19ème siècle,” Les cahiers de la Fonderie 2 (1987): 3–21; Luc Keunings, “L’affaire de la traite des blanches. Un aspect de la prostitution urbaine en Europe occidentale au XIXème siècle,” in Du sordide au mythe (2009), 17–44. 16 Jean-Michel Chaumont, 2. 17 Ibid. 18 Courbin, 262. 19 Spongeberg, 143–144. 20 Courbin, 265. 21 Courbin, 265. 22 “Et il eut la brusque vision d'une humanité sans cesse travailèe par le virus des anciens Ages. Depuis le commencement du monde, de pères en fils, toutes les créatures se transmettaient l'inusable héritage, l'éternelle maladie qui a ravagé les ancêtres de l'homme, qui a creausé jusqu'aux os maintenant exhués des vieux fossiles! Elle avait couru, sans jamais s'épusier à travers les siècles; aujourd'hui encore, elle sévissait, se dErobant en de sournoises souffrances, se dissimulant sous les symptômes des migraines et des bronchites, des vapeurs et des gouttes…” J.K. Huysmans, 191. 23 Courbin, 300–308. 24 Cabanes, 89. 25 It is important to recall that Belgium is linguistically divided between the community speaking Flemish (a dialect of Dutch) in the Northern region of Flanders and the Francophone community in the Southern region of Wallonia. In the late-nineteenth century, French remained the dominant cultural language of Belgium, and many Flemish artists and writers chose French as their preferred language despite their Northern origins. Fernand Khnopff was among these individuals. Though he was born in Bruges, Khnopff used French titles for many of his works. Despite the cultural hegemony of the French language, several artists and writers used Flemish as a means of promoting a cultural identity distinct from France, including Henry van de Velde and Jan Toorop, contributors to the Antwerp-based literary publication, Van Nu en Straks. For further reading on the politics of language in nineteenth-century Belgium, see Alexander Murphy and Carl Strikwerda. 26 See Robert Hoozee, “Belgian Art, 1880–1900,” in Impressionism to Symbolism: The Belgian Avant-garde, 1880–1900, ed. MaryAnne Stevens (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1994), 13–29. 27 Ibid., 26. 28 See Symbolist Art Theories: A Critical Anthology, ed. Henri Dorra (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994). 29 Georges Minne, quoted in Hoozee, 26. 30 Hoozee, 26.

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Sophie Van Vliet, “Fernand Khnopff as Illustrator,” in Fernand Khnopff: 18581921 (Brussels: Royal Museums of Fine Art of Belgium, 2003), 271. 32 Jeffery Howe, The Symbolist Art of Fernand Knopff (Ann Arbour, MI: UMI Research Press, 1979), 65. 33 Khnopff also exhibited Avec Georges Rodenbach: Une Ville Morte and Avec Emile Verhaeren, now titled Une Ange. 34 Howe, 63. 35 Josephin Péladan, quoted in Sophie Van Vliet, 273. 36 The exhibition was held on January 2, 1889 in a large hall on the Rue de Sèze, possibly in the gallery of the dealer Georges Petit. 37 Though I have chosen to focus on the figure of Eve, Khnopff’s frontispiece for Istar can be interpreted through a number of iconographic lenses. Within the scholarship, Istar is frequently compared to Saint Sebastian, drawing support from a passage in the novel. See Marie-Anne Coebergh, Onnoemelijke dingen: over taboe en verbod in het fin de siècle, ed. Anne van Buul, trans. Dries Van Loon, (Hilversum: Verloren, 2014), 68–72. Péladan also references the figure of Andromeda, another interesting association. The Andromeda motif appears on several occasions in the work of the English Pre-Raphaelites, notably John Everett Millais’s The Martyr of Solway (1871) and Edward Burne-Jones’s Perseus Cycle. Khnopff was a great admirer of the Pre-Raphaelites and close friends with BurneJones. It is worth mentioning that Burne-Jones’s Rock of Doom of the Perseus Cycle was completed in the same year as Khnopff’s frontispiece for Istar. The two works contain notable compositional similarities. 38 It appears that Istar was printed in 1888 by two separate publishers, G. Édinger and Dentu. I have thus far been unable to determine why two editions were issued. However, it is interesting to note that Dentu’s publication features a frontispiece illustration similar in theme and composition to Khnopff's. This alternate frontispiece is arguably more conventional and narrative, drawing heavily from Péladan’s novel for its content. The illustration features an Andromeda-like figure, tied to a pillory bearing a medieval crest. In the background, the cityscape of Lyon, the setting of the novel, is recognizable. 39 Gérôme, L’Univers illustré, January 12, 1889, (Paris: Levy), 19. 40 Joséphin Péladan, quoted in R. Pincus-Witten, Occult Symbolism in France (New York: Garland, 1976), 68. 41 It has been suggested that this erudite phrase may refer to Caliban of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Khnopff was an avid Anglophile and a great admirer of Shakespeare. In 1899, he delivered a talked titled, “Hamlet in England,” for the Cercle Artistique of Brussels. Marie-Anne Coebergh has suggested that the phrase “Calabani Justistia” is a proclamation of punishment or condemnation. Coebergh, 71. 42 The creature was described by Péladan as a “provincial medusa,” a reference to the province of Lyon, the setting of Istar. For Péladan, the French provinces were bastions of modern hypocrisy. Khnopff explored the theme of the gorgon in two additional works, Sleeping Medusa (1888) and The Blood of the Medusa (1898).

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 For an iconographic consideration of these works, see Michael Sagroske, “The Medusa in the Work of Fernand Khnopff,” in Fernand Khnopff, 53–63. 43 Richard Bru has proposed that Khnopff may have been inspired by Hokusai’s The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife (1814). Richard Bru, “Tentáculos de amour y de muerte,” in Imágenes Secretas: Picasso y la estampa erótico japonesa (Barcelona: Museu Picasso, 2009), 65–67. 44 The evocation of birth was noted by Sumreen Chaudry, PhD student, during a group discussion at Temple University. 45 Prior to his vision, Des Esseintes becomes preoccupied with the “syphilitic” markings on the leaves and petals of his hot house flowers. 46 “Alors il observa l'effrayante irritation des seins et de la bouche, découvrit sur la peau du corps des macules de bistre et de cuivre, recula égaré; mais l'oeil de la femme le fascinait et el avancait lentement, essayant de s'enfoncer les talons dans la terre pour ne pas marcher, se laissant choir, se relevant quand même pour aller vers elle... une épouvantable angoisse lui fit sonner le coeur à grands coups, car les yeux, les affreux yeaux de la femme étaient devenus d'un blue clair et froid, terribles. Il fit un effort surhumain pour se dégager de ses étreintes, mais d'un geste irrésistible, elle le retint, le saisit, et hagard, il vit s'épanouir sous les cuisses à l'air, le faourche Nidularium qui bà illait, en saignant, dans des lames de sabre.” J.K. Huysmans,130–131. 47 Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 305–307. 48 Michele Hannoosh, “Etching and Modern Art: Baudelaire’s ‘Peintres et aquafortistes,’” French Studies 43 (1989): 47. 49 Despite the establishment of these societies, printmaking in Belgium never experienced a level of popularity equal to that which it enjoyed in Paris. For this reason, Rops and other artists frequently touted their works in the Parisian market. However, the societies did serve to promote etching in Belgium by publishing portfolios, offering prizes for prints, and annexing a room at the Musée royale de Bruxelles (Royal Museum in Brussels) dedicated to printmaking. Stephen H. Goddard, “Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Belgium,” in Les XX and the Belgian Avant-Garde, 79. 50 Stephen H. Goddard, 77. 51 Kathleen Lochnan, The Etchings of James McNeill Whistler (New Haven: Art Gallery of Ontario, Yale University Press, 1984), 138. 52 Charles Baudelaire, quoted in Kathleen Lochnan, 138. 53 Michele Hannoosh, 49. 54 Peter Parshall, “A Darker Side of Light: Prints, Privacy and Possession,” in The Darker Side of Light, Arts of Privacy, 1850–1900 (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art), 4. 55 Charles Baudelaire, quoted in Draget, Michael and Christian Berg, Laurence Brogniez, Guy Vanbellingen. Splendeurs de L’Ideal: Rops, Khnopff, Delville et leur temps (Belgium: Snoeck-Ducaju & Zoon, 1996), 29. 56 Félicien Rops, quoted in Stephen H. Goddard, 82. 57 James Ensor, quoted in Ibid., 86.

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See Charles Baudelaire, “Peintre de la vie moderne,” in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon Press, 1995), 30–31.

CHAPTER FOUR VERHAEREN ON REMBRANDT’S “FOLIE”, “S’IL N’ETAIT UN GENIE, ON LE PRENDRAIT POUR UN FOU” ALBERT ALHADEFF

Long the butt of nineteenth century critiques, Rembrandt van Rijn was faulted in many a critical tome for mingling with cripples and derelicts, for embracing Jews and chaperoning beggars. With his biographers faulting him for his miserliness, his bald lies, his cupidity, his loose morals and other indiscretions, his missteps seemed endless.1 Indeed his image of himself as a deranged, crazed soul in one of his more scabrous selfportraits [Fig. 4-1] does support the contention that Rembrandt, foul mouthed and “snarling,”2 is unhinged. Émile Verhaeren’s 1904 seventyeight page essay on the Dutch master [Fig. 4-2]3 rehearses these epithets and censures that color Charles Blanc’s, Thoré-Burger’s, Eugène Fromentin’s, and Hippolyte Taine’s appreciation of the painter from Leiden.4 For them, Rembrandt was a scapegrace, a renegade, a man who, as Verhaeren said, paraphrasing his peers’ critiques, “scandalized all by his outrageous behavior” (scandalisait par l’audace de sa folie).5 Verhaeren, however, questioned these pernicious judgments, calumnies that have a long history in themselves, reaching as far as the eighteenth century.6 Verhaeren himself was especially sensitive to such slurs, for as an essayist, poet and biographer, he too had long suffered a rash of querulous critics;7 like Rembrandt he too had been dismissed as an outcast and had endured the vitriol of reviewers, and though the years had passed time had not assuaged his pain.8 Belgium had betrayed him and betrayed his generation---artists he had known and defended such as Ensor, Khnopff, Rops, Minne and Maeterlinck come to mind.9 As late as 1908 he could bitterly complain that la Belgique had never embraced the avant garde, the outspoken few who had dared to confront the press. But all this was a déjà

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Fig. 4-1. Rembrandt van Rijn, Self Portrait as Beggar Sneering, 1630

Verhaeren on Rembrandt’s “folie”

Fig. 4-2. Émile Verhaeren, Cover for Verhaeren’s Rembrandt, 1904

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vu, for as he and his cohorts had experienced the ire of his peers in the late 19th century, Rembrandt, viewed as an outcast by his fellow burghers, had sustained the ire of his Dutch colleagues in the 17th century. Indeed, as Belgium was hostile aux lettres10 and its nascent masters, so “Holland,” Verhaeren pointedly observed, “distanced itself from Rembrandt” (La Hollande au XVII siècle s’est éloignée de Rembrandt).11 Always protective of its decorum, “she neither understood, nor stood by him, nor did she acclaim him” (elle ne l’a ni compris, ni soutenu, ni célébré).12 Thus as Holland neither acknowledged nor celebrated its greatest artist, Belgium neither acknowledged nor celebrated its golden age, those halcyon albeit combative days when Verhaeren and his cohorts suffered innumerable jeers at the hands of an offended and outraged public.13 For Verhaeren, Rembrandt was not bound, as his peers were, to bourgeois values. On the contrary, Rembrandt’s genius freed him from such constraints. With this in mind, Verharen could say that “Rembrandt might have been born anywhere . . . at any time” (Rembrandt aurait put naître n’importe où. À n’importe quel moment).14 In transcending his milieu, his nationality, it follows that Rembrandt, given Verhaeren’s views, might have been a colleague, a confrère working in Brussels in the 1890s rather than in Amsterdam in the 1640s.15 Thus, as Verhaeren envisioned him, Rembrandt alone battled the pharisaic many who challenged his art, not unlike Verhaeren himself or Ensor16 or Maeterlinck. Perhaps encouraged by his peers’ tumultuous history, Verhaeren found his own angry voice, not so much in his study on Rembrandt as in his study on Ensor, a publication of 1908 postdating the Rembrandt study by a few years. Characteristically, though Verhaeren’s Ensor was written with Ensor’s late work in mind, Verhaeren liberally inserts in its pages a long column on this most obstreperous master from an earlier 1886 review. Here he compares Brussels with an abattoir, a stinking slaughter house that slays its artists and splatters them with blood, a place where, with smoking entrails and stomachs’ slit, men like Ensor and all other fervent spokesmen for the new are suspended from meat hooks.17 That is la bêtise belge et bourgeoise,18 the senseless incomprehension and crude behavior of the Belgian public as it berates its own artists, its protean masters. La bêtise belge, as Verhaeren knew, was not unique to Belgium. Yet, as Verhaeren believed, the wrongs artists sustained, whether in Brussels or Leiden, readied them for the glories to come. We find this best expressed in his study on Ensor: It was because he was scoffed at, shouted down that his victory today seems to us so encouraging and so beautiful. Glory does not come by itself; it must be grabbed. She retreats behind a wall of hostilities and

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sarcasms. All true artists are genuine heroes. [An artist] must suffer (il faut qu’il souffre) before he can joyfully say to everyone that the day is his.19

Read out of context, these lines could easily be addressing Rembrandt. Il faut qu’il souffre—“He must suffer.” Indeed, had they not labeled him un fou, a madman, a man to be shunned? And yet for Verhaeren, this very epithet was far from pejorative. On the contrary, it meant talent, drive, “imagination.” Thus Verhaeren: “Had he [Rembrandt] not been a genius, they would have thought he was mad” (S’il n’était un genie, on le prendrait pour un fou).20 Indeed, were he not above the fray, they would have locked him away. Unquestionably, the Dutch, ever still and quiet, could not deal with someone who reels with joy in his studio, who is inebriated with his own labors ([qui] s’énivre de son métier),21 as Verhaeren phrased it. Who, after all, but a lunatic would blaspheme the past as Rembrandt would with his urinating Ganymede, reducing the latter to an over-fed tot pissing with fright before a scalding Zeus [Fig. 4-3].22 Or, turning to another more down–to-earth image, a man peeing, his penis in his hand [Fig. 4-4].23 Insensate images, fashioned, we can hear Rembrandt’s peers saying, only by un fou, a crazy lunatic. But if Rembrandt was unbalanced, so was Ensor. For Ensor, like Rembrandt, also shocked bourgeois sensibilities with scatological images, indiscreet images that Rembrandt had once favored himself---namely a man (Ensor himself), urinating against a wall [Fig. 4-5].24 But the wall against which Ensor is relieving himself has a bold graffiti scratched onto its surface, raw marks slandering the artist with a disparaging slur: Ensor est un fou, it says--a mocking aspersion that recalls the jeers Rembrandt sustained when his peers, according to his nineteenth century biographers, belittled him. But as we mull over this slight, we must not forget that Ensor himself chose to couple his selfportrait with this crude self-raillery, a self-imposed epithet that turns the tables around. For we find ourselves asking, who in truth is mad here? Is it the artist for his disquieting and disconcerting labor or is it the public for its adamant and unnerving rejection of all that is unconventional? A question that must have resonated with Verhaeren as he considered his Rembrandt. The conventions Rembrandt so blatantly flaunted could not be excused. Whereas Rembrandt, indépendant and farouche25 favored “an unbridled, fanciful and lustful life” (une vie spontanée, féerique et païenne),26 the Dutch petit bourgeois favored balance—the norm being “not too much, not too little” (ni trop, ni trop peu),27 and those few short words, syllables almost nipped in the bud, succinctly encapsulate “the ideal of this quiet being, ever moderate, slow, practical and bourgeois which lies at the core of

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Fig. 4-3. Rembrandt van Rijn, The Abduction of Ganymede, 1635

all true and authentic Dutchmen.”28 Thus abiding by prevailing stereotypes, the Dutch are seen as a people prone to silence, never favoring noise, excess or eccentricity. In short, anything out-of-the-way would earn the

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community’s disapproval; seen as unacceptable it would not be countenanced. Elaborating on their self-discipline, Verhaeren notes: Hardly a sound. All is as it should be, formal, fixed, stiff, pre-arranged. Life is comparable to a financial document: straight lines and numbers. . . . What these brave fellows fear the most is that in the future their monotony and starched existence may be threatened. If they embrace liberty in the abstract, they do not embrace it in fact. They liberate ideas, but enchain their flow.29

Fig. 4-4. Rembrandt van Rijn, Man Pissing, 1631

Rembrandt, as a free spirit, found these strictures inhibitive, restrictive. For him they were anathema. On the other hand, his peers could not accept his carefree ways, finding him vile, un monstre.30 Before us then is a polarized situation, one that places Rembrandt at one end of the scale and his peers at the other. Isolated and all but cast aside, Rembrandt was at odds with les petits maîtres néerlandais,31 the minor Dutch masters his peers so favored. Inoffensive and rather dull, albeit ever popular, they painted, as Verhaeren writes, “attractive and mundane subjects or filled

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their paintings with an easy gaiety, a roguish frolic, smut, farce and merry making. Heavy drinkers, studs in heat after the ladies. Gay dogs all.”32

Fig. 4-5. James Ensor, Man Pissing, Ensor est un Fou, 1887

Outside the fray, and not being a gay dog, Rembrandt terrorized them. “He seemed,” quoting Verhaeren, “too unlike them, too mysterious, too involved,”33 plaudits that insured his present isolation. Paradoxically, as

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Verhaeren exalted Rembrandt’s infinite reach, the very heights where Verhaeren rested his hero’s laurels necessarily distanced him away from his countrymen. Reduced to an outsider, existing on the margins, Rembrandt, as Verhaeren defined him, was constantly at odds with his peers: “Il leur est opposé; il est leur contraire”34—a succinct phrase that says that, whatever his fellow burghers believe or want, Rembrandt believes or wants otherwise. Contrariness is his hallmark. Thus, with Rembrandt’s views inimical to theirs, Rembrandt, as Verhaeren underscores time and again in his eponymous essay, signifies the other. Flaunting decorum, Rembrandt is the great nay-sayer, denying the values his peers value, accepting what they reject, favoring what they spurn. Thus, without apologies, Verhaeren frames the following equation, a relatively simple one: either Rembrandt embodies all that is Dutch or he does not; “[e]ither he embodies Holland or they do” ([o]u bien c’es lui qui exprime la Hollande, ou bien c’est eux)35—meaning les petits maîtres, Rembrandt’s all too familiar nemeses. Verhaeren’s stark divide, expressly alienating Rembrandt from his Dutch peers, is based on his reading of Hippolyte Taine. Taine’s la théorie tainienne as persuasively espoused in his Philosophie de l’art dans les pays bàs (1869) divides Europeans into Latins (especially Italians) and Northerners (those Taine casts as Celtic—namely Germans, Dutch and English).36 Favoring antithetical contrasts, Taine draws the following line: Latins are lively, imaginative and spontaneous, while Northerners—and here Taine emphasizes the Dutch—are slow, plodding and meticulous. Hence Taine says on life in Holland: There remains for us to show one last trait of their [the Dutch] demeanor that particularly shocks the southerners, I mean to say their dull comprehension and their sluggish movements . . . It seems that when one speaks to them, they do not understand . . . In the cafes and in the public trams, their sluggish ways and their staid features stand out; unlike us, they do not feel a need to stir, to talk; they can stay still for hours at a time with their thoughts and their pipes. In the evening, in Amsterdam, the ladies . . frozen in their chairs seemed like statues.37

Rembrandt, who was neither lent nor lourd (“dull” nor “sluggish”), could hardly bear the slow tenor of their lives, or so Verhaeren says. On the contrary, he was unruly, lively and exhaustingly vivacious—their very antitheses. Unable to restrain himself, Rembrandt “went beyond all limits . . . he distanced, clashed and upset everyone. And he went to extremes in everything he did.”38 No wonder they thought he was a monster, or should we say a lunatic! Just look at how he treated his first wife, Saskia. Quelle

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folie, what madness, what extreme, Verhaeren asks, did he not commit to please her?39 But where most nineteenth century critics disparaged Rembrandt’s much publicized purchases, Verhaeren lauded his spendthrift ways. Surely his views ran counter to the prevailing views---one that saw him as an unrepentant miser addicted to gold. A long forgotten painting of 1838 by one Jules-Jean-Baptiste Dehaussy tells it all [Fig. 4-6].40 Depicting Rembrandt on his death bed, it shows a fleshy and ever lascivious Rembrandt—his torso exposed when it should be demurely covered— asking a woman by his side (is it Hendrickje?)41 to uncover the wooden floor boards by his bed so that he may gaze once more at the sacks of gold he has so avariciously hoarded through the years. And now with his treasures before him, he can expire with a miser’s joy, fingering in his mind’s eye his beloved gold. Verhaeren, however, questioned these legends. Indeed, what so many found despicable in Rembrandt, Verhaeren, on the contrary, found commendable. In short, Verhaeren lauded Rembrandt’s unconventional behavior, viewing his singular ways as proof of his generous spirit. There is no better example of this than Verhaeren’s reading of Rembrandt’s Night Watch [Fig. 4-7], a commission of sizable dimension painted at the height of his career.42 And yet, for Verhaeren (and his peers), the Night Watch with its proud assembly of burghers was a difficult canvas, one Verhaeren could barely comprehend. Indeed, quoting Verhaeren: “Never has a canvas appeared more enigmatic . . . or confusing.”43 How are we to understand it, to know [j]ust when, why and in what order, and in what city had these men come together? . . . Why these mirrors hanging from pillars? No one has yet unraveled the myriad knots of this enigma. Conjectures lead us nowhere, and one can only ask oneself if Rembrandt knew what he was doing.44

Faced with questions beyond his ken, Verhaeren, given his own penchant for the abstruse, arrives at an arresting conclusion, one that smacks of the fin de siècle—namely, that Rembrandt did not paint what was before him (an assembly of eminent burghers gathered for their portraits) but something he imagined, painted, as it were, with his eyes closed. Who, after all, would dare translate a civic commission bustling with people of import into a setting so personal? Hence Verhaeren’s conclusion: “It is possible that he [Rembrandt] only painted a dream” (Il est possible qu’il n’ait traduit qu’un rêve).45 Only a mad man would dare do so. Indeed, Verhaeren asks, was Rembrandt aware of what he was doing, [ce qu’]il traitait]? Was he so inebriated with his own art that he painted his Night Watch in a trance, drugged with joy?

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Fig. 4-6. Jules-Jean-Baptiste Dehaussy, Last Moments of Rembrandt, He Asks to See His Treasures Once More Before

Verhaeren was not alone in this. Others were equally nonplussed by the painting. Eugène Fromentin, a painter and essayist, had visited les pays bàs in the 1870s and had stood before the Night Watch. His impressions are recorded in his Les Maîtres d’autrefois.46 Rembrandt, for Fromentin, was a genius, but a most “bizarre”47 one—a cryptic and somewhat pejorative adjective that finds a recurrent place in Fromentin’s study. Rembrandt for Fromentin was lost in his own fantasies, living in a dark cell of “bizarre reveries” ([il] vivait dans un milieu de rêveries bizarres).48 Indeed, somewhat too bizarre for his taste, Fromentin does not hesitate to fault Rembrandt for the very qualities Verhaeren lauds. This is most apparent if one compares their approach to the Night Watch, and in particular, their readings of a personage clad in yellow, a rather smallish woman who turns her gaze towards the spectator [Fig. 4-8]. Surrounded by staunch burghers she raises a host of questions. Whom might she be? Why is she there? Verhaeren’s answer tells us much about Verhaeren: She is, he

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writes, a sorte de princesse vêtue d’or et de soie,49 a princess clad in gold and silk raiments who has lost her way onto the canvas. Rembrandt inadvertently painted her, we may conclude, since he was—returning to Verhaeren’s position mentioned above—barely aware of what he was doing as he was painting his Night Watch. Fromentin’s position was otherwise. Far from Verhaeren’s “princess of sorts,” he sees her as “barely human,” a “grotesque’ and “shapeless” gnome,50 a low life creature “from the Jewish ghetto, a foul figure from the theatre or la bohème.”51 For all the world, she looks like a beggar wearing rags, “des loques.”52 Unattractive and benighted (her bearing dull and without character),53 this petite personne, wizened and child-like and at home between men’s legs, carries about her, says Fromentin, a dangling white rooster that can be mistaken for a money-belt.54 A cheap tart, she is unmistakably bizarre, as bizarre as those misshapen misers from the ghetto, Jews who like Rembrandt never tire of counting their gold.55

Fig. 4-7. Rembrandt van Rijn, The Night Watch, 1642

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Verhaeren’s naine des légende, on the contrary, belongs to a totally different order: she speaks of wonder, of fabled lore, of bed-time stories to wide eyed children. And so as Verhaeren tells it, she appears with unexpected éclat amidst the assembled burghers, an untoward fairy who has strayed onto Rembrandt’s grand canvas. Certainly, whoever and whatever she is, she is not, for Verhaeren, a misshapen Jewess56 with a money belt---a caricature of greed as Fromentin would have her. Unlike his nineteenth century predecessors, with Fromentin in the lead, Verhaeren would not sully his exalted view of Rembrandt with such bald tall-tales. But vile, mean and degrading stories followed Rembrandt well into the days of the Dreyfus affair when anti-Dreyfusards, especially Éduard Drumond, did all but equate Dreyfus with Rembrandt. For as Dreyfus—a Jew whose fate stirred decades of debate in France and Belgium—was accused of selling France’s treasured military secrets for a price, so Rembrandt was accused of selling out his friends and his family for money.57 Jews, it was widely believed, had no compunction to amass gold; they would do whatever it takes to fill their coffers, or so Drumond’s vastly popular La France juive said. First published in 1886 and still widely read in France in 1900, Drumond’s offensive pages course with encyclopedic-breadth from one anti-semitic incident to another, cheap tawdry tales that demean their targets, unsuspecting and unwary subjects like Rembrandt.58 Forever lusting after gold, Rembrandt, according to Drumond, naturally congregated with Jews, for like them he was inordinately miserly, valuing that precious metal above all else. Even his canvases, Drumond tells us in a truly inventive burst of anti-Jewish fantasy, favored yellow because yellow is the color of gold. As Drumond tells it: Rembrandt’s “art has a Jewish color, it is yellow, a warm and passionate yellow that recalls the glint of gold.”59 But Drumond’s spiteful rhetoric does not end here, quite to the contrary. Having dragged ces juifs de Rembrandt through dark, dank and dreary alleys, he settles them outside a Jewish house of worship, “chatting on the day’s business leaving the synagogue, discussing the worth of the florin,”60 calumniations that are especially incendiary in that this exchange is happening on the Sabbath within the shadows of a holy site for Jews. All this leads to Drumond’s startling conclusion: if you want to know what Jews are really like, look at Rembrandt: “It’s Rembrandt that one must contemplate, study, scrutinize, search and analyze to get a good look at the Jew” (C’est Rembrandt qu’il faut . . . contempler, étudier, scruter, fouiller, analyser si l’on veut bien voir le Juif).61 And the awful sight that

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appears after scrounging through his dirty linen is a miser who hoards everything from gold to bibelots. This, in effect, defines Rembrandt: . . . Rembrandt constantly lived with Jews. His atelier bursting with objets d’arts, a veritable hodge-podge of fabrics, stuff and trinkets of all sorts, look like a small second-hand shop of minor goods where somewhere lost in its recesses one can discern after a while—for one’s eyes need to get adjusted to the mess—a sordid old man with a hooked nose.62

Fig. 4-8. Rembrandt van Rijn, The Night Watch, (detail), 1642

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By likening Rembrandt’s atelier to a pawnshop inhabited by a grotesque old man with a hooked nose, Drumond is but a step away from saying that Rembrandt is in fact, like most Jews, one of those insipid beings who, with their fameux nez recourbé, might well have “one arm shorter than the other” (un bras plus court que l’autre).63 Then, covering his tracks, Drumond readily excuses his outrageous remarks by suggesting that they are based on learned treatises, citing Lavater’s infamous eighteenth century physiognomic studies as the basis for his own remarks64—a source we posit known to Fromentin as he reduced the girlish woman in Rembrandt’s Night Watch to a figure “who has nothing human about her” and is but “a shapeless . . . being.”65 How far Verhaeren’s vision of Rembrandt is from all this! Where Rembrandt’s nineteenth century critics reduced Rembrandt to a greedy, closefisted miser whose life circled around money, Jews and endless acquisitions, Verhaeren saw Rembrandt’s passion for amassing objects— silks, furs, Medieval armor, Oriental costumes, Italian prints and much more—as a way to deny the circumscribing limits of his environment and immerse himself in a world de féerie et de chimère.66 And so, living with luxurious, wondrous and enchanting objects, Rembrandt, for Verhaeren, distances himself from his own quotidian reality to enter a fairy-land world where naines lurk, unknown tracks peopled with inventive, rewarding and consoling chimeras. Apart, ostracized from his peers and familiar with l’étrange et le surnaturel, Rembrandt was for Verhaeren an illuminée, a seer or a mad-man. Living in his own dreams, and well aware that “the dream he bears within himself ”67 defines himself (as it defined Verhaeren’s peers---Ensor and Maeterlinck immediately come to mind), Verhaeren proclaimed a loud trumpeting call that lauded Rembrandt’s caprices without apologies. With Rembrandt’s world reduced “to a world of make-believe” (il vit dans un monde de rêve),68 Verhaeren could justly call Rembrandt un fou, but as he understood the epithet, un fou was an honorific, a label one could be proud of rather than a slur and one he would gladly apply to himself as well as to his hero.

List of Illustrations Fig. 4-1. Rembrandt van Rijn, Self Portrait as Beggar Sneering, 1630, Etching, New York, Pierpont Morgan Library/ Art Resource, New. Fig. 4-2. Émile Verhaeren, Cover for Verhaeren’s Rembrandt, 1904, Boulder, Collection of the University of Colorado, Norlin Library. Fig. 4-3. Rembrandt van Rijn, The Abduction of Ganymede, 1635, Oil, Dresden, Gemälde galerie/Art Resource, New York.

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Fig. 4-4. Rembrandt van Rijn, Man Pissing, 1631, Etching, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale./ Art Resource, New York. Fig. 4-5. James Ensor, Man Pissing, Ensor est un Fou, 1887, Etching, Private collection/Art Resource, New York. Fig. 4-6. Jules-Jean-Baptiste Dehaussy, Last Moments of Rembrandt, He Asks to See His Treasures Once More Before Dying, Salon of 1838, Oil, Location unknown, (photo: from Alison McQueen, The Rise of the Cult of Rembrandt, Amsterdam Univ. Press, 130.) Fig. 4-7. Rembrandt van Rijn, The Night Watch, 1642, Oil, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum/Art Resource, New York. Fig. 4-8. Rembrandt van Rijn, The Night Watch, (detail), 1642, Oil, Amsterdam, Rijksmusem/Art Resource, New York .

Notes 1

For a detailed exegesis of these indiscretions see Alison McQueen, The Rise of the Cult of Rembrandt: Reinventing an Old Master in Nineteenth Century France (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003). 2 For these early self-portraits and the one we reproduce here from the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, see Simon Schama’s Rembrandt Eyes (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), 295-306; also see Kenneth Clark, Rembrandt and the Italian Renaissance (New York: New York University Press, 1964), 7, where Clark views Rembrandt in our print as “snarling at the prosperous bourgeois society” that rendered him famous with its commissions. 3 Published in 1904 with more than twenty plates, Verhaeren’s monograph on Rembrandt was soon followed by an extensive study on James Ensor (1908) and then one on Peter Paul Rubens (1910). Although Verhaeren’s Rembrandt is often cited in Verhaeren bibliographies, it has not found a place in Rembrandt studies. Largely unknown to Dutch seventeenth century scholars, it was rarely cited and hardly explored in late nineteenth century studies on Verhaeren studies. A case in point is Stefan Zweig’s Émile Verhaeren, sa vie, son oeuvre (trans. Paul Morisse and Henri Chervet, Paris: Mercure de France, 1910) where Verhaeren’s text is skimmed over at best. This in turn is especially perplexing since Zweig was most familiar with Verhaeren’s publication and even translated it for Insel-Verlag in 1912. Prior to Zweig’s publication, Rainer Maria Rilke rejected translating Verhaeren’s text for he did not feel comfortable with the latter’s prose. For a meticulous reconstruction of the history of Zweig’s translation and publication see Fabrice Van De Kerchove’s exacting Verhaeren-Zweig correspondence (Brussels:Labor, 1996), 77. For a recent reprint of Verhaeren’s text see Paul Aron, ed. 2 vols., Émile Verhaeren. Écrits sur l’art (1881-1916) (Brussels: Labor, 1997), 820-856; for an English translation see my own Émile Verhaeren: Essays on the Northern Renaissance, Rembrandt, Rubens, Grünewald and Others (New York: Peter Lang, 2012), 55-92.

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Verhaeren cites Taine very early in his book, clearly pitting his own reading of Rembrandt’s against Taine’s influential mid-century study of the artist. Also, although neither Blanc nor Fromentin are cited in the text, it is hardly credible that Verhaeren would not have been familiar with their work on the Dutch master from Leiden. 5 Verhaeren Rembrandt, as in Aron’s Émile Verhaeren, Écrits sur l’art, 2:822. Herewith all my quotes from Verhaeren’s text refer to Paul Aron’s two volume anthology of Verhaeren’s writings on art. 6 As early as the opening decades of the eighteenth century Rembrandt was reviled for his vulgar cupidity. See Arnould Houbraken’s pages on Rembrandt in his The Great Theatre of circa 1717-18. For Houbraken and Rembrandt see H.J. Horn, 2 vols, The Golden Age Revisited: Arnold Houbraken’s: Great Theatre of Netherlandish painters and Paintresses (Amsterdam: Davaco Publishers, 2000), 458ff. To cite but one of many examples, Rembrandt was so cheap that he would not even buy food when needed. Thus, according to Houbraken, “when he [Rembrandt] was at his work, often he had a piece of bread with cheese or pickled herring for his meal” (see Horn, 1:475). Rembrandt’s snarly personality is also key to Joachim von Sandrart’s 1675 biography of the artist. 7 For an exceedingly close study of Verhaeren’s struggles defining himself and his oeuvre within Belgium’s literary circles see Jacques Marx, Verhaeren. Biographie d’une oeuvre (Brussels: Académie Royale de Langue et de Littérature française, 1996). 8 Reminiscing on those battles of yore, Verhaeren as late as 1908 could still vividly recall the struggles of the 1880s and early 1890s: “Jamais les polémiques d’art ne furent aussi vive, aussi ardentes, aussi impitoyables. On frappait des poings sauvages . . . on était fier d’être partial et féroce”—cited in Verhaeren’s study on Ensor and reprinted in Aron, “Ensor,” Écrits sur l’art, 2:874; for further accounts of the difficulties Belgian artists encountered vis-à-vis the press see Madeleine Octave Maus, Trente années de lutte pour l’art, Les XX, la Libre Esthétique (Brussels: L’Oiseau bleu, 1926), 26-27; and Jane Block, Les XX and Belgian Avant-Gardism, 1868-1894 (Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1984). 9 For a detailed study of Verhaeren’s commitment to the arts see the excellent catalogue Émile Verhaeren, un musée imaginaire, with Marc Quaghebeur ed., and numerous authors in Les Dossiers du musée d’Orsay, no. 65 (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1997). 10 To quote Verhaeren’s study on Ensor once more, not only was Belgium hostile aux lettres, but he and his cohorts could hardly believe that the Philistines had backed down, the establishment was under siege and they all were elated: “Les coutumes furent à tel point bousculées, les réputations assises à tel point secouées sur leur sièges, qu’il y eut comme un tremblement de cervaux. On n’osait y croire; on n’y croyait pas” (Aron, Écrits, 873-74). 11 Ibid, 821, Verhaeren, Rembrandt, as in Aron’s Écrits sur l’art. 12 Ibid. 13 For a detailed survey of these battles extending to Verhaeren’s understanding of Manet and the Impressionists, see especially Fabrice van de Kerckhove,

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“Verhaeren. La lutte pour l’art dans les années 1880-1890,” in Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai, Philologia, vol. 36, no.1-2, 1991, 95-110. 14 Verhaeren, Rembrandt as in Aron, 821. 15 Students of Verhaeren have even seen the latter’s study of Rembrandt as an exercise in autobiography. Hence Marville de Ponchevin’s observes: “Le poète se recontre avec le peintre [Rembrandt] . . . comme avec quelq’un de sa race . . . Mieux encore: il s’identifie à lui, si bien que la biographie qu’il écrit resemble en plus d’un endroit une autobiographie.” Mabille de Poncheville, Vie de Verhaeren (Paris: Mercure de France, 1953), 391. 16 For an in-depth critique of Ensor in light of Verhaeren’s Rembrandt, see Marc Quaghebeur “Verhaeren, critique d’Ensor et de Rembrandt,” in Émile Verhaeren, Poète-Dramaturge-Critique, Peter-Eckhard Knabe and Raymond Trousson eds., (Brussesl: Editions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 1983), 107-125. 17 Verhaeren’s vitriol seems boundless. Thus we find the following quote from 1886 in his 1908 study on Ensor: “. . . le cerveau bourgeois se dégorge par toutes ses circomvolutions. . . . Cela rapelle des operations d’abattoir. Le porc est tué, il est suspendu, ventre ouvert, à des tringles grossières, les boyaux sont jétés sur l’étal, fumants et flasques,” See Aron, “Ensor,” in Écrits sur l’art, 1:239—angry words that Verhaeren first published in his “Les Salon des XX,” La Jeune Belgique, 5 March 1886. For further discussion of this passage stressing Ensor’s isolation see Albert Alhadeff, “Fétis’s coup de lance: Ensor and Émile Littré,” in Hommage, Robert Hoozee (Ghent: Museum voor Schone Kunsten, 2012), 114-17. 18 For this quote and a discussion of Verhaeren’s smoldering anger towards the bourgeois, see Alhadeff, Émile Verhaeren, 2-5; 19 Verhaeren, Ensor as in Aron, 2: 872-73: “C’est parce qu’il fut bafoué, nié, vilipendé jadis que sa victoire aujourd’hui nous apparaît si consolante et si belle. La gloire ne se livre pas; elle se prend d’assaut. Elle se retranche derrière une muraille d’hostilités et de sarcasmes. Tout artiste vrai est un héros ingénu. Il faut qu’il souffre pour qu’un jour il ait la joie d’imposer à tous sa victorieuse personnalité totale.” 20 Verhaeren Rembrandt as in Aron, 2:846. 21 Ibid. 22 Discussing Rembrandt’s “mischievous relish” with his Ganymede (1635, at the Gemälde galerie in Dresden), Simon Schama indulges in his own mischievous relish with the hyperbolic statement that with Rembrandt’s Ganymede we witness a “most memorable micturation,” one unsurpassed “in northern history painting.” Schama, Rembrandt’s Eyes (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), 412. 23 Rembrandt’s startling if not salacious etching has its complement in a woman squatting, skirt up and urinating. Both prints date from 1631. For reproductions where the two are seen side by side see McQueen, The Rise of the Cult of Rembrandt, p. 35 and figs. 3 and 4. 24 Ensor’s print, signed and dated 1887, relies on a rich Northern tradition of indecorous representations. Not only does it refer back to Rembrandt’s print, but to other seventeenth century profane depictions, namely Jacques Callot’s Pisseur. For

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this comparison see Robert Hoozee and Sabine Brown-Tavernier, James Ensor, dessins et estampes (Antwerp: Fonds Mercator, 1987), Fig. 160, 222. 25 Verhaeren Rembrandt as in Aron, 2:822. 26 Ibid., 2:825 27 Ibid., 2:822 28 Ibid: “l’déal même de cet être tranquille, modéré, lent, pratique et bourgeois qu’est au fond tout vrai et authentique Hollandais.” 29 Ibid., 2:825.: “Peu de bruit. Tout est régulier, compassé, fixé, prévu. La vie y est tenue comme un papier commercial: lignes droites et chiffres . . . Ce que ces novateurs rapidement assagis redoutent le plus, c’est qu’à l’avenir on dérange encore la monotonie compassée et textuelle de leur existence. S’ils admettent la liberté dans la pensée, ils n’admettent point la liberté dans la conduite. Ils libèrent les idées, mais enchaînent les actes.” 30 Ibid., 2:823.: “Rembrandt est un monstre aux yeux de la masse.” 31 Ibid., 2:822 where Verhaeren’s list of petits maîtres includes: “les Metsu, les Terburg, les Pieter de Hooge ou bien les Brauwer, les Steen, les Craesbeeck, les Van Ostade . . .” (ibid., 820). 32 Ibid., 2:822.: “[ils] peignaient des sujets gracieux et mondains, ou bien instauraient dans leurs toiles la gaité facile, l’espièglerie, la grivoiserie, la farce, la fête. Leur humeur était celle des buveurs francs, des lurons échauffés, des coureurs de filles. Ils étaient bons enfans.” 33 Ibid. 2:822.: “Il apparaissait trop extraordinaire, trop mystérieux, trop grand.” 34 Ibid., 2:821. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid., where at the outset of his essay on Rembrandt, Verhaeren suggests that Rembrandt’s peers had a choice---deux antithèses, is how Verhaeren phrases it— namely, follow Rembrandt’s way or their own a la Taine. 37 Hippolyte Taine, Philosophie de l’art dans le pays-bas, 2 vols. (Paris: Librarie Hachette, 1890), 1:261-62.: “Il reste à montrer dans leurs dehors un dernier trait qui choque particulièrement les méridionaux, je veux dire la lenteur et la lourdeur de leurs impressions et de leurs mouvements. . . . Il semble, quant on leur parle, qu’ils ne comprennent pas . . . Aux cafés, dans les wagons, le flegme et l’immobilité des traits son frappants; ils n’éprouvent pas comme nous le besoin de se remuer, de causer; ils peuvent rester fixes, pendant des heures entières, en têteà-tête avec leur pensée ou leur pipe. En soirée, à Amsterdam, des dames parées comme des châsses, immobiles dans leur fauteuils, semblaient des statues.” Taine’s study of 1869 was based on lectures presented the year before at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. 38 Verhaeren, Rembrandt, as in Aron 2:822. “[Il] traversait les cloisons des conventions. . . . Il froissait, heurtait, et bouleversait. En tout, il allait jusqu’au bout.” 39 Ibid., 2:826 40 The full title of Dehaussy’s canvas highlights the same. Shown at the Salon of 1838 as no. 441 it bore the title, Last Moments of Rembrandt, He Asks to See his

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Treasure Once More Before Dying; see McQueen, The Rise of the Cult of Rembrandt, 129-28 41 We say Hendrickje Stoffels and not Saskia, for Saskia had died years before Rembrandt was to pass away. Hendrickje bore Rembrandt a daughter in 1654 when he himself was busy amassing all sorts of objects for his house in spite of his creditors who were aghast at his expenses. 42 Verhaeren had traveled to Amsterdam in 1898 where he had seen the Night Watch (1642) amidst a sizable exhibition of Dutch art. 43 Verhaeren, Rembrandt in Aron, 2:836.: “La Ronde de nuit, et jamais oeuvre n’apparut aussi énigmatique . . . et aussi bouleversante.” 44 Ibid.: “A quelle heure, pour quel motif, dans quel ordre, en quelle ville ces hommes sont-ils réunis? . . . Pourquoi ces miroirs pendus à des piliers? Personne n’a pu jusqu’à présent dénouer les milles noeuds de cette énigme. On se heurte aux conjectures et l’on peut se demander si Rembrandt lui-même a su quel sujet il traitait.” 45 Ibid. 46 One cannot do better for a general introduction to Fromentin than to turn to Meyer Schapiro’s 1963 study, “Eugène Fromentin as Critic,” as reprinted in Meyer Schapiro, Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society, Selected Papers (New York: George Braziller, 1994), 103-134. 47 Eugène Fromentin, Les Maîtres d’autrefois. Belgique—Hollande, (Paris: Nelson, 1875), 310 where he calls Rembrandt “ce génie bizarre.” 48 Ibid., 49 Verharen as in Aron, 2:836 50 Fromentin , 290.: “[C]ette figurine affecte de n’avoir rien d’humain. Elle est incolore, presque informe.” 51 Ibid., “On dirait qu’elle vient de la juiverie, de la friperie, du théâtre ou de la bohème.” 52 Ibid.: “Elle a des allures de mendiante . . . avec un accoutrement qui ressemble à des loques.” 53 Ibid., “Sa taille est celle d’une poupée et sa démarche est automatique.” 54 Ibid., “[J]e veux parler de cette petite personne à mine de sorcière, enfantine et vieillotte . . . qui se glisse on sait trop pourquoi entre les jambes des gardes, et qui, détail non moins inexplicable, porte pendu à sa ceinture un coq blanc qu’on prendrait à la rigueur pour une escarcelle.” 55 This most pejorative reading of this golden lady in the Night Watch curiously does not find a voice in Schapiro’s reconstruction of Fromentin’s study on Rembrandt and Dutch painting. As a Jew, Schapiro might not have wanted to call attention to Fromentin’s anti-Semitism since it might have drawn attention to his own faith and his scholarly objectivity. Schapiro does note however that Fromentin was highly critical of Rembrandt if only because he preferred Rubens, “the kind of artist [he] would have liked to be.” See Schapiro, “Fromentin as Critic,” 122-23. 56 Surely, many other nineteenth century critics readily disparaged Jews. Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), for one, certainly held his own in this infamous league,

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viewing Jews as grotesques with “three legs” or “paws”—un juif à trois pattes. See his Les sept viellards from 1859. 57 For the history of Rembrandt as an avaricious miser, see McQueen, The Rise of the Cult of Rembrandt, 42-46. 58 Éduard Drumond, La France juive: Essai d’histoire contemporaine, 2 vols. (Paris: Marpon et Flammarion, 1886). 59 Drumond, 1:202-03.: “Son oeuvre a la couleur juive, elle est jaune de ce jaune ardent et chaud qui semble comme le reflet de l’or . . .” 60 Ibid., 1:202.: “ces juifs de Rembrandt causant d’affaires au sortir de la synagogue, s’entretenant du cours du florin . . .” 61 Ibid. 62 Ibid.,: “. . . Rembrandt vécu constamment avec Israël. Son atelier même, encombré d’objets d’art, véritable capharnaum d’étoffes et de bibelots, ressemble à ces boutiques de brocanteurs au fond desquelles l’oeil un moment désorienté finit par distinguer un vieillard sordide au nez crochu.” 63 Ibid., 1:34 where Drumond repeats with relish what has long been said of Jews: “Les principaux signes auxquels ont peut reconnaître les Juifs restent donc: ce fameux nez recourbé, les yeux clignotants, les dents serrées, les oreilles saillantes, les ongles carrés . . . le torse trop long . . . Ils ont assez souvent un bras plus court que l’autre.” 64 Ibid. The Lavater in question is Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741-1801), whose writings on physiognomy often disparage Jews, or so scholars have recently deplored. 65 See above fn. 50. 66 Verhaeren, Rembrandt as in Aron, 2:841. 67 Ibid., 2:832 where Verhaeren speaks time and again in his biography of Rembrandt of “le rêve intérieur qu’il porte en lui.” 68 Ibid., 2:826.

Fig. 4-7. Rembrandt van Rijn, The Night Watch, 1642, Oil, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum

Fig. 4-8. Rembrandt van Rijn, The Night Watch, (detail), 1642, Oil, Amsterdam, Rijksmusem

Fig. 2-1. Mikhail Vrubel, The Demon Seated, oil on canvas, 114 x 211 cm, 1890, The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

Fig. 2-3. Mikhail Vrubel, Portrait of a Girl Against a Persian Carpet (detail), oil on canvas, 104cm x x 68cm, 1886, Museum of Russian Art (Tereshchenko Museum), Kyiv, Ukraine

Fig. 2-4. Michail Vrubel, The Demon Flying, oil on canvas, 158 x 430.5 cm 1889, The State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg

Fig. 2-5. Mikhail Vrubel, The Demon Crashed, oil on canvas, 139 x 387 cm, 1902, The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

Fig. 2-6. Mikhail Vrubel, Savva Vrubel, The Artist’s Son Savva, oil on canvas, 138.5 x 430.5 cm, 1902, The State Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg

PART TWO: MADNESS IN LITERATURE

CHAPTER FIVE NABOKOV AND PSYCHIATRY: THE CASE OF LUZHIN1 NORA BUKHS

It is hard to find a writer who would be equal to Nabokov in contempt for psychoanalysis. “All my books should be stamped: Freudians, keep out,” he wrote in 1963. Nabokov pitilessly satirized psychoanalysis, calling it “the patent tool” and “Freud for everybody.” “Wherever you look, there is sex.” Nabokov wrote in his essay “What everyone should know” in 1931: Philologists would confirm that expressions such as “falling barometer,” “fallen leaf,” and “fallen horse” all are unconscious allusions to the fallen woman. Compare as well inn cleaner (polovoi) or floor rug (polovaia triapka) with the question of sex (pol). To this we could also add words such as half-a-year (pol goda), half-sapling (pol-sazheni), colonel (polkovnik), etc.2

In psychoanalysis the writer saw a simplifying attempt to categorize individuality, making the subjective accessible to everyone. He understood psychoanalysis as a barbaric destruction of imagery and of the multivalence of the word. Using different words, Nabokov refused to see, as Freud suggested, to the bottom of “his transparent things.” While mocking psychoanalysis, Nabokov manifested a sharp interest in psychopathology. Most of all, the characters of his own books are testimony to that fact, since at close analysis many of them could easily qualify as patients of mental institutions. These could be main or secondary characters but they are present in nearly each novel.3 The mental distortions that appear in Nabokov’s novels strike by their variety. From his texts it becomes clear that, in the writer’s understanding, psychotics contrast with neurotics as more colorful individuals. 4 For Nabokov, the world of consciousness, the inner and mental world, is the reservoir of creative possibilities, ranging from subjects and structural

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constructions of the text to the re-creation of the artistic view in it, conditioned by psychological anomalies. Thus, one of the leading methods of his poetics—the dilution of borders between arts, languages, genres, processes of creativity, text with text, and text with non-text—was shaped, probably, by the pattern of delirium, and Nabokov used it already during his Russian period. 5 One of the early manifestations of that method is present in his short story “The Venetian Woman” written in September 1924. Psychological deviations are also the theme in “Sogliadai,” “The Magician,” and Despair. They shape poetics in the novel King, Queen, Jack. The effects of hallucinations are described in the novels Mary, Gift, and Invitation to the Beheading. The phenomena of autoscopy could be found in Despair (especially in its English version). It is important to remember that Nabokov’s creativity was based on profound knowledge of what he describes. His artistic technique, in all its rich variety, is always based on exact scientific characteristics. It seems certain that important subtexts of Nabokov’s works lie not only in literature and art, or in memoirs and biographies, but also in the sciences, and especially in works on psychology. Nonetheless, up to now, Nabokov specialists avoided the study of influences from psychology, probably because of writer’s harsh utterances directed toward psychoanalysis.6 It is known how thoroughly Nabokov was hiding his sources. To reconstruct a partial list of books he read is possible through the traditional path, viz. through the archives. But often it is more productive to attempt such discovery through the text. In my article I will discuss Nabokov’s novel The Luzhin Defense, written in 1929. My thesis is that the basis of the novel is the model of autism as then recently studied and described in medical studies. It is this model that determines the artistic technique of Nabokov’s novel. I do not intend to diagnose the literary hero. The purpose of my work is to study how psychopathological characteristics have been transformed via literary methods and how the autistic way of thinking has become the organizing principle of the novel. I would like to highlight the principal line of Nɚbokov’s poetics, which, in my opinion, is essential for understanding his work. I believe that Nabokov’s poetics can be grasped by his elaborate choice of a different model for each separate text. The model determines the construction of the entire work, starting with the intricacy of the structure and compositional decisions up to the development of the story, characters, reminiscences, and wordplay. The variety of Nabokov’s models is large and unexpected. For instance, for the novel King, Queen and Jack the model is the waltz while

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for the novel The Gift the model is “ɚbove the form” (ɫɜɟɪɯ ɮɨɪɦɚ) as then being elaborated in the Russian Avant Garde. This latter model could be found in works of Khlebnikov, in his so-called sverkhpovest (above the novella), and it is the case of Nabokov’s sverkhroman (above the novel). It allows reading the text as a story from the beginning of any chapter but it hides the true beginning within the literary work, like the key in the house. In The Gift the true beginning is located in chapter four. For the novel Despair, the model is the portrait. For the novel Mary (Mashen’ka), the model is the poetic metaphor of the impossible love between nightingale and rose, a subject Byron introduced to European literature, and then reused by the Russian poet Afanasi Fet. 7 Using this structure as an interpretive proposal, I suggest that Nabokov uses as a model for The Luzhin Defense the autistic way of thinking, a psychopathological phenomenon, which appeared in medical literature shorty before the publication of the novel. Before I demonstrate my ideas using the text, I would like to give a brief history of the illness. The author of the term “autism” (from ancient Greek auto) was E. Bleuler, a famous Swiss psychiatrist, professor of the Zurich University, and a director of this university’s clinic for the mentally ill. His colleagues and assistants were K. Jung (for nine years), E. Minkovsky, A. Ei and others. In fact it was Bleuler who introduced Freud’s psychoanalysis into the academy and who encouraged rapprochement between Jung and Freud. Bleuler himself was a specialist in clinical pathology. For many years he studied the illness which E. Kraepelin, another important psychopathologist, called “dementia praecox.” In 1911 Bleuler published his famous work Dementia praecox oder Gruppe der Schizophrenien (Early Dimentia, or A Group of Schizophrenia), in which he was the first to use the new scientific term schizophrenia, from the ancient Greek words schizo, to split, and phren, reason. Here he explained in detail the essential aspects of this illness. He defined schizophrenia as a psychological illness whose symptoms (delirium, hallucinations, and disturbance of affective functions) lead toward disintegration of the personality. According to Bleuler, schizophrenic thinking is characterized by modified perception of reality. It appears as something archaic, incapable of distinguishing what appears in consciousness from what is really real. Its main features are disconnection from reality and lack of capacity for performing logical assessment. Bleuler’s main innovation was in announcing that the known symptoms of this illness were secondary and in fact incidental whereas, according to Kraepelin, up to then they were perceived as primary. Bleuler believed that the real primary symptoms of schizophrenia were hidden. E.

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Kretschmer, one of the founders of constitutional psychology, wrote Construction of the Body and Character in 1922 while clearly under the influence of Bleuler’s ideas: The schizoid individual shows only his psychological superficies, the same way as does the person mentally ill with schizophrenia. Given that reason, for many years up to now medical science only saw in dementia praecox affective stupidity and bizarre mental retardants and impairments. . . . Only Bleuler found a key to the inner life of the person mentally ill with schizophrenia and opened the door for the discovery of this astonishing psychology.8

For Bleuler there were four main symptoms of schizophrenia: disturbed affectivity, disturbed associativity, ambivalent behavior (i.e. contradictory reactions), and autism. According to Bleuler, autism is a direct consequence of schizophrenic logic in its lack of conformity. When one suffers mental retardation as a result of weakening associations, one’s affective mechanisms create a new management and organization of thoughts. The principle of pleasure becomes the determining factor for the person, rejecting everything that is unpleasant and sustaining everything pleasant. The French psychiatrist Henry Ey wrote in 1926 that this is autism as the foundation for a split from the outside world. Bleuler wrote in 1911: “We call autism the escape from reality with, at the same time, relative or absolute predominance of the inner life.” 9 In other words, autism is an illness that takes over psychic life in order for the individual’s inner life to become a closed system; this is a condition of isolation. “The autistic world,” Bleuler wrote, “is as real as reality itself. It can be more real than the outside world. The content of autistic thought consists of wishes and fears. The most important role is played by symbolism.”10 Bleuler’s work had great success and very soon was translated into many languages, including Russian. In 1911 Carl Gustav Jung wrote the article “Critics of the Theory of Bleuler’s schizophrenic negativism.” In that article, Jung notes that Bleuler’s autism is equal to Freud’s self eroticism (see “Three Articles on Theory of Sexuality”). Jung himself, in order to define this psychic symptom, suggested the term of “introversion.” Nonetheless, in the history of psychiatry it is Bleuler’s term that became established. In 1919 Bleuler published a book Undisciplined Autistic Thinking in Medicine and Its Overcoming. The book provoked a scandal, and during two years it was republished three times. Also famous is Bleuler’s essay “Autistic Thinking.” His other work on autism was published in 1922 as an annex to his book Affectivity,

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Hypnosis and Paranoia. The description of autism became a part of Bleuler’s famous textbook The Manual of Psychiatry (first edition 1916, in Russian—1920). Autism as a term and a concept was rapidly picked up and spread through psychiatry and philosophy. About Bleuler’s discovery the philosopher and the psychiatrist K. Jaspers wrote in his famous book General Psychopathology in 1913: We detach ourselves from reality with the help of fantasies, easily and generously awaking in us everything that in real life is reached with such a great effort and with such a great degree of incompleteness. . . . Despite their unreality, fantasies bring us a relief. That self-incarceration in one’s own isolated little world Bleuler designates with the term of autistic thinking.11 . . . That kind of consciousness is “directed within, concentrated on proper fantasies without any relation to reality.”12

Following Bleuler, Jaspers designates disintegration of thinking as a typical autistic feature. In 1922 Ernest Krechmer produced work dedicated to the classification of human body types and temperaments. Krechmer not only used many of Bleuler’s observations, but devoted the whole section of his book Psychoesthetic proportions to the study of types that Bleuler called autistic. Krechmer himself calls them schizoids and distinguishes three types of schizoid features. In 1927 the work Schizophrenia by French psychopathologist Eugène Minkowski came out. Minkowski was Bleuler’s student and his disciple. He devoted a large section of his book to Bleuler’s concept of autism, which without a doubt contributed to the increased popularity of the Swiss psychopathologist in France. According to Minkowski, autism as a mental illness is a superfluous subjectivity. In autistic consciousness a symbol substitutes what it is supposed to symbolize, more precisely the symbol no longer fulfills its function in relation to reality. In autistic thinking the symbol wears off and loses any meaning.13 Minkowski suggested distinguishing between two forms of autism, rich and poor. He defined as a rich autism the reconstruction of an imaginary world by a schizophrenic consciousness, a reconstruction patterned after a dream or fantasy, with complexes playing a determining role by dictating unpredictable variation of reactions among those with mental illness. A poor autism is a form of dementia, which is manifested in complete isolation. In 1926 Henry Ey added an important precision to the concept of autism. He suggested distinguishing between autism as an exclusion (a form of fantasy) and autism as existence in a symbolic world

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(autistic delirium). 14 Later, in his famous article for the medical and surgical encyclopedia, Ey defined autism as both impotency and need.15 The first text in Russian literature to follow the footprints of these descriptions of this condition, and to creatively describe this discovery of psychopathology, is Nabokov’s The Luzhin Defense. In 1929, the year when Nabokov wrote his novel, the concept of autism as a symptom of schizophrenia became established in the world of psychopathology. The works of E. Bleuler were translated from German into Russian. In 1919 his book The Autistic Way of Thinking came out in Odessa while in 1920 his main work The Manual of Psychiatry came out in Berlin in Russian and in 1927 Affectivity, Suggestibility and Paranoia was published, the appendix of which contained an essay on autism. Bleuler’s works evoked a great interest among specialists and nonspecialists alike and soon after their publications in Russian they became part of both scientific and cultural usages. As an example, take an excerpt from the novel The Golden Calf by Ilf and Petrov, written a few years after The Luzhin Defense. In the chapter “The Narration of the accountant Berlaga about what happened to him in the madhouse,” there is a story told by the inmate Mikhail Aleksandrovich, who believes that he is a mandog: “Take me as an example. . . this is a subtle game. Man-dog. The schizophrenic nonsense, complicated by the manic-depressive psychosis, and what’s more, note, Berlaga, twilight soul condition. Do you think I easily reached it? I worked on sources. Have you read the book by Professor Bleuler Autistic Thinking?” “No,” answered Berlaga… “You have not read Bleuler?” Kai Iulii asked, surprised. “Allow me, what kind of material have you used then?” “He probably subscribed to the magazine Jahrbuch fur psychoanalytich und psychopathologische Forschung,” suggested the inadequate barbel.16

The journal mentioned by the barbell was the Annual of psychoanalytical and psychological research (Jahrbuch fur psychoanalytiche und psychopathologische Forschung) which Bleuler published together with Freud from 1909 to 1913.17 There are no documents showing Nabokov’s acquaintance with Bleuler’s works or with works of other French and German psychiatrists. Nonetheless, it is hard to imagine that Nabokov would be almost cruelly critical of Freud without being acquainted with his works. The name of Bleuler was closely connected to Freud’s, especially because together they published an annual journal. Moreover in 1920s Bleuler was not less known than Freud. His works, which open the

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door to the inner life of mentally ill people, were widely known among the public. It is obvious that Nabokov, who was in the process of creating a character with psychopathology, could not have neglected to consult them. The proof of it is Nabokov’s text itself that he wrote during the period of passionate discussions about schizophrenia and autism. The Luzhin Defence recreates Bleuler’s concept of pathological solitude. Nabokov’s hero is a chess player who lives in the imaginary world of chess. “Well constructed, clear and full of adventures was real life, the life of chess…”18 Luzhin “accepted outside life as something inevitable, but absolutely not amusing.”19 “Life around him was dull …, such a silence around . . . and in the ears is the noise of solitude.”20 The work reflects a typical gap for schizophrenic autism existing between the inner emotional world and outside real life of the ill person. From an artistic point of view it is described by the representation of two worlds that do not coincide: one is Luzhin’s world created and governed by his emotional needs (reality is a part of it only in accidently grasped pieces, in a very fragmented way) while the other is the real world, in which Luzhin’s personality seems impenetrable and motionless. Luzhin’s wife perceives him as “blind and gloomy,” 21 a motionless, absent “person of another dimension.”22 Using other words, in the single artistic space of Nabokov’s novel there are two ways of thinking, creating in the reader the impression of fusional impossibility. According to Bleuler’s definition, one is logical and realistic, the other is autistic. “The first establishes the connection with reality using the verbal fɨrmulas.”23 All the novel’s characters use it save Luzhin himself. It is always the other characters who come toward Luzhin with questions; the initiative of contact always comes from outside, and never from Luzhin himself. The second form of thinking is represented as dreams and fantasy; it functions independently from the outside world and it does not involve any contact with the latter. This is Luzhin’s autistic way of thinking. One recognizable symptom of autism is the character’s inability to understand the true meaning of his situation with the attitudes and words of those surrounding him. Nabokov reproduces the inability to distinguish the animate and the inanimate objects of the outer world, a challenge typical for the autistic person. Thus Luzhin, walking in the hospital park, cautiously bends down over “the flower, which – God knows – might bite.” 24 The hint at Luzhin’s psychic abnormality is reinforced by an allusion to Garshin’s short story “The Red Flower,” in which the crazy protagonist sees in the flower “all

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world’s evil.”25 The chess figures seem to Luzhin as though coming to life, the obvious effect of hallucinations. Special attention attracts Luzhin’s way of speaking. “His way of speaking was clumsy—so his fiancée thinks—filled with ugly strange words, but sometimes the unknown intonation, hinting at some other words, lively and filled with subtle meaning, which he was not able to articulate, would jump out.”26 There is a temptation to look at Luzhin’s language from the point of view of the dichotomy between language and speech, reminding us of Ferdinand de Saussure. In his works language is understood as a hidden way of thinking, whereas speech is thought of as a mask, or a connection with the theoretical principles of Nabokov’s hated Freud, since Freud perceived speech as a recognizable symbolic layer, drawn from the images and phenomena of the unconscious. In the context of the novel, Luzhin’s speech is similar to the visual layer of the chess game. The analogy is reinforced by numerous examples, in which for Luzhin the “blind” game which takes place in the imagination is opposed to the real game, which takes place visually, on the chess table, with figures, “dead puppets.” Those soulless figures are like the words used by Luzhin, words that hint at the possibility of another rich world, hidden in language or in the unconscious. This analogy makes us think about Saussure’s famous comparison of language with a chess game, for instance. Nonetheless, equally it is possible to have another interpretation, according to which Luzhin’s speech is the reflection of reality as he perceives it through the prism of language. This observation comes from Ludwig Wittgenstein, who affirms in his Logico-Philosophical Treatise (1921) that “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” This interpretation brings us back to autism with its reduced, selective, and fragmentary perception, registering the surrounding world “as through a glass darkly.”27 According to Bleuler, patients with autistic thinking have a reduced comprehension of words’ meanings and employ strange and inadequate usage. In the case of Luzhin, it comes out in a strange stylistic mix of written and oral speech, which is marked by a sharp change in the eloquence of expression. The phrases of the hero contain a number of fragmented utterances of differing emotional and psychological content and of differing modalities, from the order to the prayer. One example is a marital proposal that Luzhin makes to the young woman in the sanatorium: “Thus to continue what was said earlier, I must announce to you that you will be my wife, I beg you to accept, it is absolutely impossible to leave, from now on everything will be different and excellent.”28

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In the text there are many examples of the hero’s speech, which reflect formal thinking as defined by psychiatrists, something characteristic of the more advanced forms of autism.29 For example, Luzhin’s future wife asks him whether he has been playing chess for a long time, a mundane question deprived of any particular meaning. “He did not answer anything and turned away. She became so embarrassed that she began to list all meteorological examples of yesterday’s, today’s and tomorrow’s day. . . . He suddenly turned his face to her and told her: ‘Eighteen years, three months and four days.’”30 Luzhin’s personality is constructed according to Bleuler’s model. There are two feelings that are responsible for selectively organizing Luzhin’s real world: fear and pleasure. What inspires fear is brutally rejected by Luzhin; what brings pleasure is eagerly accepted. The outside world for the autistic person is mysterious and hostile. The main reason for the autistic reaction of fear is the inability to distinguish. For Luzhin, his hostile environs consist both of inanimate objects and of living characters such as his parents and others. The inability to read and to recognize them instills fear in Luzhin. As a child he kept away from his parents: “The son was sitting on the front bench . . . in sailor’s cap, put askew, which nobody ever would dare to put straight.”31 As an adult Luzhin thinks with a repulsion about his father: “. . . he was not able to bear that old man, joyful in appearance, dressed in a knitted vest . . . .”32 As a boy, Luzhin feared his school comrades. As an adult, Luzhin runs away terrified from a classmate he meets at the émigréé ball. It is with exactitude that Nabokov reproduces typical autistic syndrome with its hyper-sensitivity, which expresses itself in the inability to bear a glance, a voice, or a touch of another person and in outbursts of unexpected anger, hiding the anguish and fear of the autistic person: Luzhin senior . . . was listening to the monologue in the neighboring dining-room, to his wife’s voice, who was begging the silence to drink the hot chocolate. “Terrible silence,” Luzhin senior thought. “He is not feeling well, he has some kind of serious mental illness . . . perhaps it was not a good idea to put him in school. . . .” “Eat at least some fruit cake,” the voice behind the wall continued sorrowfully begging. And again there was a silence. But occasionally the horrible would happen: suddenly for no reason the other voice, squealing and gruff, would break out, and the door would slam as it was pushed by the hurricane.33

Jung wrote:

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If realist thinking creates new forms of adaptation, imitating reality and trying to modify it, introverted thinking,34 to the contrary, goes away from reality, frees the subjective desires and is absolutely unproductive in adapting to real life.35

Luzhin’s fear in front of the real world contributes to the development and growth of his imaginary world, which seems to him understandable, harmonious, and subjugated to his will. The intrigue of the novel consists in the hero’s move from one world to another. It can be read at least on two levels. One level is existential and metaphysical, manifested in the forced migration from paradise into life, from the spiritual creative world to the world of physical reality. The other level is the postmodern construction of the text as reflecting the relationship between the hero and the author, in which the hero is endowed with a free will equal to the author’s. Precisely this reading of the novel seems to me the most adequate. The development of the novel’s subject begins with equating the boy’s dislocation from the protected space of home and childhood with his peculiar murder: Most of all he was struck by the fact that from Monday he will be Luzhin. His father — the real Luzhin, Luzhin of a certain age, Luzhin who wrote books — left him smiling, rubbing his hands, already lubricated for the night with transparent English cream, and with his nocturnal swaying gait returned to his bedroom.36

The gesture of rubbing hands lubricated with cream could be understood as a gesture of erasure, which, in combination with the noiseless gait of the father, acquires criminal connotations. Conditional murder in the frame of his father’s writing profession could be understood as a transformation of the younger Luzhin as Nabokov’s hero into a hero from the elder Luzhin’s works. The real world to which the boy is exiled is equated with the text created by his father as an author. But in Nabokov’s novel the young Luzhin refuses this subordinate role, creating his own imaginary reality, autistic reality, and escapes there. The chess game isolates him. Luzhin’s imaginary chess world creates some kind of a text within the text. Nonetheless the independence of each text gradually weakens, their borders slowly disappear; life acquires the character of a chess game, whereas the chess game acquires the meaning of life’s struggle with destiny. The novel begins with the transformation of the young Luzhin into a literary hero, the hero of a literary game, whereas it ends with his

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escape from the game of life: “The only solution . . . it is necessary to fall out of the game.” Luzhin thus explains his forthcoming suicide.37 The hero’s acquisition of his lost name in the last lines of the novel signals his inverted metamorphosis. In this case, the family name is understood as both a social and literary sign. The hero’s bride addresses him using his last name, as “the young women in Turgenev did.”38 The final sentences of the novel, when the hero’s first name is first pronounced, take place when the hero is no longer alive and hence already absent from the text. Here we can see the allusion to the final scene of Leonid Andreev’s 39 short story “The Big Helmet” (“Bol’shoi shlem”), which talks about a card game. In both texts the names of main characters after their deaths become an empty signifier, deprived of meaning, which means in Luzhin’s case that death destroys the semantic structure typical for autism. It seems that the hidden topic of the novel is the hero’s revolt against the author (this will be further developed in Despair and in Gift). The hero refuses to be a toy in the hands of his creator; he isolates himself in his own creativity, but without possessing creative independence he multiplies the intended images and repeats the subject’s movements. To realize this hidden schema is possible because of the structure of autistic thinking. It motivates the introduction into the text of another fantastic dimension, completely invisible for other characters. Luzhin’s autism determines the strategy of his behavior in the story, explaining his supposedly unpredictable deeds which, given his psychopathological nature of thinking, are in reality programmed from the beginning. This is the method by which Nabokov polemically parodies literary realism with its imitation of life’s unpredictable particularities, like Leo Tolstoy’s wellknown exclamation about Anna Karenin’s suicide. It is notable that the figure of the mad Luzhin, idiot savant, is the postmodern reflection of the romanticized idea of the “high” madness of the creator.40 Nabokov’s novel reflects the autistic personality’s insurmountable inability to perceive the general picture of the surrounding world, an inability accentuated by a persistent fixation of attention on separated details and sensations. An example of Luzhin’s disjointed registration of reality is when, upon finding himself in his bride’s apartment, he admires “touching colorful brilliance, from which at moments the isolated objects jump out: the porcelain elk or dark eyed icon.”41 During the chess game, Luzhin notices “a couple of ladies’ legs in shining grey stockings. These legs clearly did not understand anything in the game; it was unclear why they came.”42

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The hero perceives the outside world as a planar world, two dimensional. That is how Luzhin understands the sudden acquaintance with the young girl who would become his fiancée and then his wife: He truly began to feel himself better in the middle of this green decoration [of the sanatorium], sufficiently beautiful, able to give a feeling of security and peace. Suddenly, as it happens in the circus, when a curtain made of painted paper got torn, creating a shape of a star and letting through a lively smiling face, a human being, so unexpected and so familiar, appeared from goodness knows where.43

Descriptive material from Bleuler’s main work probably played an important role for Nabokov’s novel, as did the theoretical concept of autism it introduced. It is possible to suppose that it is particularly from here that Nabokov borrows very important observations about typical autistic behavior. Later research works on psychopathology will involve more elaborate developments, but at the end of the 1920s the description of phenomena remained predominant. Repetition as an important characteristic of autistic behavior results in multiple iterations of the hero’s actions. Luzhin avoids “the disgusting novelty” and “from his childhood he liked the habit.” 44 Bleuler’s description of a persistent repetition, which manifests itself mechanically, is presented in the novel as continuously taking the same path: through forest, by the mill, going home or, before he commits suicide, in his familiar surroundings in the rooms of the house (“and here the strange promenade started” 45 ). It is also reflected in the hero’s intellectual activities. This is how Luzhin as a child observed his nursery: The wall paper was white, above it there was a blue line with the painted grey geese and red puppies. A goose was walking toward a puppy, and again the same thing, thirty eight times around the room.46 This type of the repetition causes the autistic person pleasant sensations. But this is only one reason. The second reason is that it is a way for the autistic person to adapt himself to reality through the accumulation of stereotypes. According to contemporary French psychopathologists Rosine and Robert Lefort,47 because the autistic person lives in communicative isolation in a world in which signifiers mean nothing, the autistic person is able to use as a point of reference only his own mnemonic traces and for that reason he constantly returns to them. This particularity of autistic thinking—the thinking of the main character

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in the novel — explains the organization of the text based on the principle of autistic repetition. The narrative consists of two unequal parts, separated by a period of sixteen years (the number of figures each chess player possesses at the beginning of the game). In the first part, Luzhin as a child becomes a chess genius, wunderkind, whereas in the second part, after he loses the fire and courage of the chess maestro, he participates in his last tournament. The chess law is the law of attack. The refusal to attack means failure. In the novel’s second part the autistic mechanism of repetition becomes a destructive force. Once again, it shows Nabokov’s fidelity to the scientific representation of his material. According to the description of psychopathological theory, autistic behavior emerges as an escape into the world of imagination from the attacking reality of life, only to become self-destruction. It seems like the second part of the novel is lining up on top of the first. Realizing the mechanism of autistic consciousness, the action develops on the basis of images registered by the memory. The first part of the novel plays the role of a model to serve as a point of reference; in the second part, the hero builds repetition from the fragmented elements. For example, the appearance in Luzhin’s life of his future bride gives him an impression of something very familiar: With stunning clarity he recalled the face of the young whore with naked shoulders, dressed in black stockings, who was standing in the lit fraction of the door in the dark alley in the nameless city. And in a stupid way it seemed to him that it was her, that she appeared now dressed in a decent dress, after slightly loosing her looks, as if she washed away some kind of seductive blush, but because of that became more accessible.48

In the first part of the novel there is a description of the boy’s return to the city. On the platform, Luzhin notices that “on the right, on the huge bale was sitting a little girl resting her elbow on her palm and eating a green apple.”49 Many years later in Berlin, Luzhin comes to the house of his bride’s parents. When he walks in, he sees a “bright painting made with oils.” “Baba in calico scarf covering her up to the eye brows was eating an apple, and her black shadow on the fence was eating a larger apple.”50 The Picturesque canvas with its iconic sign lines up on top of the registered childhood image. But this time it is not a lively scene from Russian life, but a fragment of a Russian “decoration.”51 The bride’s parents’ apartment furnished in a Russian style represents an accidental collection of similar objects. They, after “becoming rich again, decided to live in severe Russian style.” 52 “There were many

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paintings on the walls—again the baby in colorful scarves, the golden warrior on the white horse, huts under the blue puffs of snow . . . .”53 These verbal descriptions of paintings by Russian artists — F. Maliavin’s Baby, 1896; V. Vasnetsov’s Warriors at the Crossroad, 1878; M. Iakunchikov-Weber’s The Town in the Winter, 1898 — in themselves are secondary. The novel about the chess game is constructed according to the principle of the puzzle, the game creatively limited, excluding the variation of solutions and in some way reconstructing autistic thinking. The puzzle appears in the first and in the second parts of the novel: [Luzhin as a boy] found ɚ fake comfort in folding pictures. At first they were simple, made for children, built out of large pieces. . . . But during that year the English fashion invented the folding pictures for adults. . . . cut out in a quite quirky way: these were parts of all possible shapes, from the simple circle (the part of the future blue sky) up to the most amusing shapes. . . . impossible to determine where to fit them. . . .54 Later, when Luzhin found himself “late at night, early in the morning, in the inescapable minutes of a groom’s solitude, there was a feeling of a strange emptiness, as if in a colorful folding picture, built on the tablecloth, there were unfilled blank spaces of the elaborate shape.”55 If at the beginning the puzzle fulfills the function of one of the elements of the general childhood picture, later it responds to the autistic perception of reality. For Bleuler who contrasts autistic with realistic thinking, autistic thinking is not deprived of logic. The difference is that the logic of autistic thinking is of a particular nature. It reacts to accidental, unequal, as Bleuler says, “accidently encountered, mistaken” concepts and images, “detached associations.” This pathologically defective logic of psychosis transforms these concepts and images in delirium, now organized accordingly to a pattern set from the beginning. Luzhin ends up locked into his autistic world, in other words, locked within the novel. He becomes one of its elements, a puppet, that the author plays with, the chess figure, the hero of the novel moved by Fate. His pretension of creative independence is realized in understanding his loss. When all parts of Luzhin’s world find their place in his consciousness, the text, as a puzzle-game, comes to its end. “The key is found. The attack’s aim is clear. Ⱥ stringent repetition of the move brings again the same passion. . . . Emptiness, horror, madness.”56 It is customary to think that the hero-cum-chess-player becomes mad at the end of the novel. But that madness is of a particular kind. This is the

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manifestation of autistic thinking in its finished phase, when, tragically yearning for the salutary repetition, it destroys itself. The detachment from outside reality acquires the shape of negativity. Thus the story comes to its end, and its hero falls out of the text into a different dimension, into his autistic eternity.

Notes  1

Translated from Russian by Rosina Neginsky. Nora Buhks, “Nabokov i psychiatriia. Sluchai Luzhina” (“Nabokov and Psychiatry: The Case of Luzhin”), in Semiotika bezumiia, ed. Nora Buhks, Sorbonne, Paris-Moscow: Russian Institute, 2005, 172-193. 2 Vladimir Nabokov, Romany (Novels). Rasskazy (Short Stories). Essays. St. Peterburg, 1993, 223. 3 It is interesting to note that in his lectures V. Nabokov was critical of Dostoevsky for his supposedly exaggerated interest in pathology. He wrote that the behavior of an “aggressively delusional individual or one mentally ill, who has just been released from the psychiatrical hospital and will be taken back at the first opportunity, is so weird that the artist/writer who using that as a material and trying to explore the impulses of the human soul would find himself in front of an enigma that cannot be resolved.” V. Nabokov. Lectures on Russian literature. Moscow, 1996, 186. 4 In Nabokov’s works there are many examples of mocking representations of neurotics, especially hysterics, who potentially can become clients of psychoanalysts. See Nabokov’s Camera Obscura. 5 Please note that Russian philosopher B. Rudnev determines as “a main cultural collision of the 20th century a search for the frontier between dream, fantasy and reality.” He believes that the art that is typical of the 20th century is cinema. The same problematic was “provoked by psychoanalysis.” B. Rudnev, Bozhestvennyi Ludwig. Wittgenstein: formy zhizni. (Divine Ludwig. Wittgenstein: Shapes of Life). Moscow, 2002, 97. 6 Please see G. Green. Freud and Nabokov, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, USA, 1988; the article by J. Shute, “Nabokov and Freud” in The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov, New York, 1995, 412-420; chapter “Exquisite Cabbage Soup” in the book by G. Barabtarlo, Sverkaiushchi obruch. O dvizhushchei sile u Nabokova (A Shimmering Hoop: On the Movement of Nabokov's Themes), StP, 2003, 78-90. Barabtarlo believes that while still in Europe Nabokov acquired the knowledge “in the hostile area of the psychoanalysis” and that “he uses it in all novels after Sebastian Knight” (G. Barabtarlo, ibid., 78). According to my hypothesis conveyed in this article, psychiatry became one of the sources of Nabokov’s poetics already in the third novel of the Russian period. 7 I analyze the principle of this construction in details on the basis of Nabokov’s Russian novel in my book on Nabokov. Nora Bukhs. Eshafot v khrustal’nom

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 dvorze. O russkikh romanakh V. Nabokova. (Ⱥ Scaffold in a Cristal Palace: About V. Nabokov’s Russian Novels), Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 1998. 8 Ernest Kretschmer. Stroenie tela i kharakter. (Physic and Character), Moscow, 2003, 233. 9 E. Bleuler. Dementia praecox oder Gruppe der Schizophrenien, 1911, translated by Henry Ey, Paris, 1964, 54. 10 E. Bleuler, ibid., 54-55. 11 Karl Jaspers. Obschaia psychopatologii. (General Psychopathology), Moscow, 1997, 400. 12 Ibid., 542. 13 Eugène Minkowski. La schizophrénie. Psychopathie des schizoides et des schizophrènes (Schizophrenia: Psychopathy of the Schizoids and Schizophrenics), Paris, 2002, 168. 14 E. Minkowski, ibid., 168. 15 Henry Ey. Remarques critiques sur la schizophrénie de Bleuler. Ann. Med. Psycol. 1, 355-365. 16 I. Il’f, E. Petrov. Sobranie sochinenii in five volumes. (Collected Works in Five Volumes), Moscow, 1961, v. 2, 189. 17 E. Bleuler participated in the first congress of psychoanalysis, which took place in Salzburg in 1908. Nonetheless he never became a member of the International Society of Psychoanalysis, which was founded in 1910. See Bleuler’s view of Freud in his Guidelines for Psychiatry. 18 Vladimir Nabokov. Zashchita Luzhina. (The Luzhin Defence), Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1979, 144. All citations will be taken from this edition of the novel. 19 Ibid., 104. 20 Ibid., 105. 21 Ibid., 245. It is interesting to note that French psychiatrist Pierre Janet puts in the category of “intellectual sentiments” the emotions such as “feelings of novelty” (sentiment de nouvauté), “feeling of oddity” (sentiment d’etrangeté), and “feeling of blindness” (sentiment de cecité). They are all related to the process of cognition. E. Bleuler also discusses it in his work Affectivity, Suggestibility, Paranoia (1922, first Russian edition, 1927), Moscow, 2001, 9. Helpful for my article was a popular French study on autism, La cecité mentale (Mental Blindness) by Simon BaronCohen, ed. Pug, 1998. 22 Ibid., 113. 23 E. Bleuler, “Autistic Way of Thinking” in the book Affectivity, Suggestibility, Paranoia. 24 Zashchita Luzhina. (The Luzhin Defence), 173. 25 See B.M. Garshin. Short Stories, Moscow, 1980, 224. 26 Ibid., 178. 27 The image of ɚ dull, impenetrable glass, through which only the hero is able to see the world around him, appears in the novel many times. 28 Ibid.,112. 29 See W. Jahrreis, 1928. 30 See The Luzhin Defence, Ibid., 97.

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 31

Ibid., 26. Ibid.,105. 33 Ibid., 40. 34 This is the Jung’s term for autism. 35 K.G. Jung. “Uber die zwei Arten des Denkense, Jarbuch fur psychoanalytiche und psychopathologische Forschung,” 1911, III, 124. The article is a follow up to Bleuler’s revolutionary work. 36 The Luzhin Defence, Ibid., 23. 37 Ibid., 264. 38 Ibid., 123. 39 In the text the name of Leonid Andreev is mentioned indirectly. But his mention in the novel about the autistic chess player is not accidental. Andreev was mentally ill and a few times he tried to commit suicide. He also wrote a lot about the psychic deviations. 40 Compare with the short novel by A. Odoevsky Beethoven’s Last Quartet. This novel is about a mad composer. 41 The Luzhin Defence, 130. 42 Ibid., 132. 43 Ibid., 108. 44 Ibid., 29. Both citations. 45 Ibid., 262. 46 Ibid., 41. 47 Rosine et Robert Lefort. La Distinction de l’Autisme, Paris: Seuil, 2003, 53. 48 The Luzhin Defence, Ibid., 108. 49 Ibid., 28. 50 Ibid., 129. 51 Ibid., 113. 52 Ibid., 113. 53 Ibid., 129. 54 Ibid., 45. 55 Ibid., 188. 56 Ibid., 258. 32



CHAPTER SIX RUSSIAN PARANOID DISCOURSE1 OLGA SKONECHNAYA

The fear of persecution lies at the center of several Symbolist novels. Two among them, Petty Demon and Petersburg, became the literary symbols of the period. Other works, less known and less mature, use the same tonality, including Sologub’s Heavy Dreams together with Andrej Bely’s novels Silver Dove, Madman’s Notebooks, The Madman of Moscow, Moscow Under the Blow, Masks, Kotik Letaev, and Baptized Chinese. An experience born in the hero’s psyche overtakes its inner dimension, penetrates its Romanesque fabric, and gives its particular tonality to the whole of these works. It embraces nature’s rhythm, the city’s landscape, the costumes, and indeed the text’s whole historical, literary, and mythological stratum. The fantasized persecution, rooted in the mind and strengthened within the shapes of reality, is responsible for subjects’ architectonic arrangement by ordering the characters’ and the narrator’s postures, conflict development, the dialogues’ order, etc. This psychic phenomenon does not appear merely as one person’s property (or of a number of persons in Petersburg), but as reality’s point of refraction. This point allows the Symbolist model’s dark side, embodied in the world’s dualities, to come to life. These novels describing the clinical pathology of persecution mania come from authors who were very well informed: their interest in psychopathology has been noticed by a number of researchers. We know that Sologub was an attentive reader of Korsakov and Krafft-Ebing, while Bely knew works by Korsakov, Kandinsky and Theodor Maynert. Both authors were confronted with “models” of mental illness. Sologub encountered it in one of his colleagues who became the prototype of Peredonov. 2 Bely in turn encountered it in his close friend Sergei Soloviev, whose hallucinatory experience is described in Dudkin’s nightmare in Petersburg.3 Both writers observed mental illness before they used its symptoms in their works.



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In their texts, paranoia has a particular Symbolist meaning, namely the inability of consciousness to master the sudden feeling of the material world’s ephemerality and consequent insufficiency. The soul is not ready to confront this metaphysical experience or is unable to decode the signs of the reality other than which passes through this world. From the Symbolist point of view, the sickness of contemporary humans consists in a new vision: the signs have appeared but their significance is not clear. “Paranoiac novels” are those using the motives and behaviors of this type of madness as a literary strategy for aesthetic transmutation of psychic material in art. A novel qualifies as “paranoiac” as long as the mania of persecution (with its attendant mania of grandeur) features as one of the main symptoms of paranoia, independently of strictly scientific classification or interpretations. The paranoiac novel is based on a character through whom perception transforms the world. (In Bely’s works these instances could be numerous.) At the moment of this perception, the hero sees himself as the target of a certain action, which later on appears to be the aggressive essence of the world. It is important to stress that, in the Symbolist logic, this pathological knowledge is at once a de-formation of the visible world and the re-formation of its reverse side. That is why the illness’s reconstruction of the world is a superimposition sometimes coinciding with the Romanesque “objective” reality not motivated by the individual consciousness. If in Sologub’s work Peredonov’s “subjective” or delirious dimension could be somewhat (though only somewhat) separated from the narrator who straightens him, in Bely’s case it is absolutely impossible. The hero’s process of accomplishing the world’s transformation also acquires the value of truth for the narrator. An experience establishing the relationship between real existence and the perceiving subject generally inaugurates this process. Soon after, that relationship is interpreted as hostile. The persecutor is an undefined spy (somebody, Sologub’s ɤɬɨ-ɬɨ), agent, ɚɝɟɧɬ, silhouette, Bely’s ɮɢɝɭɪɤɚ, etc.) who is always designated by his spatial position: he walks or he keeps himself behind, he waits in front, or he hides himself behind objects. This somebody appears as an exterior threat, but also as an intrusive interior presence, namely as a double who attacks the integrity of a “self” and who (in clinical terms) matches the Lacanien little other. The forms or “projections” of pathological intelligence produce the appearance of a Romanesque space. It is here that the border between the interior and exterior becomes a porous boundary between the “I” who



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perceives and other characters, by whom the “I” could be driven away: “It is him who transformed me, my Dudkin . . . he who flattened, staggered me against the wall of my attic.”4 Or that "I" might be replaced: "Well, he thought . . . he no longer wants to be Pavlouchka. It is clear he is envious of me. Perhaps he hopes to marry Barbara and glide into my skin.”5 The character might have a feeling of their porosity toward others and of others’ attendant intrusion into the character’s self (body, brain, soul). He also has a feeling of being possessed by the other or being implanted in the other. The border between the hero and the surrounding landscape or interior is also blurred. If in Sologub’s case that porosity remains mainly at the stage of an idea amenable to influence, in the case of Bely it appears in the shape of the hallucinatory intrusion: In fall the street of Petersburg penetrates you right through, freezes you to the depth of the bone and burns your throat; it walks with you into the house and runs feverishly in your veins.6

That projected space gives a new point of view. Something from within the hero puts itself outside and, as a foreign element, is hidden from sight. Such is the hostility of the landscape, itself spying on the hero. Sologub unveils hidden reasons for this phenomenon, noting that "nature seems hostile to Peredonov; he felt in it only his own anguish, his own fear."7 That glance moved toward the exterior and went toward the one whose look is alien, not recognizing its own origin. The Senator’s consciousness, which detached itself from its owner, suddenly clearly saw: he was perceiving in front of him something that reminded him of the place where he lived, and that something was a yellow old man who looked like a plumed chicken.8

The shift of borders between the world and the “I” who lives through persecution seeks compensation in the symmetry of action between the hero’s “I” and an opposing “them.” For the reader this is expressed as a hostile operation reflecting both parties. The action is constructed through strategies of mutual sorcery, with mills organizing the novels’ intrigues as a kind of reflected movement. The idea of the plot rationalizes the antagonists’ actions as perceived by the hero or by the narrator. On the one hand, the plot explains to the hero the totalizing character of this persecution and the necessity of mounting a defense; it is a form achieving causality in the fantastical world. On the other hand, it reveals the real nature of being, which proceeds using a conspiracy rather than a free divine will as its point of departure. Under its glance, existence stops appearing to be a consequence of the laws of nature, of objective events, or of accidents. Instead existence



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seems to be only “a competition of circumstances organized with premeditation.” This is the reason why the conspiracy, in its numerous variations all underlying the intrigue of these novels, drives the imagination of the paranoid hero as well as driving the course of the events comprising the plot. The hero of the Petty Demon suspects his neighbors—the director, the school boys, the young girls, etc.—of a conspiracy against him. As a matter of fact, the young girls unite against Peredonov, but not at all in the way he thinks they do. In the case of Bely, the consciousness that is perceived (the Dar’jal’skij’s, Ableuhov’s, Dudkin’s consciousness, the I in the Notes of One Madman by Korobkin) liberates the demonic universal plot incarnated in the actions of the characters. The paranoiac novel plays on the homonym "zagovor" (meaning both "conspiracy" and “the magical formula") by crossing the different lines of malfeasance (or of protection against it): political, daily, and magical. They all go up to the idea of the metaphysical plot which is present in every novel: the plot of the universal will (in Sologub’s) or comic conspiracy of satanic Freemasons (in Bely’s). The plotters who organize the mad reality—party, sect, community of colleagues or of neighbors—are always present; they look to capture and to destroy the hero. In the novel The Silver Dove it is the sect of Doves that is active; in Petersburg, it is a political party; in the Notes of a Madman, there are masons, as there are in Moscow. The theme of the mirror gives rise to one of a double conspiracy, “the conspiracy against the conspirators,” as Peredonov says it. This opposes the conspiracy of characters against the protagonist with the protagonist’s counterconspiracy against “them.” In this case, the character is able to “plot” not only with the real characters (coaxing boys to enter into contact with party members), but also with the elements of nature (the moon in Heavy Dreams, thoughts in Notebooks of the Madman). At the same time, the perceiving consciousness turns toward discovering the principal persecutor, reducing this hostile multiplicity to one character who should either be eliminated or escape. This elimination or escape becomes the key element which corresponds to the traditional culmination: Motovilov’s murder accomplished by Login (likewise Pavlouchka’s by Peredonov and Lippancenko’s by Dudkin), Dar'jalskij’s attempt to free himself from the boiler, and Korobkine’s attempt to eliminate Von Mandro. But the figure of the enemy, perceived as a double, has a tendency to lose its unity and its precision; it fades and disappears. This is especially true for Bely’s world where toward the end the enemy loses his personality and disintegrates



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(realizing by anticipation Lacan’s idea according to which the persecutor of delirium does not have a personality). The novels’ action falls under the idea of reduction, which in the Symbolist novel combines its clinical and eschatological aspects. The reduction presents itself as x the fragmented substance of the romantic world: dust, broken glass, pulverized matter, etc. x the angst to be faded and diminished, or else to be crushed or pulverized by the explosion: "the moment came to be exploded: my ‘I’ will fly in fragments" (Notes of the Madman). x the motif of the reduction of space, of its transformation in one point (Petersburg) or in shade. x disappearance, annihilation. The smallness and fragmentation of the delirious existence is manifest through the fantastic and mad characters who are already small and possess the capacity to reduce or fragment the space in which they multiply themselves: Nedotykomka (Sologub), bacteria, cells, corpuscles, nervous connections (Bely). The theme of disappearance, of the transformation into nothingness, spreads through the temporal organization of texts where the idea of the end of story is visible, as in allusions (The Petty Demon) and in prophecies (Bely’s novels). The dynamic of intrigue is opposed by the stable situation which consists in anticipating the final catastrophe in each text. It is possible to say that the paranoiac novel’s poetics are inspired by figures at the crossroads of clinical and literary fantasies. At the level of literary causality, it is the figure of conspiracy, the delirious “fable” par excellence; at the level of the spatio-temporal organization of the text, it is the model of the penetrable and reduced space together with the end of the world, configurations in which delirium is neighboring religious and occult systems. It is known that Symbolism distinguishes between two types of folly: the elevated prophetic folly whose role is to unveil the mysteries of existence, and the low folly which represents the supreme level of stupidity/silliness or the confinement to that absurd world. As far as clinical folly is concerned, it could appear as a degeneration of the elevated folly into illness (it is in this way that Bely perceives Nietzsche’s madness)9 or as the opposite, a sort of hypertrophy of earthly thought, a hypertrophy of a limited intelligence, which in its impotency destroys its own limits (such is “Peredonov’s mania”).



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The figure of paranoia is a form reorganizing the world according to the model of persecution with regard to the perceiving “I”. It can seal the crisis through which the illness is installing itself, namely the incapacity to react toward the modified reality and the absence of the elaboration of the new forms of knowledge, which come to be replaced by other forms (that is, old forms). Or else this figure seals the extreme mutual fidelity which culminates in the hallucinatory egocentrism. In both cases, the illness’s prism makes this reality bizarre and off-set, offering the writer a pathological way to construct it. As long as the persecutors, for instance the neighbors who conspire against Peredonov, are the projections of the hero’s aggressive egocentrism or of the laws of the divided universal will, it is possible to say that he is persecuted by the forms of his own imperfect knowledge which creates the world of cruel illusions. In the case of Bely (starting with Petersburg), these persecuting forms are in Kantian (or neo-Kantian) subject-object relationships, rendered diabolical by the writer. The unveiling of the fragility, irritation, and absurdity of the material world, lived through by the heroes and motivated by the illness and by the state of the modified consciousness, appears as an intuition of another form of being which could be a result of the specific perception (Login, Dar'jal'skij, Ableuhov, Dudkin, Korobkin) or be very ordinary (Peredonov). In both cases, this intuition appears as a sign of new catastrophic times whose hitherto hidden element is unveiled and approached by mortals. Overall, the paranoiac symbolist novel shows a world created by an active mentally ill consciousness; it is a question of the real world, not hidden behind the veil of the average rationality of "normality." It is the delirious world laid bare. Its unveiling is a result not only of the illness but especially of the new experience which breeds the illness, an experience which is too violent for the weak or ordinary consciousness. Such is unable to decode the signs and, using them as a point of departure, to reconstitute the lie and horror which truly govern the limited existence, condemned to disappear.

Notes  1

Translated from French by Rosina Neginsky. Originally published in Russia. See Olga Iu. Skonechnaya, “Paranoidal’ny roman russkogo simvolizma: Fedor Sologub, Andrei Bely, Universalii russkoj literatury, v. 5, in Collection of Essays, ed. Faustov A.A., The State University of Voronezh, Voronezh: “Nauchnaya kniga,” 2013, 63-77.



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2 Ulanovskaja, B., Sur les prototypes du roman de F. Sologub “Le démon mesquin”, L., Russkaja literatura, 1969, # 3, p.181-184. 3 Ljunggren, M., Andrej Bely's “Peterburg”. The Dream of Rebirth, Stocholm, 1982. 4 Biély, A., Petersbourg, trad. par G. Nivat et J. Catteau, Lausanne, L’Age d’Homme, 1967, 76. 5 Sologub, F., Le démon mesquin, Paris, Gallimard, 1949, trad. par H. Pernot et L. Stahl, p.82. 6 Bely, A., Pétersbourg, p.31. 7 Sologub, F., Le démon mesquin, p.393. 8 Bely, A., Petersbourg, p.112. 9 Bely, A., Petersbourg, p.112.





CHAPTER SEVEN SEXUAL NEUROSIS OR CREATIVE CATALYST? HYSTERIA AND DEMONIC POSSESSION IN ALEXEI REMIZOV’S SOLOMONIIA JULIA FRIEDMAN

Russian modernist Alexei Remizov was born in 1877 in Moscow and died just a few months after his eightieth birthday in Paris in 1957. He started his creative career as a writer in turn-of-the-century Russia, publishing his first novel The Pond in 1907. By the end of the decade, he had written enough to fill eight volumes of his Complete Works. Soon after emigrating to France in 1923, Remizov first began to supplement, and soon to substitute, texts with drawings, thus producing an impressive body of graphic work. Over the course of some twenty years he created over two hundred handwritten illustrated albums that combine drawings and texts.1 If there is one trait that could characterize Remizov as an artist, it is his unwavering persistence in rejecting boundaries of any kind: cultural, temporal, stylistic. Remizov feared normalcy above all. He believed that a true artist is able to escape its confines with the help of a metaphorical “ladder.” His good friend the symbolist poet Alexander Blok’s ladder was his ability “to hear the music” of his time while the great Russian realist writer Fyodor Dostoevsky was an epileptic and the romantics Edgar Allan Poe and E. T. A. Hoffmann were alcoholics.2 Remizov spent years searching for a way to evoke the artistic quality ever present in dreams— his own ladder out of normalcy. Many of his narratives (both textual and visual) are modeled on dreams, but one particular narrative—“Solomoniia”— rests in the ambiguity of whether the main character, Solomoniia, dreams up the supernatural events, or actually experiences them by becoming “possessed,” sick, and clinically hysterical, thus breaching the limitations of ordinary perception.



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This paper will argue that if Solomoniia is indeed “possessed,” sick, clinically hysterical, the onset of possession is welcomed, even coveted. It enables Solomoniia to escape the normalcy cursed for Remizov. This paper will also explore the underpinnings of how Remizov’s tale “Solomoniia” from his 1951 book Possessed: Savva Grudtsyn and Solomoniia (Besnovatye: Savva Grudtsyn i Solomoniia)3 was conceived and executed within this notion of connecting insanity and creativity. I will argue that its publication was, at least in part, a response to the contemporaneous linking of insanity (hysteria, more specifically) and creativity. The two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old text that was at the base of Remizov’s tale is known from two manuscripts named for their provenance: the so-called Public Library and Buslaev versions. In 1860, the Public Library manuscript was reproduced in the first volume of Pamiatniki starinnoi russkoi literatury (Landmarks of Old Russian Literature), edited by the prominent Russian historian Nikolai Kostomarov and published by Count Kushelev-Bezborodko.4 The protagonist of the story, Solomoniia, is an innocent young country girl who promised herself to God, but is married off to a local shepherd against her will. On her wedding night she has a vision of a devil who assumes the place of her husband. This is followed by many more explicitly sexual apparitions, demonic torture, and the birth of the devil’s offspring. The story ends with a miraculous cure of Solomoniia by the saints Prokopii and Ioann, who retrieve and kill the demons that are afflicting the possessed. During his life Remizov saw “Solomoniia” published six times—twice in Russian and four times in translation. After its initial 1929 publication in the Prague émigré journal Volia Rossii, the text came out in the Serbian journal Ruski Arhiv (Belgrad, 1931). Its French translation appeared in the Paris periodicals Hippocrate (1935: no. 10) and Confluences (1945: June– July), and then in Remizov’s 1947 collected volume Où finit l’escalier: Récits de la quatrième dimension; Contes et légendes. Finally, the Russian original was placed in the 1951 Opleshnik edition together with the pendant story “Savva Grudtsyn,” published there for the first time. In addition to these printings, Remizov also produced three illustrated albums based on the story. The earliest of them (1934), now in the collection of the Amherst Center for Russian Culture,5 contains twenty-seven pages of combined Russian text and pasted-in drawings. All but three drawings in this album are black and white. The other two albums—one in Russian, the other in French—are dated 1935 and are preserved in private collections in Paris. The one with the Russian text has some twenty-four black-and-white drawings similar to those in the Amherst album.6 It is



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dedicated to Remizov’s friend Pavel Nikolaevich Chizhov; I will hereafter refer to it as the Chizhov album. The album with the French translation is visually very different from the two Russian versions. Its six sumptuous drawings are much larger, separate from the text, and in color.7 Although chronologically the albums postdate the initial publication of the text, the drawings that ended up in the Amherst album comprised an integral part of the actual writing of the story: “Solomoniia, her visions, I first drew . . . And I write using the drawings.”8 Remarkably, this first “graphic” incarnation of the story also marks the beginning of Remizov’s transition to the visual mode. Just before he drew Solomoniia in the spring of 1928, Remizov confided in his wife’s salon album that as an artist (khudozhnik) he was still “unrealized” and that his “drawing passion burns only in [him] without igniting anyone else.”9 This revealing statement, dated March 4, 1928, testifies to Solomoniia’s watershed character in yet another respect; it must have been Remizov’s first fully graphic text. Once the vision is released through images, the creative process begins. The original narrative of demonic possession that served as a model can now be infused with new, Remizovian content. As was the case with many of his other texts that went through multiple editions, every subsequent Solomoniia presented the story in a new light, depending upon its author’s current interests. To gauge the extent of artistic subjectivity in Remizov’s changes to the seventeenth-century prototype of Solomoniia, we just need to compare his text with that of another author who also used the Kushelev-Bezborodko original to write a modern account of the possessed Solomoniia. Aleksandr Valentinovich Amfiteatrov (1862–1938) was a popular novelist and a well-known journalist who wrote a studious commentary on the tale, complete with its verbatim retelling in contemporary Russian. Notably, he was also a correspondent of Remizov, and his own take on the original tale was admittedly influenced by Remizov.10 According to Amfiteatrov, Remizov started out with the idea of writing a historical novel based on the manuscripts in Kushelev-Bezborodko but the research part of his project proved to be so interesting that he soon found himself the author of a three-volume study on the life and mores of the seventeenth-century Russian North.11 Although he never saw his study printed in its entirety, Amfiteatrov managed to publish much of it in three separate books. First came a sixty-page essay called “Solomoniia besnovataia: Chelovecheskii document XVII veka” (“The Possessed Solomoniia: A Human Document of the Seventeenth Century”).12 In this early interpretation, dated February 1913, Amfiteatrov argued that the tale was but a “history of sexual neurosis written down by a cleric” (tserkovnikom



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zapisannaia istoriia seksual’nogo nervoza) (55) that presented Solomoniia’s “demonomania rooted in sexual disorder” (demonomaniia na pochve seksual ’nogo rasstroistva) (1). The essay was an attempt to follow Solomoniia’s sickness “clinically,” taking advantage of the latest advances in psychiatry. Amfiteatrov supported his argument with numerous references to medical studies, court cases, literature, and documents describing possession from the last few centuries all over Europe. His step-by-step analysis begins with a meticulous discussion of the mental shock Solomoniia experienced during the consummation of her marriage. Amfiteatrov was convinced that it was post-coital trauma that brought on Solomoniia’s initial vision of the demon, while the vision itself, in his view, was a textbook case of an attack that usually precedes an epileptic seizure. He even tagged the demonic blue wind that blows into Solomoniia’s face as “aura epileptica,” a sensation of the blowing wind at the start of a convulsion (5). But in his opinion, Solomoniia was not a regular epileptic. Amfiteatrov proposed that she was also afflicted with a condition of “heightened sensitivity of her sexual organs” (povyshennoi chustvitel’nosti organov polovogo obshcheniia) (10). This sensitivity further disallowed any conjugal contact and intensified her hysteria. Considering his positivist approach, it is not at all surprising that the author dismissed Solomoniia’s rapist-demons as “sexual hallucinations” (seksual’nye galiutsinatsii) and her stories of abduction as “fictions” (nebylitsy) (10, 14). He also surmised that the hysterical Solomoniia simulated some of the epileptic seizures, at least at their start.13 As to her insensitivity to pain that is depicted in one of the many torture scenes, in it Amfiteatrov sees a case of “hysterical anesthesia, [or] analgesia” (istericheskoi anastezii, [ili] analgezii)—a psychosomatic condition that prevents one from feeling pain.14 His practical explanations culminate in the interpretation of the tale’s ending, where Solomoniia feels the demon gnawing through her left side—he blames the bleeding hole on a burst furuncle, a simple boil on her skin (43). Still, Amfiteatrov allows some metaphysical elements into his otherwise physical account of Solomoniia’s possession. He admits that her cure was psychosomatic as it began with her reception of the Holy Mysteries (48). Amfiteatrov’s second publication based on Kushelev-Bezborodko’s Solomoniia manuscripts appeared in the book Oderzhimaia Rus’: Demonichskaia povest’ XVII veka (Russia Possessed: A SeventeenthCentury Demonic Tale).15 This volume consisted of a word-for-word retelling of “Povest’ o besnovatoi zhene Solomonii” and “Skazanie o Petre i Fevronii” (“The Tale of Peter and Fevroniia”), another text found in Kushelev-Bezborodko.16 It also contained a study (etiud) of the story



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about Savva Grudtsyn, which Kushelev-Bezborodko placed right before that of Solomoniia.17 In addition to the texts, Amfiteatrov included two essays on demonology in Russian folklore and a chapter about the iurodivye (fools in God) of Ustiug. Because Amfiteatrov’s retelling of the tale itself faithfully follows the Public Library and the Buslaev manuscripts, most of his interpretation unfolds in the short introduction and the two essays. In the introduction, Amfiteatrov repeated his “psychophysiological” argument from 1913 (22), refining his definition to the “‘clinically’ observed and recorded history of the sexual neurosis of a most unfortunate hysteric” (“klinicheski” nabliudennaia i izlozhennaia istoriia seksual’nogo nervoza neschastneishei isterichki) (26). He expanded this original interpretation only slightly, to include masochism and a compulsive desire to wander off as essential traits of Solomoniia’s condition.18 For the most part, Remizov’s foreword to the 1951 edition juxtaposes his poetic and metaphysical understanding of Solomoniia’s affliction with Amfiteatrov’s strictly physical and observationist view (their correspondence took place between the time of the initial publication of the text and the latest canonical version of 1951). Remizov describes his version of the narrative as “a tale about the appearance of the phallus that takes on different guises in order to torture its victim” (povest’ o iavlenii falla, prinimaiushchego raznye obrazy, chtoby muchit’ svoiu zhertvu) (“Solomonija,” 5). For the writer, the tale has an obvious mythical quality that Amfiteatrov firmly denied.19 Even when he emphasizes the detrimental significance of Solomoniia’s wedding night, he does so in a more lyrical form: “all her being, from the first touch, is shaken, torn up” (vse ee sushchestvo s pervogo prikosnoveniia potriaseno, razorvano) (5). Compare this with Amfiteatrov’s dispassionate statement on the subject: “the hysterical seizure with which Solomoniia’s ‘possession’ began was a result of the nervous disturbance experienced by the young woman on her wedding night” (istericheskii pripadok, kotorym nachalos’ ‘“besnovaniie” Solomonii,—rezul ’tat nervnogo potriaseniia, perezhitogo moloditseiu v pervuiu brachnuiu noch’) (5). What Amfiteatrov referred to as “sexual hallucinations,”20 Remizov presented as a metaphorical transformation of the phallus: “the phallus takes on the visual image of a ‘serpent,’ then the ‘beast,’ then divides into the unfamiliar young men, and, finally, into the multitude of naked little phalluses—‘tadpoles’” (fal prinimaet zritel’nyi obraz “zmiia,” potom “zveria,” potom raschlenilsia v neznakomykh molodykh liudei i, nakonets, v mnozhestvo golykh malen’kikh fallov— “golovastikov”) (5). So, in contrast to Amfiteatrov’s medically sexual interpretation of Solomoniia’s possession, Remizov offers a poetically sexual one.



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Perhaps even more polemical is Remizov’s third Solomoniia album from 1935.21 When compared to the two Russian versions of Solomoniia, this French rendition (titled Solomonie) seems very decorative and even lavish. The album contains a French translation of the tale and an afterword based on the foreword of the Russki Arhiv and the Amherst album. Critically, it takes into account Remizov’s newly acquired knowledge of Aleksandr Amfiteatrov’s work on the tale by including the foreword that grew out of the Remizov-Amfiteatrov correspondence. The most important image for interpreting the content of the album is its last drawing,22 which shows a silhouette of a woman facing a homunculus with three phallic protrusions. Its inscription reads “l’univers/ est /un /acte / de / volupté” (“the universe /is/an/act of / lust”) along the upper inside edge of the outer frame. The differences in the content of this album (based on which images it includes and which images it excludes) are as telling as the differences in its appearance. The obvious omission of all but the most sexually explicit illustrations, and the inclusion of the drawing that declares that “the universe is an act of lust” give the album an unmistakably erotic connotation not present in the Russian-language versions. A possible explanation for this shift in Remizov’s presentation of the tale is that since the album was intended for a French audience not familiar with the intricacies of miraculous cures by Orthodox saints, it would be sensible to concentrate on the “human element” of the narrative.23 Far from compromising its meaning, this presentation is entirely consistent with Remizov’s description of Solomoniia’s confession (ispoved’) as “delirious and, moreover, sexual” (bredovaia i pritom seksual ’naia).24 More can be learned from a closer look at the translator of Remizov’s text into French. The author of the translation used in the album was none other than Gilbert Lély (1904–85), a poet with strong surrealist links known for his erotic verses and his publications on the Marquis de Sade.25 A promising young scholar, in the mid-thirties Lély was working on the papers of Sade. Lély’s biographer Jean-Louis Gabin writes that latent sadism, voyeurism, sexual libertinism, and devotion to erotic literature were already evident in his works of the early twenties.26 During the midto-late-1920s and the 1930s these interests were absorbed into the broader surrealist vocabulary. André Breton himself referred to Lély as a “lampe scabreuse” of surrealism, and “un érotomane distingué.”27 If we review the statement about the universe as “an act of pleasure” against the background of Lély’s writings on the libertine philosophy of sexual gratification by any and all means, both the drawing and the album make much more sense. It is even possible that the album was intended as a gift



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to Lély, who by the time of the album’s production was not just a translator but also a close acquaintance of Remizov.28 Alternatively, the album could have been produced for sale, making the conformity to the audience’s voluptuous interests especially relevant.29 The mid-to-late 1920s saw an explosion of publications that could be deemed erotic or pornographic, depending on one’s point of view.30 In an unpublished letter addressed to Remizov, his friend the poet René Char promises to show the album to Valentine Hugo, one of the artists who illustrated Pierre Louÿs’s erotic text Trois filles et leur mere, published by Paul (and Gala) Éluard. In either case, I would argue that Remizov’s decision to present the story from an angle of eroticism was driven by the potential audience for the album, thus making this erotic presentation of the story singular among its nine avatars. The surrealists’ interest in Sade was only a part of their attempt to reevaluate the accepted norms of love and of what constitutes madness. Perhaps the most significant act of the surrealists in their effort to undermine conventional morals was the project to which they gave the quasi-scientific name “Recherches sur la sexualité” (“Studies for Sexuality”). It was organized as a series of sessions (eleven in all) where the participants, among whom were André Breton, Marcel Noll, Benjamin Péret, Raymond Queneau, Yves Tanguy, Louis Aragon, and Man Ray, took turns answering questions regarding their own sexuality and their views on “normalcy.”31 This was the discourse into which Remizov’s Solomonie la Possedée (note the spelling out of the protagonist’s condition in the French title) was printed in 1935. The venue for publication was the journal Hippocrate,32 where two years previously Remizov had placed his “Tourguéniev, poète du rêve.”33 Hippocrate defined itself as a “revue d’humanisme médical” and published all sorts of texts related to medical themes or authored by medical doctors dabbling in the humanities. Lély, who in the case of this publication was not just a translator but also the editor in chief of the journal, knew that Remizov’s Solomonie la Possédée would appeal to the readers of Hippocrate because it referred to demonic possession and implicitly to the already-familiar and popular topic of hysteria. (Demonic possession was associated with hysteria as it was commonly assumed the symptoms of the former were a medical manifestation of the latter.)34 To fit the positivist profile of the journal, the text of the tale was abridged to omit the first appearance of St. Feodora and the following scene where Solomoniia takes communion.35 To ensure that the French readers could understand Solomoniia, the tale was accompanied by a foreword.36 Thus the emphasis is placed on the more physical and physiological content of



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the story, relegating the spiritual theme of salvation through faith to the background. What’s more, for the first time in its printed history, the text was illustrated with two images. These show the scenes where Solomoniia is tied down and tortured by the demons. The subscribers to Hippocrate could easily see a Sadian reference here: in the very first issue of the journal, the year of Remizov’s first contribution to it, Maurice Heine had published a long essay on the “Divine Marquis.”37 In another article, from 1933, Heine had described an infamous incident in which Sade restrained, flogged, and allegedly tortured a certain young widow, Rose Keller—an image mirrored in Solomoniia’s own misfortunes of virtue.38 While the changes to the translation of Solomonie la Possédée were made some years after the story was written, there is still enough evidence to suggest that Remizov was familiar with French writings on hysteria and possession, especially those in the surrealist press, prior to putting the story on paper. Remizov’s address book, preserved in the Reznikoff collection, proves that he was aware of the journal La Révolution surréaliste and of its editor André Breton as early as 1924, the initial year of its publication.39 Subsequently, the journal printed a number of writings that would have interested Remizov. The third issue (April 1925) contained an unsigned letter to the heads of psychiatric asylums (“Lettre aux Médecins-Chefs des Asiles de Fous,” 29) that declared the relativism of the notion of madness, claiming that it is so- called rational reality that is irrational. In the March 1926 issue (no. 6) Louis Aragon’s text “Entrée des succubes” (pages 10– 13) extolled the different types of female demons whose sole purpose was to sexually engage human males. Scholars of surrealism have previously noted the surrealists’ fascination with succubacy.40 According to Ades, the surrealists found the idea of intercourse with a succubus attractive on two levels. First, it challenged “the notion of a clear split between the real and the imagined,” echoing the formulation from Breton’s “Second Manifesto of Surrealism”: “Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions.” Second, succubacy was “a kind of private shorthand for the surrealists’ quarrels with the contemporary practitioners of psychology and psychiatry, their radical questioning of socially governed definitions of insanity, and their attack on notions of normal and pathological in sexuality.”41 Not only the demonology of Solomoniia makes specific references to incubi, male demons in human guise, the beautiful youths who defile her, but the notion of liminality within Solomoniia’s consciousness as she is accosted by the



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demons is key to the story. Remizov emphasized repeatedly the heroine’s borderline states of mind that allowed her to slip in and out of dreams and visions. Although a victim, a person possessed, Solomoniia’s strength was in her ability to transgress the limitations of the diurnal consciousness. Her visions released her imagination, and her possession was the impetus for this release. It is on the issue of possession as a creative phenomenon that Remizov’s and the surrealists’ ideas converge. The March 15 issue of La Révolution surréaliste contained a short essay entitled “The Fiftieth Anniversary of Hysteria,” signed by Aragon and Breton and illustrated with a series of photographs of Professor Charcot’s most famous patient, known as Augustine. The authors described previous “mythical, erotic, lyrical, and social” definitions of hysteria as oscillating between science and diabolism. Having rejected both ways of looking at the disease, they came up with a new definition, which concluded with an important pronouncement: “hysteria is not a pathological phenomenon and may in all respects be considered a supreme means of expression.”42 This questioning of what hitherto has been perceived as abnormal must have carried a serious appeal for Remizov, because in Solomoniia, possession (oderzhimost’ or besnovatost’) is much more than an affliction that subjects its victim to the cruel curiosity of the gawking crowd. Rather, it is an asset, a gift that expands one’s imagination. Remizov’s search for the ways to escape the confines of normalcy led him to perceive possession as a creative condition akin to what a writer or an artist experiences as he transforms the events of life into art. A draft of the introduction to Possessed contains a passage where Remizov actually describes himself as possessed: “Both the guardian angels and the demons dwell not somewhere on the side, but in me. // ‘Possessed’—uninhibited and haunted. // I am subject to my own powers—and I am possessed.”43 Although he never repeated this pronouncement in print, his possession is implicit in an iconographical self- association with fire and blood: “I was born on the night of Ivan Kupala, and came into the world from a ‘demonic brew.’ . . . The nature of my being is Kupalesque: fire and blood.”44 Here the connection to possession is through blood: “Both Savva and Solomoniia are possessed—haunted. Blood—from blood and through blood come their visions.”45 If possession allows one to have visions inaccessible to “normal” and “healthy” minds, then in depicting himself as possessed (if only metaphorically) Remizov presents possession as a welcome artistic impulse. The essay on the fiftieth anniversary of hysteria was not the only piece in the March issue where the surrealists questioned the existing definitions of madness and posed the link between madness and imagination. The



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readers of La Révolution surréaliste were also invited to wander Parisian streets along with Breton and the fictional character Nadja of the eponymous book. Breton’s accusation that psychiatric asylums were a breeding ground for abnormality (with reference to Nadja) is a reiteration of the sentiment expressed in the open letter to the heads of psychiatric asylums published in the third issue of the journal. A more direct reference to this earlier publication comes in a letter addressed to Breton by Jean Genbach (Ernest Gengenbach), in which Genbach, who is confined in the Sédillot military hospital, claims to have just recited it to a visitor “at the top of his lungs.” As he is interviewed, Genbach professes to have no desire to be “normal, balanced, a master of his emotions and impressions,” instead wishing to be “possessed by his thought, his desire, and his dream” (31). Genbach’s letter is immediately followed by the aforementioned transcripts of the first meeting for “Studies in Sexuality.” Notably, it happened to be a meeting in which one of the key questions involves the relationship between succubi and imagination.46 This accumulation of references to madness, hysteria, demonism, and creativity leads to a very palpable “theme” for the March 1928 La Révolution surréaliste, a theme Remizov would hardly have missed. Since he dated the actual writing of the story to the spring of 1928, it is quite possible that his presentation of madness as creativity was prompted by the March 1928 issue; but the writer whose use of sources was the very definition of bricolage did not need to rely exclusively on Breton’s journal.47 A number of other publications also could have suggested viewing hysteria in metaphysical terms. For already half a century some of Charcot’s students were practicing a form of retrospective medicine as they wrote about hysterics in art and in history.48 In 1926 Pierre Janet published De l’angoisse a l’extase: Etudes sur les croyances et les sentiments, a two-volume illustrated study on religious ecstasy and its connections with clinical hysteria.49 Janet’s work came closest to the later pronouncements in “The Fiftieth Anniversary of Hysteria” in that he explained hysteria as a form of expression, albeit a pathological one.50 The same year the original de Sade scholar Maurice Heine published a Collection of Psycho-sexual Confessions and Observations from Medical Literature.51 Remizov would certainly have known of Leiris’s trip to Dakar and his well-illustrated studies on possession.52 Plus, by 1928 Prinzhorn’s book on the art of the mentally ill was already incorporated into the French discourse on alternative artistic expression. If Remizov did not read it in Berlin just after it came out (he was fluent in German), given the book’s popularity with the surrealists, he is very likely to have read it in Paris. As the topic



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of the art of the insane became increasingly fashionable, Parisian galleries competed in organizing exhibitions of drawings made by the mentally ill. I mentioned earlier the Galerie Vavin blockbuster exhibition of 1928.53 Jean Vinchon’s 1924 study L’art et la folie (Art and Madness) utilized the examples of psychotics’ drawings from Dr. Auguste Marie’s Villejuif collection, attracting further public interest to the subject.54 By the mid1930s, when Remizov made his French Solomoniia album, Breton had already purchased some of Wölfli’s drawings for his own collection of the art of the insane, so the album’s conspicuously detailed narrative drawings could be considered a nod to Wölfli’s mosaic-like sectioning of the page, where horror vacui reigns supreme.55 While I am convinced that Solomoniia is above all a personal narrative, and the next chapter of this book is dedicated to explaining how this was the case, the aspects of Remizov’s story that have to do with the relationship between possession/madness and creativity were clearly a part of the contemporaneous French discourse on the subject. Lély’s translation, which Remizov used in the Reznikoff album, was published three more times.56 In 1935 the full text and an adapted foreword came out in Hippocrate: Revue d’humanisme medical, discussed above.57 The foreword was pulled from the next two publications. The first of them took place right after the war in the June–July issue of Confluences, a journal of art criticism published in Lyon.58 Then, in 1947, Remizov reprinted Lély’s translation of the tale in his collected volume Où finit l’escalier: Récits de la quatrième dimension; Contes et légendes.59 The latter volume presented the story of Solomoniia from yet another angle. Où finit l’escalier, just like the 1937 illustrated album with the namesake subtitle, was devoted entirely to dreams.60 It is easy to see why Remizov would present the tale as a dream.61 Already in the seventeenthcentury version published by Kushelev-Bezborodko, Solomoniia has visions of the Virgin and Saints Feodora, Prokopii, and Ioann when she dozes off at the various Ustiug churches. Remizov brings even more of the dream element into his Solomoniia. When I examined the draft copies of the tale at the Amherst Center for Russian Culture, I noticed that in one of the early drafts the initial appearance of the devil to Solomoniia is described in an indented paragraph—a device Remizov habitually used to designate dreams within his texts.62 Presenting the nocturnal visits by the devil and the incubi as dreams offers a superficially new interpretation, in which Solomoniia’s possession is triggered not by her broken vow of chastity or her epileptic hysteria, as interpreted by Aleksandr Amfitiatrov, but by her overactive imagination, aided, perhaps, by the visual memory of St. Feodora’s carnal trials as they were depicted in the illuminated



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manuscripts. However, this glimpse of normalcy is just that. As we find out from his introduction to Où finit l’escalier, dreams and “phantoms” are only accessible to “sick” minds (les fantomes n’apparaissent qu’aux maladies).63 This last idea redirects us to the original reading: it was Solomoniia’s possession, her “sickness,” that produced the creative vision. It mirrors Remizov’s mention (in the zapis’ to the Amherst album) of a sickness that overtook him as he finished his work on the tale—“I connect my pain with my writing”64—thus reinforcing the need for some external prompting that would help to release his imagination.

Notes  1

It is hard to know the precise number of the albums, partly because Remizov cited two sets of numbers for the albums and for the drawings they contain. Thus a 1954 inscription on a book for N. Kodrianskaia refers to “400?” albums made from 1931 to 1949, when Remizov was unable to publish in the conventional way (Natalia Reznikova, Ognennaia pamiat’. Berkeley: Berkeley Slavic Specialties, 1980, 92– 93). In 1950 he had specified his count at 430 albums and 3,000 drawings (Alexei Remizov, Peterburgskii buerak, [Petersburg Ravine]. Paris: Lev, 1981, 398). However, the bibliography of his last published book, The Circle of Happiness (Paris: Opleshnik, 1957), gives “two hundred plus albums” and “two thousand plus drawings” as his graphic tally for the eighteen-year publishing lull. This later number is confirmed in his most complete list of illustrated albums. There, Remizov calculated 230 albums and 2,000 drawings between 1932 and 1937, which accurately reflects the number of albums in the accompanying list (Antonella D’Amelia, “Neizdannaia kniga Merlog: Vremia i prostranstvo v izobrazitel’nom i slovestnom tvorchestve A. M. Remizova,” in Slobin, Aleksej Remizov: Approaches to a Protean Writer, 1987, 141–67, 143). According to this, between 1932 and 1940 Remizov made about 247 illustrated albums (I deduct 13 other graphic artifacts from his 260 listed items.) The full list is published in D’Amelia 1987, appendix II, 161–66; the original is in the Russian Ministry of Culture Archives (formerly in Reznikoff archive in Paris). In the 1950s Remizov became increasingly preoccupied with tracing the whereabouts of his lost drawings, and he tried to salvage what remained. See his letters of March 1, 1952 (Natalia Kodrianskaia, Alexei Remizov. Paris: N. Codray, 1959, 248); July 9, 1952 (255; also in Kodrianskaia 1977, 279); and February 22, 1953 (1977, 312). For published examples of Remizov’s illustrated albums see Greta Slobin “The Writer as Artist.” In Images of Alexei Remizov, 13–25 . Amherst: Mead Art Museum, 1985, Alla Gracheva, “Krug schast’ia—litsevoi kodeks Alekseia Remizova.” In Risunki pisatelei, 20–30. St. Petersburg: Akademicheskii Proekt, 2000, Antonella D’Amelia “Pis’mo i risunok: Al’bomy A. M. Remizova.” In Slavica Tergestina, edited by Maria Chiara Pesenti, 53–76. Trieste: n. p., 2000, and Julia Friedman, “Blok’s ‘Gift of Hearing’ through Remizov’s ‘Audible Colors.’” SEEJ



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 47, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 367–92. 2 Alexei Remizov, Martyn Zadeka: Sonnik [Martyn Zadeka: Book of Dreams]. Paris: Opleshnik, 1954, 1. 3 Paris: Opleshnik. 4 Grigory Kushelev-Bezborodko, Pamiatniki starinnoi russkoi literatury [Landmarks of Old Russian Literature]. Vol. 1. Edited by Nikolai Kostomarov. St. Petersburg: Tip. Kulisha, 1860, 153–68. 5 Henceforth referred to as the “Amherst album.” Several images as well as a short description of the album were published in the catalog Images of Alexei Remizov (Amherst: Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, 1985). 6 René Guerra collection. 7 Ministry of Russian Culture, formerly Reznikoff collection. 8 Solomoniiu, ee videniia ia snachala narisoval . . . i po risunku pishu” (Remizov, Possessed, Opleshnik, 1951, 8). 9 “Ia ved’ ne voplotivshiisia! I vsia moia risoval’naia strast’ tol’ko gorit vo mne, nikogo ne podzhigaia.” The 1920s album is in the Reznikoff collection, cited in Alla Gracheva, “Krug schast’ia—litsevoi kodeks Alekseia Remizova.” In Risunki pisatelei, 200– 30. St. Petersburg: Akademicheskii Proekt, 2000, 202. 10 The Remizov-Amfteatrov correspondence started with Amfteatrov’s letter of August 1930 in which he asked Remizov to furnish him with some information for his current history of Russian literature. The correspondence began formally, but soon became warm and collegial. The two writers shared tips on publishers, and Amfteatrov helped Remizov to place some of his works. 11 Aleksandr Amfiteatrov Oderzhimaia Rus’: Demonicheskiia povesti XVII veka. Berlin: Mednyi Vsadnik, 1929, 5. In 1902 Amfiteatrov was also exiled to Vologda. There he became interested in the folklore of the Russian north. Remizov, who was arrested in November 1896, was transferred to a Vologda prison in July 1900, where he remained with brief interruptions until his move to Odessa in 1904. I could not find any evidence of the writers’ acquaintance at the time, and their correspondence, which I will address later in the chapter, began in 1930. Its initial letters suggest that the two did not know each other personally until they started corresponding. 12 Published in Amfiteatrov, I cherti i tzvety (Demons and Flowers) (St. Petersburg: Energiia, 1913), 1–59. 13 Ibid., 19. Here he offers the example of Smerdiakov’s simulation of his convulsions in The Brothers Karamazov. 14 Ibid., 20. As proof for this last point, Amfiteatrov proposed that such “hysterical anesthesia” was the reason for the patience of Christian martyrs during their tortures. 15 Berlin: Mednyi Vsadnik, 1929. 16 No. 3. 17 Kushelev-Bezborodko, nos. 23 and 24, respectively. Remizov will put “Savva Grudtsyn” into his last printing of “Solomoniia” as part of the volume Possessed (Paris: Opleshnik, 1951).



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 18

Amfiteatrov 1929, 160–62 and 224. Amfiteatrov 1913, 1. 20 Remizov, “Solomonija,” 5. Family here equals reproduction, fertility. 21 Russian Ministry of Culture, formerly Reznikoff collection, Paris. It is no. 132, Solomonie, on Remizov’s list (Antonella D’Amelia, “Neizdannaia kniga Merlog: Vremia i prostranstvo v izobrazitel’nom i slovestnom tvorchestve A. M. Remizova,” in Slobin, Aleksej Remizov: Approaches to a Protean Writer, 1987, 141–67, 164). The same number is marked in pencil in the upper left corner of the dedication page. 22 Blue stands for Solomoniia’s cornflowers, her “innocent” color. The brown behind the blue is reddish brown, the color of dried blood that could represent her other self, tainted by the demons. 23 The translation published in Confluences italicizes the phrase that mentions that the demons appearing to Solomoniia as young men “were much younger than Matvei” (483). 24 Remizov, Possessed, 92. 25 Among Lély’s best-known erotic verses are Arden (1933), La Sylphide ou l’Etoile carnivore (1938), and L’épouse infidèle (1966). Lély not only wrote the first scholarly biography of Sade and published much of his papers and correspondence, but he was also the editor of the standard eight-volume collection of Sade’s work. See, for example Lettres choisies du Marquis de Sade (Paris: Union générale d’éditions, 1938); Morceaux choisis de Donatien-AlphonseFrançois, Marquis de Sade (Paris: P.Seghers,1948); and Vie du Marquis de Sade: Écrite sur des données nouvelles et accompagnée de nombreux documents; Le plus souvent inédits (Paris: Gallimard, 1952–1957). The Hippocrate translation is signed by S. and Gilbert Lély. Lély described this translation as a “poème en prose adapté du russe d’apres une traduction mot à mot” (in Vie du Marquis de Sade). The translating relationship between Remizov and Lély was reciprocal—in 1938 Remizov translated some of Lély’s poetry into Russian (Gilbert Lély, Etudes critiques inédites [Paris: Thierry Bouchard, 1979], 53). 26 See 1938 Dictionnaire abrégé du Surréalisme. Sarane Alexandrian writes about Lély’s defense of libertine values. It seems that Lély was too risqué, sexually, even for the surrealists (in Les libérateurs de l ’amour [Le Seuil, 1977], 232). 27 Jean-Louis Gabin, Gilbert Lély: Biographie. Paris: Séguier, 1991, 37. 28 Gilbert Lély dedicated the manuscript of Je ne veux pas qu’on tue cette femme’ to Remizov: “A mon cher et grand ami Alexei Remizov auteur de tant de merveilleux romans et poemes et qui m’a fait le rare honneur de traduire en russe ces poèmes,—maintenant plus beaux . . . /avec mon affectuese admiration/ Gilbert Lély. 23 Jan. 1936” (Amherst archive, series 3, box 27, folder 9). Lély was also an admirer of Remizov’s drawings. It was he who arranged for Remizov to exhibit in the Dream Surrealist exhibition (see letter in Amherst), and it was he who put Remizov’s images into Le Courrier Graphique (in 1937, while still working at the Hippocrate, “devient gérant du Courrier Graphique,” and a member of its editorial board [Gabin, 104]). 19



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29 The album remained in Remizov’s hands and was passed to Natal’ia Reznikova in 1950. Since the dedication page is left blank it is impossible to say with certainty for whom it was made, but it would be in line with Remizov’s habits to prepare such a gift as a token of gratitude for the job of translating the tale. The Amherst album, for example, was dedicated to the person who was eventually in charge of distributing the 1951 Solomoniia edition. 30 The aforementioned story by Louÿs came out in the mid-thirties (an earlier edition, without illustrations, was printed in 1926). In 1928 the publisher R. Bonnel planned to put out an erotic trilogy comprising Histoire de l’oeil (by Lord Auch, a.k.a. Georges Batailles), Le Con d ’Irene (by Aragon) and Les Couilles enragés (by Satyremont, a.k.a. Péret). The first two were printed but Péret’s book was not, due to a police raid. Then in 1929 Aragon and Péret authored a work formatted as an almanac with a poem and an explicit photograph for each month. For more detail see Gérard Durozoi, History of the Surrealist Movement. Translated by Alison Anderson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002, 61–162. 31 The results of the initial meeting of January 27, 1928 (formatted as a roundtable), were published in the March 15 issue (no. 11) of the journal La Révolution surréaliste. The complete transcripts were translated into English and published in 1990 (Investigating Sex: Surrealist Research 1928–1932, ed. José Pierre, trans. Malcolm Imprie [New York: Verso]). 32 No. 10, 802–24. Gabin believes that Remizov and Lély met during the poet’s tenure as editor in chief of Hippocrate, where Lély worked from 1933 to 1939 (94). 33 1933, no. 3, 529–87. 34 See Martha Evans, Fits and Starts: A Genealogy of Hysteria in Modern France. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991, 24–25. 35 Hippocrate, no. 10, 820. 36 The foreword was adapted from the Russian version recently printed in Russki Arkiv. The French translation of the foreword contains some explanations of names that would be obvious to their Russian readers. (It states, for example, that iar in Old Slavic is phallus, and that Boguslavka easily associated with the Greek name Theodora in which theo stands for “God” as bog does in Russian [802]). 37 L’affaire des bonbons cantharidés du Marquis de Sade” (95–128). Four years earlier, in 1929, René Char discovered thirteen letters written by de Sade. He entered into correspondence with Maurice Heine, who published, in October 1931, no. 2 of Surréalisme au Service de la Révolution, a study on Sade: “L’hommage a D.A.F. de Sade” (Gabin, 98). 38 “Le Marquis de Sade et Rose Keller,” Annales de Médicine Légale, June 1933, no. 5. 39 One of the entries in Remizov’s 1924 address book reads: “André Breton/ Librarie Gallimard/15 Bd. Raspail/La Révolution surréaliste.” This was not in Remizov’s hand. Then, in the same book, is a different entry, now in Remizov’s handwriting: “La Révolution Surréaliste/42 Rue Fontaine.” The latter, of course, was Breton’s home address. This, to my knowledge, is the earliest testament of



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 Remizov’s acquaintance with Breton, which would predate his friendship with Lély, whom he might have met through Breton. It is hard to establish the degree of acquaintance between Remizov and Breton, aside from a single handwritten invitation issued by Breton to an exhibit at the Gradiva gallery (Amherst archive, series 1/1, box 6, folder 6, 102). The catalog of the sale of André Breton’s estate lists several items Remizov gave to Breton. Among them are a signed copy of “Tourguéniev, poète du rêve,” as well as a four-page-long manuscript containing the texts of Remizov’s three short stories: “The Fried Lion” (“Le lion rôti”), “The Whipping” (“La fustigation”), and “The Bee” (“L’Abeille”). Remizov’s choice to share the first of these three stories, which, though written some quarter of a century before, might be an allusion to the Breton-Bataille polemic of the late 1920s when Georges Bataille referred to Breton as a “castrated lion” (le lion châtré), seems a bit peculiar. 40 See, for example, Durozoi 164ff., and Dawn Ades, Afterword to Investigating Sex: Surrealist Research 1928–1932. Edited by José Pierre. Translated by Malcolm Imrie. London: Verso, 1992. 203–5. 41 Ades, 203. 42 Le Cinquantenaire de l’hystérie,” in La Révolution surréaliste, March 15, 1928, no. 11, 20–22. 43 “I angely-khraniteli i besy prebyvaiut ne gde-nibud’ na storone, a vo mne. // “Besnovatyi”—raskovannyi i oderzhimyi. // Ia vo vlasti moikh sobstvennykh sil—i ia besnovatyi” (Alla Gracheva, Aleksei Remizov i drevnerusskaia kul’tura. St. Petersburg: Petropolis, 2000, 202; the original is held by the Russian Ministry of Culture, formerly in the Reznikoff archive). 44 “Ia rodilsia v kupal’skuiu noch i voshel v mir iz ‘demonskoi kipi’ . . . Priroda moego sushchestva kupal ’skaia: ogon’ i krov’ ” (Kodrianskaia 1959, 89). The ancient celebration of nature’s fertility on the eve of Ivan Kupala was by definition hedonistic: it featured dances around the bonfire and arbitrary sexual encounters among the villagers. In a 1909 letter to his wife where Remizov describes a fire he witnessed from the window of their Petersburg apartment, he mentions both the fire as his element and the synesthetic quality that unites fire and music: “And how eerie was that fire, in the white night, [it] draws you in, impossible to tear yourself away [from it]. I do not know if this is like that for others, but for me—fire turns the soul inside out. It could be that I am frightened by our fires, or my nature is— fire. And there is some connection with music. Fire sounds for me, music blazes. Paid the rent ( June).” (A kak eto zhutko zarevo beloi nochiu i tianet, ne otorveshsia. Dlia vsekh li tak, ne znaiu, no menia ogon’— vsiu dushu vyvorachivaet. To li ia napugan nashimi pozharami, to li moia priroda—ogon’. I est kakaia-to sviaz s muzykoi. Ogon’ dlia menia zvuchit, a muzyka pylaet. Zaplatil za kvartiru. [iun’].)(Remizov to Serafima Pavlovna, May 29, 1909, copied and edited by him, book 11, Serafima Pavlovna Remizova-Dovgello papers, 268, Russian Ministry of Culture, formerly Reznikoff archive.) There exists a 1924 photograph of Remizov inscribed to his wife: “24.6.1877. v noch’ na Ivana



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 Kupala. Moskva. A Remizov” [24.6.1877. on the night of Ivan Kupala. Moscow. A Remizov] (IRLI, manuscript division, f. 256, op. 2, no. 18). 45 “I Savva i Solomoniia besnovatye—oderzhimy. Krov’—iz krovi i cherez krov’ videniia” (Remizov, Possessed, 7). Blood in Savva Grudtsyn is both literal (from the murder he commits) and figurative (his passion). In Solomoniia, Remizov changes the seventeenth-century tale when he shows Solomoniia drinking a chalice of blood offered to her by Iaroslavka. 46 Naville asks Péret, “Péret, a-t-il eu des jouissances précises par succubes?” P.E.: “Oui.” N.A.: “Quel rapport cette jouissance a-t-ell avec celle qu’on obtenient dans la réalité?” P.E.: “C’est beaucoup mieux.” ... N.A.: “Quelle différance faites-vous entre les répresentations fémimines dans le succubat et dans l’onanisme?” P.E.: “La difference entre le rêve et l’imagination dans la veille” (33). 47 Contemporary Soviet sources could have contributed as well: a look at the newspaper clippings preserved in the Reznikoff collection shows that by 1928 Remizov’s interest in the topic of hysteria and religiosity was already in place. There is a clipping from a Soviet newspaper (April 5, 1924 [?]) reporting about a woman from Rome who displays blood, tears, and stigmata on Holy Friday: “Eti istericheskiie iavleniia,—tak naz. Stigmaty, khorosho izvestny vracham, proiavliaiutsia u ‘sviatoi monakhini’ v naredkost’ opredelennoi forme.” The next clipping from June 24 concerns some “sviataiamogila” at Volkovo cemetery. Another from a French Russian newspaper from September 1926 is about “porazitel’nyi religioznyi pod’em v Rossii.” It retells an article from Izvestiia no. 217 that mocks this revival (Reznikoff archive, f. 103, p. 51). 48 L’Hystérie dans l’art was a compilation of religious works of art showing possession or religious ecstasy that symptomwise resembled hysterical convulsions. Many students wrote their theses and published articles on religious “miraculous” cures, diabolic possessions, etc. Bourneville and Régnard (Iconographie photographique de la Salpetiere, service de M. Charcot, vol. 1 [Paris: Delahaye, 1877]) wrote that there is “no need at all to invoke supernatural influence” to explain hysteria. Charles Richet wrote “Les Démoniaques d’aujourd’hui et d’autrefois” (in Revue des deux mondes, 1880, 37:340–72, 552– 83; 828–63). 49 Paris: Alcan, 1926. 50 According to Janet a hysterical attack was simply an acting-out of the original disturbing idea (idée fixe). This was a post-Babinski book; auto-suggestion is a part of the assumption here. Dr. Joseph Babinski, Charcot’s student and his later detractor, sought to “dismember hysteria” and offered a new term to describe the phenomenon: pithiatism (a neologism he fashioned from a combination of Greek words meaning “curable by persuasion”). He insisted that hysteria was not justified by real events but was in the patient’s head. Evans notes that Babinski’s



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 antihysteria stance should be seen in the context of larger antipositivist ideas of fin-de-siècle Europe (57). 51 Recueil de confessions et observations psycho-sexuels tirées de la literature médicale (Paris: Editions Cres, 1926). 52 Michel Leiris, L’Afrique fantôme: De Dakar à Djibouti, 1931–1933, 3rd edition. 53 John MacGregor, The Discovery of the Art of the Insane. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992, 281. 54 Auguste Marie, “L’art et la folie,” in Revue scientifique 67 (1929), 393–98. Cited in MacGregor, 356, note 50. 55 See Alain Jouffrou, “La collection André Breton,” in L’oil 10 (October 1955), 32–39. Cited in MacGregor, 357, note 90. 56 Lély later reworked his original translation of Solomoniia into a play (poème dramatique). This play, which consists of five chants, introduces two new character, both narrators: male Trophime and female Irina. According to one of Lély’s bibliographies, an illustrated edition of this play was to come out sometime after 1979 at Jacques Carpentier. The illustrations were to be done by surrealist artist Léonor Fini (Gilbert Lély, Etudes critiques inédites [Paris: Thierry Bouchard, 1979], 54). Fini, who is known for her erotic drawings, was certainly an appropriate illustrator for the story as Lély presented it. I was unable to find any traces of either the book or the illustrations, possibly because of Fini’s death the same year (1979). 57 No. 10, 802–24. 58 1945, 481–500. Here, Solomoniia follows Francis Ponge’s essay on Jean Fautrier. It is possible that Jean Paulhan’s interest in both Remizov and Fautrier led to their inclusion in the same issue. 59 Paris: Editions du Pavois. 60 Remizov’s placement of the tale in the volume devoted to dreams is in line with his interweaving of personal and traditional myths. For Remizov, dreams reveal “the states of soul that precede [his] actual existence” (des états de mon esprit qui ont précédé mon existence actuelle), thus setting a template for the present life (Remizov, “Le merveilleux,”in Où finit l’escalier, 8). 61 In 1859 doctor Paul Briquet referred to hystero-epileptical attacks as “dreams” (Traité clinique et thérapeutique de l ’hystérie, 398). Cited in Evans, 19. 62 Remizov Papers, series 1, subseries 2, box 15, folder 10, research materials, p. 1, Amherst archive. 63 Remizov, “Le merveilleux,” 7. 64 Zapis’ page in the Amherst album: “I conceived this tale in the spring of 1928 while scrutinizing the materials printed by Kushelev-Bezborodko in Landmarks of Old Russian Literature. I drew pictures, and using them wrote the text. All of November 1928 was dedicated to Solomoniia. We had just moved to a new apartment on Port Royal. The new place, winter moon and autumn wind— everything helped me to write. I wrote five drafts—a number fateful for Solomoniia. The tale did not pass without consequences: in January 1929 I became ill. I connect my pain with my writing. It could not have come for nothing. But the first spring sun I greeted with joy. The book was finished 22/ix/1934. Twenty-



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 seven drawings. Full text.” (“Zadumal etu povest’ vesnoi 1928 vchitavshis’ v materialy napechatannye u Kusheleva-Bezborodko v Pamiatnikakh starinnoi russkoi literatury. Narisoval kartinki, a uzh po nim i pisal. Ves’ noiabr’ 1928 goda byl posviashchen Solomonii. Tol’ko chto pereekhali na novuiu kvartiru v PortRoial’. Novoe mesto, zimniia luna i osennii veter—vse mne pomogalo pisat’. A perepisal piat’ raz—chislo rokovoe dlia Solomonii. Povest’ ne proshla darom, v ianvare 1929 goda ia zakhvoral. Ia sviazyvaiu svoiu bol’ s moim pisaniem. Da, takoe tak ne daetsia. No pervoe vesennee solntse ia vstretil radostno. Zakonchena kniga 22/ iX/1934. Dvadzat’ sem’ risunkov. Polnyi tekst.”)



PART THREE: MADNESS IN MUSIC

CHAPTER EIGHT MENTAL DISORDER AND CREATIVITY IN COMPOSERS: THE PERFORMER’S GESTURE AS A POINTER TO TRACES OF “MADNESS” JEAN-PIERRE ARMENGAUD1

"No great mind has existed without an element of madness,"- wrote Aristotle. From the King’s fool to the "cursed" artists of Symbolism to the Russian yourodivi (that Dimitri Shostakovich boasted of being), "madness" is part of the DNA of artistic genius. Paul Claudel, who did not feel much inclination for music, called it "a crazy woman who does not know what she is saying." But the consensus that artists are a little mad is a nominalist assertion whose definition and attribution have always been the result of a subjective and "political" judgment, a reflection of the norms of civilization, encoded in us by an unconscious cultural heritage and by normative societal attitudes. We realize today that the stigmatization conferred by the word "madness" (which refers to the elusive aspect of dreams) and the more clinical and much "safer" term of "mental disorder" (but what order is being referred to?) in fact stigmatizes, and shows the true colors of those who set the standards, especially in the artistic field most disconnected from reality: music. Romanticism, Symbolism, and then Surrealism, having let out of Pandora's box the aesthetic theories of reception, made the subjectivity of the "receiver" (whether an intermediary, a performer, or an audience member) the co-creator of the work of art and therefore a biased judge of the element of so-called rationality, one that meets his artistic expectations, and of the element of madness that consumes itself in the obsessive regret of the past or else projects itself recklessly into the future. Things get complicated when it comes to music. This is beautifully summarized in a literary fashion by Marcel Proust when, in "Swann in

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Love," he brings up the case of the composer Vinteuil, the fictional author of the famous little musical "phrase": The painter had heard that Vinteuil risked losing his mind. And he maintained that signs of this could be detected in certain passages in the sonata. This remark did not strike Swann as ridiculous; rather, it puzzled him, for a purely musical work contains none of those logical sequences whose deterioration in language would be a proof of insanity. Thus insanity diagnosed in a sonata seemed to him as mysterious a thing as the insanity of a dog or a horse, although indeed such cases may be observed.

It is now known that music affects every aspect of brain function, while being able at any moment to short-circuit logical processes, hence its use to help to treat Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, etc.2 The recent neurological discoveries about the existence of a "center for music" in the brain, which is neither the one for language nor that for vision, have established that it functions in a complex way in relation to the networks involved (hallucinations, colors, tastes, smells, recluse memory, projected memory, narcissistic creativity, etc.) and that a special approach is needed to apprehend mental disorders in the case of composers. The musical brain makes a synthesis between memory (music being a temporal art which provides a sound narrative but without an objective "story"), present action (the real dynamic of the sound movement) and creative projection (a true leap into the unknown that can endanger the aesthetic paradigm as well as psychic behavior). This synthesis helps to define the specificity of emotional communication that is characteristic of music. In his work "I of the Vortex," Rodolfo Llinas, Professor of Neuroscience at New York University, is even more specific: The neural processes underlying that which we call creativity have nothing to do with rationality. . . . The activity of the basal ganglia never stops . . . these nuclei appear to function as a generator of random and continuous sound patterns . . . . Music that comes from memory has the merit of drawing attention to thoughts that are neglected or repressed, which may allow it to perform a function similar to that of dreams . . . . Most of us hear incessant inner music.3

This shows the difficulty to list the composers affected by these mental disorders. The Clinical Psychology Review of February 20124 summarizes the various forms of disorder observed in some composers. It states that 46% of artists are affected (56% for writers) and that creativity, in its search for a disrupting originality to generate new associations, is most of

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the time incompatible with an immediate intellectual, social, and financial recognition. This existential contradiction without "reward" generates a particular tendency to mania, deep nostalgia, or the withdrawal into obsessions, rather than to severe bipolarity. But case studies are generally content to describe and observe this phenomenon rather than explain the processes and their effects on creation. On close examination, the list of composers threatened at some time in their lives by these syndromes is long, very long: Lassus, Gesualdo, Dowland, Handel, Schubert, Donizetti, Schumann, Berlioz, Glinka, Tchaikovsky, Alkan, Brückner Mahler, Holst, Elgar, Mussorgsky, Arensky, Wolf, Scriabin, Ciurlionis, Rachmaninoff, Wagner, Debussy, Chausson, Duparc, Satie, Ravel, Lourie, Mosolov, Ives, Scelsi, Ligeti, Zimmermann ... it’s hard to know where to stop! Such is why this article does not claim to take stock or to speak on this subject in terms of clinical judgment, but offers a different methodology, taking as its starting point the interpretation of music in order to detect traces and effects of a noted mental disorder (according to the norms of the period) in certain composers’ works. "We listen with our muscles," wrote Nietzsche.5 To analyze how a disorder may have influenced creativity, we will focus on the artistic, technical, and even "muscular" reflexes of the performer, although these are inevitably conditioned by education and a background of cultural expectations. Our goal is to try to translate what the hands of the performer feel and express by studying the parameters (dynamics, tempo, tone, expression, style, context, gestural attitudes and fingering, etc.) after hundreds of hours of learning and performance spent in reconstituting and reconstructing the pre-magical structure of the work,6 its areas of shadow and light, its sublimated pain and thus its elements of alleged madness. Our opinion, of course, will also always take into account other information related to the psycho-musical context of the works. The categorization of the effects of mental disorder on music creation is rendered difficult by the complexity and permeation of networks involved in the "music brain" and by the psychological reactions of denial, guilt, defense, and protection. In general, the aspect of madness generally shows itself to the fingers of the pianist as an impossibility, a step beyond the musical project, the crossing of a red line, or even an aggression. The shadow of madness appears for example: x when worry, anguish, and loss of ego undermine creativity, as in the case of Schumann.

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x when the tension in the discourse leaves no room for relaxation, as with Scriabin. x when the violent rhythm of unconscious depths contradicts the sublimation of the destiny of the work, as in Brückner, because, as tragic as it is, the message of the work is always presented in a form that calms and brings pleasure. x when the memory of past pleasure removes the interior mirror of beauty to leave room for doubt, as in Rachmaninov and Sibelius. x when the tyranny of an unsatisfied super-ego and hypersensitivity generates an outdistanced, expressive form of hysteria, as in Chausson and Sibelius. x when caricature or ridicule in music are used to hide a secret, something unspoken, too heavy to bear, as in Satie. Our study will focus on a few pre-symbolist or symbolist composers, significant because of the different kinds of effects of mental disorder on their work: Schumann, Scriabin, Rachmaninoff, Mahler, Brückner, Satie, and Sibelius. Their problems, their positions, and their postures sometimes intersect, sometimes diverge. Their disorders have grown more manifest over time in the memory of music lovers. If their disorders are seen by extreme behavior in their lives, what about the consequences on their creation? Let us go over to the piano, to play and listen.

The Symbolic Case of Robert Schumann Fantasiestücke op.111: the beginning. Going up and down the chromatic steps of eighth-note triplets (G-A flat, A natural, B flat, B natural, A flat), the fingers, although in a classical rounded position, feel an almost unbearable tension throughout the first piece, the hand confined in an unnatural "corset," to which are added the octave leaps that break the melodic continuity (measures 2, 4, 6, 10 . . .), strident accents on a background of dissonant seventh intervals (measures 32, 34, 36, 45, 47, 50, 52, 57 . . .), the contrapuntal dissonances that hide the violence of suffering (measure 19), impotence, and rebellion (measure 59). (Example 1: measures18-19). The fingers claw the ivory with rage as they cannot sing like Schumann's music requires or lighten the garlands of descending figures that would give the nightmare the lightness of a dream. The music bridles neither due to a lack of inspiration nor to anti pianistic writing as some critics have claimed, but under the influence of extra-musical impulsion.

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The hands face a maddening momentum stronger than the "idea" of the work and sense that the overload of the movement needed is partly outside the general concept. They are confronted with passages that seem outside the main narrative, with sound matter that engraves its own pattern in music disfigured by foreign shapes which resist integration into a perfectly mastered form, with a rush toward torrents of anxiety born by a formal imagination of exceptional power; these carry some incredible and unique meteors of sound, symbolically even more radiant. An energetic and desperate madness is at work without any further meaning than the violence of its repeated gestures. This pre-symbolism in Schumann must be stressed: it gives the music the power to access a metarational order, where the hands of the pianist are arbiters between the comprehensible and the incomprehensible, like symbolist painting would be between the visible and the invisible. Let us give homage to the pianist Vladimir Horowitz who, thanks to his incredible finger musculature, was effortlessly able to perform this piece. But should one sublimate the message or accept rather to restore the discomfort, the unmasterable awkwardness, the existential suffering?

Fig. 8-1. Robert Schumann, Fantasiestücke op.111, example 1: measures18-19

The second piece tries to calm the storm, with a tendency to close the hand of the pianist in the "round fingered" position. The melody itself is rounded out as if to hide a secret, seeming to apologize mezzo voce for

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having let out a different person’s ego. Even the rising chromatic line of the second motif (an excellent structural reminder of the one that was totally unleashed in the first piece) eventually turns the pianist’s fingers to the fundamental chord of the soothing key of E flat, endlessly repeated; this withdrawal into oneself for fear of getting lost, this reuniting of all the egos, "Eusebius," "Florestan," and all the others, this aspiration to a central sonority which the fingers of the performer might want to leave, tempted by other adventures, would be sought by Schumann throughout his life. To whisper a secret, a remorse, the vibration must be mastered and the fingertip pads be flattened (measures 16-17). To hide? For protection? From the fear of madness, or simply depression, either threatening again or which is remembered through syncopated hammered octaves, like heavy blows (measures 35-40)? (Example 2: measures 38-39). Schumann's madness can also be detected in this phobic music of a terrorized child (or parent with guilty feelings), which prevents him from speaking for fear of being heard or unleashing the irreparable. Music that gives goose bumps, which is silent or speaks in whispers for fear of an internal explosion, is found in the famous "Scenes from Childhood" and in the "Forest Scenes" including "the Prophet Bird." The pianist must also be afraid. The third piece clings to the simplicity of a march with a clear spirit of national identity, with leaden soles, violent and perfectly harmonized. The fingers feel an excess in the heaviness of the martial theme and especially the "forte" repetition of basic chords with little modulation, simple harmonies, and numerous classic cadences as if to avoid the risk of loss of the unity of the ego with alterations and passing dissonances. It is the sign of being caught in the rut of an infernal psychotic-like impulsion, which struggles against invisible barriers and whose subliminal message overwhelms the purely musical intention. The saturation of chords with repetitions of the fundamental (as if clinging desperately to a rational sound narrative), the presence of major or minor dissonant seconds within conventional chords of superposed thirds, and the harmonic and spatial compression of the writing mean that the hand of the performer has to bear excessive weight which brings about, behind the sometimes abrupt clarity of discourse, a form of harmonic blurring, and dispossession of a language suddenly alien to its own meaning, a "doppelganger" of itself. The great Schumann pianist Yves Nat told his students that they must put words and images on Schumann’s notes, but they can only be "shadows of words,"7 memories of words of love and hope! The pianist’s gesture sets off almost shapeless waves of murmured sound, unwritten mysterious traces of the silent inner music that

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Fig. 8-2. Robert Schumann, example 2: measures 38-39

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we all carry within us, repressed by our rational behavior of protection. A sign of disorder? In Schumann it is ready to take priority over the rest; the fingers of the pianist must manage this excessive conflict between a musical legacy of Beethoven, who masters his destiny, and abandonment to obscure forces (death or transfiguration?). The middle of the third piece of the Fantasiestücke Op 111 escapes without transition to a typical Schumann dream space; the fingers of the pianist fingers become those of someone else, but they feel they translate that other form of Schumannian madness, the expression of parallel worlds, apparently disconnected. The Geistervariationen, the last work by Schumann, begun before his suicide attempt in the Rhine and finished at the Endenich mental hospital, has long been wrongly rejected, by Clara Schumann herself and by most performers and musicologists, as a minor work, a victim of mental impairment and disease in the composer’s terminal stage. The "poverty" of writing is voluntary, in the form of a single, simple theme, endlessly repeated and varied with great economy of means in five variations, simultaneously redundant and sparing. It reveals, through a different pianistic gesture, another aspect of Schumann’s battle between creativity and madness. More than a musical farewell of a dying man, it is, unique in the history of music, a work of "passage" between life and death, with its ebb and flow, its peaks of sharp pain and its periods of remission. When he launches into the theme of the chorale, the pianist fingers immediately feel the expressive dichotomy, that of a depressed and withdrawn affettuoso, but alive—and that of a masked feeling of dread, encrypted in the tension of an academic counterpoint. Before the last struggle and at the price of a gigantic hidden effort (but the performer must make it felt), Schumann managed to gather and unify all his egos in this mezzo voce theme of rediscovered childlike sweetness, and frame them in austere variations, confined in a limited range and some basic chords, often incomplete, whose lulls and spaces the ear must fill. It is through these voluntary gaps, these underlying silences, these understatements aiming at concealment, that the fear of madness intrudes in the musical form (Variation 3 and 4) and through these "graffiti" turning around the main theme (Variation 1), with the risk of not giving the pianist enough space to place his fingers. But in this strained enclosure of the irrational, the dykes of counterpoint tremble. In Variation 1, the fingers have no more space and leave a feeling of something unsaid. Variation 2 is constructed as a canon, the hands can only contradict and stifle, not without masochism, the ultimate idealized aspiration of the chorale. In the first lines of variation 3, which is the most developed, the accompaniment is disfigured by

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becoming more dancing or leaping, as if it were allusion to a new musical character, ready to break free of the single theme. In the second part of the variation (measures 103-104), we can notice "memory lapses" of a sort in the statement of the chorale; the hand and ear would like to repeat pivotal notes of the theme, and their non-repetition makes them nearly disappear in the auditory memory. (Example 3: variation 3 measures 103-104). In variation 4, a sudden entrance in made by strangely resonant notes, traces of some auditory hallucinations which Schumann felt as internal explosions, a threat of dissociation of personality. Variation 5 sees his dream slowed by an excess of rhythmic counterpoint and veiled by the pedal, allowing the right hand and the left hand to cohabit throughout the variation in a perfectly dissonant harmonic atmosphere. The playing of the pianist constrained by this blurring of intentions lets the music quite naturally sink gradually into the night, leaving the trace of a perfectly controlled creative desperation, a few days, a few hours, before the composer was actually overwhelmed by madness. Numerous publications by scientists have issued a judgment on the nature of the insanity of Schumann,8 who also suffered from syphilis, and we do not consider it right to give an opinion about this, as it could be wrong only to see periodic attacks of phobic and obsessive neurosis. Aesthetically, our pianist’s hand, acting as a sentinel, has guided us to the breaches, inconsistencies, denials, silences and encryptions in Schumann's music in which the threat of madness, underlying since his youth, played a role in the construction and in the message. The combination of mental disorder and extraordinary creative energy led to a cohabitation of different levels of structure, a depth of reception and sound framing in which extremes meet: presence/absence, loudness/silence, resistance to the dispersion of the ego/sublimation. All things considered it is an affirmation of a form of symbolist transcendence towards another world. The performer, like the listener, must live with this threat of madness lurking in all the work of Schumann, which show not only his genius but a uniqueness, which could be termed "over-musical."

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Fig. 8-3. Robert Schumann, example 3: variation 3 measures 103-104

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Erik Satie: Saved From Insanity by Irony The hands of the pianist touch the keys and the fingers play "bureaucratically" as if it were a sonata by Clementi, a study by SaintSaens, or a jumping ritornello. Occasionally they play in the style of a jazzy cabaret. The finger can just be regular, exaggerating the "right" hand position according to the good education of the Conservatory; although the dynamic contrasts are many, the color of the sound is rather monochromatic. This serenity is short-lived, as soon the fingers of the pianist "no longer know where to go" because this apparently simple mosaic-like music is never quite where cultural reflexes of pianist and listener want it to go, which moreover makes it difficult to remember. Each piece reserves a surprise, often in contradiction with a theme or a dominant style: in the "Gymnopédies" two minutes of melodies, particularly slow and "anorexic" in response to the triumphant power of Wagner's operas (each lasting several hours); in the "Sonatine Bureaucratique" ("Bureaucratic Sonatina"), a false Clementi sonata played in another register; in the "Embryons désechés" ("desiccated embryos"), a quote from the funeral march by Chopin, completely decontextualized; in the evocation of "Courses" ("Races"), "Sports et Divertissements" ("Sports and Entertainment") that of "La Marseillaise" polluted with false notes; in the description of the voluntary death of Socrates, a priori so moving, "desensitized" and trivialized harmonic expression; or in the ballet "Entracte" ("Intermission"), coarse harmonies of blaring music "in front of spectators dazzled by car headlights," all that embellished with asides, abrupt rhythms, unexpected countermelodies, incongruous harmonies (under the pretext of free contrapuntal encounters), unromanticized melodies, contradictory and slightly schizophrenic polysemies, misleading titles, and even silences. Endless examples can be given of trompe l'oeil, auditory traps, and musical jokes, but also of behavioral, literary, aesthetic, political, and sentimental pranks by Erik Satie. They target the inanity of academicism, styles, institutional systems, received and well-meaning ideas, denouncing them using the recipes of the theater of the absurd, pushing to the limits our rational pseudo-logic, until it collapses by itself. At first sight the madness is not Satie's, but rather the listener's, made crazy by this music as it confronts him with his own madness and that of the world of absurd rationality in which he is trapped. Satie's music is a mirror in which, wrote Georges Auric, his rival and colleague in the Group of Six, "we can see thoughts through it" and recognize ourselves. Did not

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Satie wish to heal his listeners with "the application of my Gymnopédies four or five times!"9 Following this logic, Satie's madness is thus primarily the theatre of a simulated madness, sometimes nostalgic, light, chastising, humorous, surrealistic, and falls within the kaleidoscope of the evolution of fantasies in the world before and after 1914. An activist of aesthetic "poverty," he plays at being crazy, at making statements in iconoclastic writings which can give the impression of a mental disorder, at attracting the attention of the listener by auditory illusions and the deconstruction of musical language. Added to this is his seemingly extravagant and mysterious behavior in his personal life (creating his own church that could excommunicate, fantasy drawings with psychotic handwriting,10 an umbrella duel with a critic, exile in a miserable room in the suburb of Arcueil, etc.). "I went rather a bit too far" he said to Madeleine Milhaud, who nursed him in hospital. But is this simulated madness the mask of a true mental disorder, the actor caught up in his own role, or conversely the expression of torment of a lonely creator gradually rejected by all, whose inner settling of accounts pervades his work? Yet is it the character created by these postures that bears traces of madness, or Satie the man, orphaned early and marginalized ? Or rather was it because of his musical project, too heavy to bear in its radicalism? One may wonder if the development of an ever more excessive attitude, with its provocative violence, its irremediable and somewhat masochistic ruptures ("I have the big heart of a naive young girl," he admitted), and, in his music, the focusing on details and multiple meanings that he permanently superimposed, did not generate a fundamental doubt about his mental representation. There was aesthetic schizophrenia certainly, and undoubtedly ethical schizophrenia, maybe narcissistic schizophrenia too, but his biographies speak of no clinical or therapeutic passages (other than metaphorical). The famous photograph by Man Ray says much about the double aspect of his gaze, what it was like to be in the world of Satie: short sighted and long sighted at the same time, contemplative in the microscopic examination of sound (with a compulsive tenacity) with an infinite distance from the ego. Satie’s few close friends (Madeleine Milhaud, Georges Braque, André Derain, and Brancusi) wondered how could he resist a dissociation of personality after such excessive mental contortions and drinking of absinthe. The alcoholic state probably provided him with an artificial paradise, a way of playing and exploring free zones between reality and fantasy, an anabolising therapy to avoid falling into fundamental doubt. All his texts are best understood if one imagines that they were written in a state of high alcohol-fueled excitement!

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Fig. 8-4. Erik Satie, example 4: extract from "Son of the Stars," measures 28-29-30-31

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To unravel the true from the false, the pianist's fingers can guide us. In most pieces by the composer, from "Airs à faire fuire" ("Airs to make you run away") to "Ballet Parade" ("Parade Ballet"), the pianist faces an alliance, sometimes a conflict, between circular melodic fragments and the "hiccup" of syncopation (borrowed from the first jazz music played in Europe), thus symbolizing a universally popular musical reflex. Even in the "Gymnopédies," the slight accent in the left hand on the second beat contradicts with languor and cancels the nostalgic effect of the melody in the right hand, foreshadowing in the same phrase this conflict between two directions, between a lost nostalgia and longing for modernity, between the abandoning of a sublimed melancholy from memories, and a cruel but creative tension towards a new imaginary world. The fingers foresee this unequal combat, tirelessly thought over and staged by the music, and indicate the presence of a double artistic "madness": that of a repetitive confinement in the denunciation of the falsely rational logic of the existing music system, and that of an existential doubt on the possibility of developing a continuous musical discourse by making use of such language. While remaining within the tonal system, the fingers are caught in an aesthetic program of a disordered nature which is revealing: excessive freedom of lines, a wish for unexpected harmonic combinations and intervals, use of humorous pointillist dissonances (questioning, "bouquets of thorns," provocation, derision, etc.), anti-conventional titles ("en forme de poire"/"pearshaped"), pastiche conclusions or intentional absence of conclusion. These two concurrent traces of "madness" come together in "musique d'ameublement spirituelles" ("spiritual furniture music"),11 namely "Pièces mystiques" ("Mystical Pieces"), "Le fils des étoiles" ("The Son of the Stars"), "Vexations," and the symphonic drama "Socrate" ("Socrates"), pieces which have not yet revealed all their secrets.ġ (Example 4: extract from "Son of the Stars", measures 28-29-30-31). It is in these linear works "on the border of fertile country," with a pale and anorexic expression, that Satie's true "madness" shows through, favoring an apparently self-destructive decline in art. It is possible to analyze it as a postsymbolist positioning tending to the annihilation of the "meanings" of art, in which two impulses are mixed: withdrawal into an unexpressable inner brooding, and yearning for a new function of music. To denounce the "points noirs" ("black dots") and really "s'ouvrir la tête" ("open one's head") Satie's music therapy provides two remedies: musical hypnotism (the piece "Vexations" is a pattern of 12 chords repeated 840 times) and witticisms.

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Satie escaped from this kind of aesthetic experimentation (a source or reflection of a certain mental disorder) on the listener and himself thanks to his capacity for fundamental irony and metaphorical transgression. Like Nietzsche he finds amusement in the decline of music and society, the spasms of a world destined for inevitable dramas; but more than in the energy of a superman, Satie happily believed in the emergence of a new fraternization between the proletarians of Arcueil and aristocrats of the Boulevard Saint-Germain, having never stopped going from one to the other, on foot and penniless, as a raiser of consciousness, carrying to excess the idealistic and surreal "madness" of his time.

Alexander Scriabin and Serge Rachmaninov: Creative Madness and Therapeutic Insanity The music of Alexander Scriabin is a reflection of his madness, architectural, metaphorical and dreamlike, in a new territory whose mystery is absolute Truth. He affirmed very clearly, and with exaltation declared, his form of megalomaniacal madness, as both a trophy and as a transcendence. "I am a game, I am free, I am life. I am God!" he wrote in his notebooks.12 In his music he transposed his titanic battle for the advent of a superman, accessing another universe, at the limits of music. Serge Rachmaninov on the contrary, affected by severe regressive episodes of anxiety and depression, needed music to protect him from this madness he felt rising in him, as it gave him a form of regenerative therapy of creativity, culminating in the advent of the famous 2nd concerto for piano and orchestra, the first "child" of art dictated by psychoanalytic treatment. The two Russian composers have in common the expression or channelling of their madness by seeking an intense musical and harmonic vibration: resonances of the consciousness of man with the universe of the "Great Whole" in Scriabin, echoes of interior murmuring and lost nostalgia in Rachmaninov. What is suggested by the feelings of the pianist about the music of Alexander Scriabin? The hands are driven beyond their physical capabilities, an opening and extension of the digits, a continuous projection of the fingers towards 9th, 11th, and 13th chords played in repetitions or cascades, an alternating play between dynamic expansion and tightening, a concentration of complex events and obsessive repetitions, all supported by an immense longing to exceed the human capacity for playing and auditive comprehension. Large sound progressions in tiers are accompanied by a kind of explosion of harmonic material, looking for a

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mystical elevation in sound that does not come, unless it is in the form of violent and almost hysterical repetitions of trills or chords in the treble, as in the famous poem "Vers la flamme" ("Towards the flame") and in the 10th and last Sonata, a sketch of that "mystery" that Scriabin never managed to compose and complete.ġ(Example 5: Poem "Vers la Flamme" measures). Certainly the performer also meets, through the many exogenous events of this music in search of new sounds, new categories of sound pleasures—some speak of musical eroticism—as to exceed the spectrum of the human psyche, putting in music "tiger kisses," "rustling wings," "snake embraces," etc., with resonances of particularly narcissistic mirrored sounds that require a range of colors from the pianist, from the softest to the most violent, to build a harmonic architecture and sound vibrations, in a spirit of Dionysian lightening and levitation. The performer must also integrate this "Scriabin sound" in a unified sound progression, which itself contributes to a continuity, and —this is the true genius of Scriabin—a point of balance to dispersed motifs, long sequences of discourse without events, fugitive passages suceeding each other without transition. All this is part of a gigantic task of counterpoint between textures and dynamics that have either a dreamlike stability or an extremely urgent mobility, and are sometimes mirrors of themselves. But behind the complexities of an innovative musical composition, the pianist’s fingers perceive at all times the unease of a certain mimesis. Beyond the desire to recreate a new world, Scriabin's music describes with some sonic realism the horrors and stages of a mental disorder of the superego, made up of alternating excitement and depression, obsessions and fixed ideas, narcissistic then hysterical episodes, and mystical crises, followed by periods of dejection. The performer can only admire the power of thinking to organize time and space of the musical memory with acoustic progressions of resonances, pedal effects, and finely weighted styles of accompaniment, music backgrounds with repeated syncopated notes (as at the beginning of the 8th Sonata), which have often been interpreted as expressions of anguish, but whose aim was to include, in the note or chord of the main motif, only the resonance or the harmonic of the fundamental of the chord in order to alleviate the music and play on the effect of memory. Curiously the performer feels that the creative power of this new music also involves an element of artificiality that includes areas of confusion, messy complexities, saturations of overly-condensed events, morbid indulgences in excessive sounds, like an overdose of impotent, weakwilled impulses.

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Fig. 8-5. Alexader Scriabin, example 5: Poem "Vers la Flamme" measures

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As often in Russian art, the exacerbation of symbolism not only calls for transcendence but is projected into a surreal fantasy that feeds the creative force at the price of an irrational disorder in musical discourse: "something" said Scriabin "thinks inside me, in place of me." Serge Rachmaninov also suffered all his life from crises of mental disorder; a highly gifted child and adolescent, with exceptional ease at the piano (well served by larger than normal hands), he was probably affected by a form of autism and partial dissociation of the ego, generated by a disproportion between his mental capabilities and his psychic resistance. Reinforced, like Scriabin, by overweening pride and an aristocratic haughtiness, his temperamental Slavic personality favored an alternation of creative excitement and depressive crises of doubt, especially after the failure of his first symphony, criticized for his sketchy, spasmodic, and oppressive writing, overflowing with little-controlled sentimental lyricism. Admittedly in the first works the pianist's fingers feel an ease and compositional fluidity (which in some way may recall that of Richard Strauss), an imagination like a fluttering butterfly, and the dominance of a melodic and narcissistic melancholy. This transmits a sort of brooding sorrow of "mourning" music, wreathed in the left hand by a back and forth harmonic movement, but without this leading, such as in Scriabin, to an unveiling or projection of a symbolist or modernist vision; it is rather like a powerful hand that closes on a regret or a lost or kept secret than like the projection of the fingers towards a futuristic sound. This attitude of symbolic withdrawal and anxiety can be noticed in the appearance of the funereal Dies Irae theme in many works and in some brief creative passages. The masked insanity in the music of Rachmaninov, hidden by the mastery of harmonic writing, requires the pianist to be attentive and, by using the pedal, bring out an underlying latent roar behind the decorative virtuoso outbursts with their ways of covering up fundamental and less constructed suffering, Unlike with Scriabin, Rachmaninov’s music was a therapy for mental disorder, rather than madness being the creative engine of his composition. The story (complete with a bit of legend?) says that during hypnosis sessions, Dr. Dahl, the composer's psychiatrist, restored his selfconfidence and convinced him to write the famous second piano concerto and orchestra, by making him reveal his most secret expressive desires and by more or less dictating the structural and emotional plan of the work, whose clear forms eliminate the excesses and instabilities of previous works. What a success for this "reward" therapy!

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Fig. 8-6. Serge Rachmaninov, example 6: Prelude Op 23 No 6 measures 4-5

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Fig. 8-7. Serge Rachmaninov, example 7: Musical Moment No. 2 measures 1-4

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The pianist feels that everything is lighter, has become fluid; previous conflicts, made up of moods and contradictions, are structured between the right hand and the left hand with a depth of field between two time frames, past and present, whose metaphorical meaning asserts itself more clearly. The opposition of a powerful melodic line disturbed by the almost obsessive evocation of bells and deathly nostalgia generates a network of connections, made up of affirmations, suggestions, close but also distant thematic memories, implicit prolongations of memory by elision, harmonic pedals, deferred or implied resolutions, as in Prelude op.23 # 6. (Example 6: Prelude Op 23 No 6 measures 4-5). The evocation of lost worlds, rediscovered near and far, takes place in a semi-symbolist, semi-preimpressionist atmosphere, especially in the left hand; the night rustles, the bird calls, the whirling of the accompaniment and the incessant chromatic harmonic progressions are wrapped in a transfiguring harmony. Yet the performer is often confronted with a form of tactile and auditory schizophrenia: two worlds, two distances, two dynamics, two opposing gestures are superimposed on each other in a very cinematic way. The melodic right hand, ample, fluctuating, free, with a conquering attitude overlaps with, in the left hand, graffiti-like chromatic patterns of greater or lesser magnitude, with an opposing gesture: an open and vibrating horizontal right hand, a round fingered left hand, with an inexorable monochrome diction, like in Johann-Sebastian Bach. This opposition, between art seemingly dictated by fate, and art mastered by the creative invention of the artist, is very typical of Russian symbolism. But the two hands are not always opposed and may, as in "Musical Moment No. 2," unite in a double "sound graffiti," almost disembodied, that "chats" in the place of a fundamental lack of discourse. (Example 7: Musical Moment No. 2 measures 1-4). Madness, feared, challenged, hidden, and sublimated, leaves varied traces in Rachmaninov's music, like a landscape of half-real, half-artificial shadows and lights passing on several screens. During his exile in the United States, the regressive forces would take over and he would stop composing, saying "I have lost myself."

Anton Brückner and Gustav Mahler: Viennese "Transfer" Music Vienna! The European cultural capital went, in less than fifty years, from the capital of light music (like in the1818 Congress of Vienna where people sought amusement) to that of the suicide rate. Centred on the

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urgent need to protect a "music business" and especially the distribution of cultural posts within artistic baronies, a consequence of the authoritarian Austro-Hungarian regime, it always struggled to recognize musicians of genius (Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, Brückner, Mahler, etc.). The form of madness we observe traces of in Brückner and Mahler (more repressed and castrating in the former, more exacerbated and espressed in the latter) fits into this heavy social and political context of a city withdrawn into pride in its style and avarice of its privileges, and which throughout the nineteenth century was the resonator of identity problems and nationality movements in Mitteleuropa. Anton Brückner did not entrust much music to the hands of the pianist, and all his musical vigor, bound in violence, resonates instead with organs, voices, massive strings, trombones and other brass instruments, the latter bearing a primary symbolism with demonic connotations. However the composer's most famous little piano piece, "Erinnerung" (written at the same time as his 3rd Mass), allows the pianists fingers to detect a "preRomantic" theme (in 1868!), with a simple and regular meter, and some hints of this creative regressivity which is both the mark and the genius of the composer. The elegiac theme is expressed thoughout the piece in the form of melodic steps, repeated from octave to octave like small urgent appeals, imperious desires, or memories suddenly present. Ready to grasp (metaphorically) the object of its desire, the melody is as if trapped and retained by the unsurprising but imperturbable slow march in four beats, and ends with a despondency tinged with guilt. This same pattern recurs eight times in a row, and the discourse progresses only by changes of dimension or accompaniments without transition, and a juxtaposition of repetitions, giving the impression of a certain conceptual stiffness and creative inhibition. The music never manages to escape the fateful rigor of the meter, a kind of categorical imperative (observation by the mother, unconscious castration by society?) that Brückner imposes on himself in a masochistic way as a displacement/punishment for his unattainable desire, the guilt of which he believes he can rid himself. The colors of the music are just the mimesis of his moods; it advances according to the emotional registers the composer-organist pulls both from his real emotional obsessions and from his self-flagelating compositional postulates. But it faces a closed door. When the repeat comes, with the left hand accompaniment of arpeggios imitating a harp, it "blushes" suddenly, angry, reflecting the temperament of Brückner, stomps like a child, swelling the dynamics and sound amplitude, hammers out the main romantic theme, distorting it, revealing a very noticeable extra-musical violence. (Example 8: Erinnerung measures 41-42-43).

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Fig. 8-8. Anton Brückner, example 8: Erinnerung measures 41-42-43

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"Erinnerung," though a minor piece in the work of Brückner, nevertheless reveals a strange receptive disorder, echoing a form of madness with quite mysterious implications for the music. At the piano, the performer perceives the contradictions of an inspiration self-restrained by a conventional exercise and the somewhat schizophrenic opposition between the effusional hypersensitivity of the writing and the theoretical emptiness of a self-imposed form. Through the naive clarity of a simple expression, the mystery of something unspoken can be felt, that his self-censorship prevents him from expressing, and that we will never know, except through these inaudible murmurs of resistance to himself and to society. It is another implicit music, unexpressed, outside the music itself, hidden behind use of sound and the metalised hammering of the brass with which he covers the impulses of his unconscious and sometimes exceeds the limits of our ears! Mozart, probably Bach, and certainly Schubert censored themselves unwillingly or unknowingly, but not to this extent and not deliberately. This is where the insanity of Brückner lies, in this music of "impeachment," which breathes all that it cannot say and that lets the listener imagine what for him was unspeakable, like people under the burden of a dark secret or disability, who speak little and just look at you in a heartrending way. This is the case in the counterpoint of the last measures of Errinerung, whispered very movingly. Brückner's life changed the day of the premature death of his father; Brückner was only 13 years old. The life of the farmer's son from Upper Austria was now led in poverty and with the rejection of the musical society of large cities. He became an assistant teacher and organist for ceremonies, where he was noted for his gift for improvisation. From his first works he was called "half-mad" and then "mad and a half" by the Deutsche Zeitung. Complaining of his physical ugliness together with some muddled efforts at seduction and his many love adventures, idealized but always disappointing, he developed an inferiority complex and failureinducing behavior, calling himself "a little dog just good enough to follow his master." The words "melancholy," "suffering," and "disenchantment" were repeated in his letters and he refused to see the world as it was. From the age of thirty, at the time of his second symphony, he suffered from headaches and attacks of paranoia, a syndome of chronic obsessional neurosis. The transfer of his taboos sometimes takes the ethereal form of an obsession with purity and a pronounced cult of the Virgin Mary. Sometimes his obsessions took a more material form, such as, from 1867, an all-out mania for counting. He counted leaves, pavement stones, windows, necklace beads, climbed to the top of bell towers to count steps

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and the houses of the town, and counted one by one the notes in his symphonies, always destined for new versions (there were up to seventeen versions), and especially their numbering (transforming opus 1 into "die Nullte," "zero"). He also started a utopian and often naive research in mathematical logic based on the idea of three themes and rhythmic and instrumental classification in increasingly complex groups, as in the Mass in D minor. The primary symbolism, with strict rules it imposes on itself, is only an obsessive transfer. The leaps of a diatonic fourth, very typical of Brücknerian accents, symbolize hope for redemption (as in the piece "Errinerung"), while those of chromatic fourth, human weakness, and those of the fifth, confidence in faith. The violin tunes evoke the infinite, the movement of the bass instruments attraction to the earth; the tonic is the symbol of Adam, the fifth that of Eve. This rather simplistic symbolism of intervals is accompanied by macabre allusions to death; it is found in the atmosphere of anguish in the Andante of the second symphony, the whiff of demonism in the Scherzo of the third symphony, in the Dies Irae of the Te Deum and the rotating repetitive patterns in "Per singules dies." But in the Te Deum ("Te ergo quaesimus"), the ear of the listener will remember signs of madness in the violent and psychotic hammering vertical chords and short sequence repeats turning round and round, running up against an impossibility of being and an inhibition of narrative, in a hysterical and primary way, as if it were music written by another. Gustav Mahler was born 36 years after Brückner and much ink has been spilled over his alleged madness. Mahler's behavior and disorders are quite well known today, thanks to the stories that Freud told of analysis sessions that were granted on request. A marginalized Jewish child born in a violent family where death stalked, and then an oft-humiliated young conductor, Mahler developed an anxious temperament, with extreme irritability that could even be seen in his uneven gait and the exalted mobility of his face. He alternated between phases of authoritarian megalomania and excitement ("could my second symphony cease to exist without an irreparable loss for humanity?" he wrote to JB Foerster) and periods of silent and regressive withdrawal, like a wandering Jew, in his pain "that alone consoles," with moments of destructive savagery and behavior imbued with sadomasochism—"he paced around like a real beast" wrote his wife Alma. The feeling of reality was unbearable for him and, feeling a stranger to himself, he was beset with visions and physical pain when working. In the "Lieder einer fahrenden Gesellen" he set to music the adventures of a double of himself, but he would do nothing, unlike Schumann, to bring his two egos together.

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It is from expressionist communication and the exacerbation of a game of madness (conscious or not) that Mahler drew his drama, the space for his expression, his revenge against helplessness, a representation of himself both calmer and more combative, because . . . it was less real! Faced with this dramatization of his discomfort, from the sublime to the ridiculous, what do the hands of the pianist tell us about the effects of mental disorder on Mahler's music, beyond the gesticulation of sound and a certain form of manipulation, for which Wagner had shown the way? Mahler wrote very little for the piano, so we have chosen a satisfactory transcript of the Adagietto from the 5th symphony. What analytical framework does the body of the performer give? x Physical movements and attitude: Hands stretch in a strange whisper. With one towards the treble another towards the bass, both hands create a sound space that expands. Even when they find the same movement towards the treble, the right and left hands can ignore each other. The latter would like to sink into the sound, and, contrary to what is said about Mahner's rejection of Impressionism, be absorbed an indefinite aura (he marks "etwas flüssiger" at measure 10), while the right hand wants to rise above in a series of pianissimo calls, heard like a distant premonition. But the pianist's body, which must give its all, is never tense; in dramatic passages the composer speaks loudly, but with moments of detachment, as if he was someone else. A disorder is already at work in the movement of the body, a disorder that says something beyond music. x Dynamics and energy: The momentum is concentrated in the contrast between a melodic leitmotif progressing step by step (in the Wagnerian manner) as a succession of calls or melodramatic supplications, sublimated by the pianissimo, and the unexpected emergence of hammered descending octaves, fortissimo, aimed at roughly sweeping away the sentimental tension, again introducing a gesture of violence that goes beyond music. Energy is limitless in gentleness as in outbursts. But the dynamics hamper the energy. The sublime melody, which soars, falls, spins around, and progressively slows down to the limits of audibility, repeats with inordinate stubbornness no less than 27 times the first four rising notes of the main motif. A trace of madness is expressed in this slow dynamic that destroys the structural power of Mahler's work from within.

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Fig. 8-9. Gustav Malher, example 9: Adagietto measures 88-89-90

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x Rhythm: The continuous 4/4 meter is that of a slowing march, advancing to the almost immobile end towards a paradise that could be that of hell. The composer imposes on us the great contradiction that he destined for himself. x Length, tempo: With a long beat, tempo gets slower and slower. Time is firstly a place of memory retention, as if through an unconscious fear of losing it, as Mahler, a man apt to break things off, tends to move abruptly from one idea to another. He can brood but also erase the memory of the past in a masochistic way. By extending time indefinitely it becomes a space, a space of dreams, of freedom in which fate is powerless and the contradictions of being are dissolved. With respect to the 1st symphony, Adorno speaks of "suspension" where time stands still. Slowness is for Mahler a posture that saves him from his madness, but it is also a power for refusing imposed time, for distorting the sound dynamics, for delaying destiny, for prolonging the feeling and pleasure of music, as the composer was looking for a form of "orgasm in sound." This tyranny of slowness is imposed on him, on the music, on the listener and performers (it is formidable for singers!); it is the absolute power of his megalomania. It represents the transfer of a suffering that does good. (Example 9: Adagietto measures 88-89-90). x Timbre, tone: It is by staging the timbres of instruments that his symphonies become real operas. The instruments' timbres are highly individualized, like pure colors, and allow confrontations, alternations, and permeations, like in the 5th symphony. "Extrasystoles" of trumpets or disturbing descending trombones blasting out in the 4th Symphony violently interrupt the lyrical idealism of the strings and introduce a macabre reality. The use of instruments goes beyond simple musical expression; a strange light is reflected, a strange guilt. In the Adagietto, it is the cellos that handle this dirty work. x Emotion, voicing: The music is incandescent, incarnate and full of nostalgia, even in its misty folds and purple silk colors. But with its slightly dark tessitura, usually mezzo or dramatic soprano, with its distended harmonic support and with its diatonic/chromatic ambiguities, it gives the impression of being foreign to itself or even an intrusion into the internal space of the composer. More than invoking, Mahler's expression carries a message, as if it came from elsewhere. The tone dynamic changes from Apollonian purity to a Dionysian voice texture. It takes time to deploy, like the takeoff

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of a large bird, climbing up and up, very high (in the "Knabenwunderlieder" there is even a diminished 16th leap), and when it comes down again it is like a groan of disappointment, bitterness, or death, as if the voice has been emptied of its own substance in a self-destructive expiration. Master of his form, Mahler lets the turmoil of guilt, which gnaws from within, show through in his melodies and in his songs. Is this a transfer of creativity or a therapeutic sublimation? x Harmony: The finger, the bow, the voice, and the ear feel that harmony is the real destabilizing factor in Mahler's music. Although music history has shown the innovative role of the composer in the evolution of the tonal system, his harmony shows another more symbolic function. Mahler uses a progressive evolution of the key system, but never seeks to merge the overlapping of two tones, for example, major and minor, instead abruptly juxtaposing keys or acknowledging their individuality, by the sudden emergence of a fourth, seventh, or a ninth chord inspired by the Wagnerian model of Tristan, but without the rational preparation for their arrival. They are made dissonant by their structure, denatured by a lowering of a semitone of the third or the fourth, which modifies or breaks the atmosphere and the melodic momentum as if creating a harmonic "fear" or an existential howl that carries a foreknowledge of death, a paroxysm of pain (measures 43-44-45 of the Adagietto), playing constantly with a diatonic/chromatic opposition. (Example 10: Adagietto measures 43-44-45). Behind the great Mahlerian line, master of itself, lies a permanent doubt, a constant change in role and color of the harmony, a variation between total absence, support of the melodic line or replacement for the melodic line. The performer is never tranquil and his body must at all times be able to anticipate these "micro-depressions," discolorings, changes of supporting notes or sudden angry sounds. The great Mahler orchestra conductors are those who, in the middle of a long pianissimo or a long lyrical development, know how to indicate a resumption, a change of dynamic or space, that seems contradictory to the music that one is listening to. For Mahler, harmony is not only the most important instrument for staging his narrative, but also an extra-musical device that reveals his inner imbalance and includes, which is quite new in music, his perceptions: fear, persecution mania, obsession, social claustrophobia, megalomaniac narcissism, violent resistance, and temptation of self-destruction.

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Fig. 8-10. Gustav Malher, example 10: Adagietto measures 43-44-45

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x Style and conclusion: Unique in the history of music, Mahler placed his madness voluntarily at the center of his creative process, at the price of disproportionate effort and suffering. The character of the opera he never wrote, but who shines through in all his works, is himself. Undoubtedly saved (up to a point) by this tragicomedy of suffering, he managed to introduce his two musical identities, one invented by his creative genius and the other untamed and indescribable, wilder, but which comes through in his instrumental arrangements. Did not Mahler himself say his "scores say everything except the essential"? He managed to give form to his harmonic and stylistic juxtapositions and the kaleidoscope of his memories, which would succeed one another, for example in the 3rd and 4th symphonies, satirical and funeral marches, satanic dances, folk tunes, military fanfares, trivial gypsy tunes, pastiches, sounds of nature, static sounds, and melodies of childhood paradise! But these are the manifestations of his mental disorder (tendency to dissociation of the ego, megalomania, obsessive transfers, violent acts of displacement, etc.) that gives coherence and, on balance, a deep symbolism to the excess and fragmentation of his inspiration. x Emotions felt by the performer: Perception seems to be the main emotional motor of Mahler’s music, perception of something that can and is going to happen at any time, that the music at once reveals and fights. The performer must find the right body attitude and sound to render permanent worry and impending tragedy in the music, an art that dances on the unsteady line between Love and Death.

Jean Sibelius: The Existential Malaise If one had to summarize the biography of Jean Sibelius briefly, one could say that his whole life was symbolically an eternal journey back and forth from Helsinki to Berlin, then to Vienna, from Berlin to Helsinki, and then to Berlin again, feeling uncomfortable in each place after a few months, with alternating crises of exaltation and depression, even exhaustion, which towards the end of his life accompanied various problems dominated by alcoholism (he composed nothing for 30 years). Sibelius is one of those composers with a strong Germanic culture who would be destined to find a place in a post-Romantic wake of Beethoven and Schumann were he not caught up, much against his will, in the turmoil of nationalism, to become—in contradiction to his reserved and introverted

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nature—the creator of a national music of Finnish identity, an identity celebrated by twenty symphonic poems ("Finlandia," "Pohjola's Daughter," "The Swan of Tuonela," etc.). This allowed him to express in his music, in addition to a very special character present in many artists from Nordic countries, a form of "madness." This was generated by a profound existential malaise, reflecting the situation of being torn between a "duty" of cultural heritage and the desire for a different music, more modern without being revolutionary, and which, without denying the cultural heritage, would find him deeper roots. Let us place our fingers on the first measures of Reverie Op 58 No 1 (1909), a piece he composed between the writing of a "funeral march," to be played at his burial, and the creation of the 4th symphony, which headed toward areas hitherto unexplored by the composer. Two worlds cohabit, but are inverted. The romantic yet nostalgic melody sings in the left hand, with a conventional rhythmic meter of 4 beats, but it includes an appoggiatura on the penultimate note, closer to a Nordic folk song. The right hand, on the contrary, soars in high pianissimo to another more distant universe with a meter of 5 beats by a series of harmonic progressions at an interval of a fourth, that is a sort of embroidery of the theme in the left hand, which gives the impression of exploring its own progression. (Example 11: measures 5-6). It disperses back and forth the notes of a denatured and interrogative seventh, with a very restrained intensity. The simultaneity of the 4 and 5 beat rhythms depict two imbalanced parallel worlds. Harmonically nothing opposes the two figures in the right and left hands; yet their superposition and their tessitura bring a strange and unreal color, and a feeling of auditory schizophrenia: one suffers, the other wants to escape and dream. This contradiction will soon be remedied by a range of rising bass chords evoking a call to order, a punitive reproach and therefore a risk of death. The fingers feel some muted dissonances but no seeking of atonality. Only the instrumental coloring, the luminous atmosphere, the juxtaposition of different worlds, back and forth between the introspective "I" and the more descriptive and distanced "he," alert us to the fundamental anxiety of Sibelius’s music and of a dual personality, hidden, repressed, fractured, which, unlike Mahler, does not try to force the music, but lets it express, through reminders and unpredictable turnarounds, its feelings in this lamentation, this barely audible groan, this underlying silence that hides and yet indicates a latent madness. Sometimes the air becomes rarified as the music is subject to a cold wind and uncoupling from reality. But it is through an invasion of sound colors and sudden rushes, inspired by the ballet and calls of migrating

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storks, that the inner mood and disrupting folly of this music can be seen, like a fateful and liberating inebriation; this explosion of timbres absorbs, hypnotizes, burns, close to oblivion. Like in some films by the director Kaurismaki, Sibelius's music illuminates the absurd fate of the man who does not know why or how he arrived at this condition. To conclude this study, we hope to have demonstrated through that analysis that by the experienced fingers of the performer is often the means of revealing the hidden effects of mental disorder on the composer and his work, and brings out the extra-musical input that moves within it in an invisible or inaudible way. But these effects are complex and sometimes insidious. At this stage we can simply sketch an (admittedly non-comprehensive) outline of their categorization: x There is music that is used for protection against madness, to mask it or to adopt a form of unconscious denial by escapism to protect against the obsession with death or that of an existential dispersion of the ego: Tchaikovsky, Schumann, Mahler, Satie, Debussy, etc. x There is music to chase madness away, that simulates madness by exaggerating, by victimizing, by guilt, by a self-critical mockery of oneself or of society: Mahler, Satie, Scriabin, etc. x There is obsessive music, often with repetitive reflections of fixed ideas that feature hysteria, sometimes visual, sometimes fluid, with sounds expressed like pictures: Scriabin, Brückner, etc. x There is music of double identity and slight schizophrenia, looking to play roles and sometimes express an implicit feeling of unreality, defects of disorder, portending a form of real or metaphorical suicide: Sibelius, Schumann, etc. x There is the music of depressive energy, foresight and fatalism, which shows violent past/present interactions, inward-looking episodes, narcissistic suffering, and depressive harmonies: Rachmaninov, Debussy, Chausson, Duparc, etc. x There is the music of rhythmic anxiety and panic, dynamics which weary, bodily malaise, and lack of space, bringing about escapes to dream worlds: Schumann, Debussy, etc. x There is music of nostalgia for a lost paradise, against a background of fear of death and guilt: Ravel, etc.

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Fig. 8-11. Jean Sybelius, example 11: Reverie Op 58 No 1, measures 5-6

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List of Illustrations Fig. 8-1. Robert Schumann, Geistervariationen (1854) G.Henle Verlag, example 1: measures18-19. Fig. 8-2. Robert Schumann, Geistervariationen (1854) G.Henle Verlag, example 2: measures 38-39. Fig. 8-3. Robert Schumann, Geistervariationen (1854) G.Henle Verlag, example 3: variation 3 measures 103- 104. Fig. 8-4. Erik Satie, “The Son in the Stars”, Préludes (1891), Editions Salabert Paris, example 4: extract from "Son of the Stars," measures 28-29-30-31. Fig. 8-5. Alexandre Scriabine, Vers la Flamme (1914), Peters Verlag Example 5: Poem "Vers la Flamme" measures. Fig. 8-6. Serge Rachmaninov, Moment Musical op.16 n°2 (1896), “Composer publishing House of Saint- Petersburg,” Example 6: Prelude Op 23 No 6 measures 4-5. Fig. 8-7. Serge Rachmaninov, Moment Musical op.16 n°2 (1896), “Composer publishing House of Saint- Petersburg,” Example 7: Musical Moment No. 2 measures 1-4.Fig. 8-8. Anton Brückner, Erinnerung (1898), Doblinger Verlag, example 8: Erinnerung measures 41-42-43. Fig. 8-9. Gustav Mahler, Symphony n°5, Adagietto (1901-1902), transcription for the piano, Peters Verlag, example 9: Adagietto measures 88-89-90. Fig. 8-10. Gustav Malher, example 10: Adagietto measures 43-44-45. Fig. 8-11. Jean Sibelius, Rêverie op. 58 n°1 (1909),Breitkopf Verlag, example 11: Jean Sybelius, measures 5-6.

Notes 1

Translated by Frederick Goodman. Oliver Sacks, "Musicophilia," 14, Threshold. 3 Ibid., 63. 4 NIH Public Access, Shery L. Johnson, University of Berkeley USA, "Creativity and bipolar disorder: Touch by fire or burning with question?" Clin Psychology Review February 2012. See also: Simon Kyaga, Department of Medical Epidemiology, Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, "Mental illness, suicide and creativity: 40-Year Prospective total population study", Elsevier: Journal of Psychiatric Research 2013 83-90. See also: Gordon Parker, PhD, School of Psychiatry University of New South Wales, Kensington NSW Australia, "The World of suprasensory Bipolar II." 2

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5 Friedrich Nietzsche "Physiology of Art" in La Volonté de puissance (The Will to Power), Paris: Gallimard, 386. 6 Ehrenschmidt. L'ordre caché de l'art (The hidden order of Art), Paris: AS Gallimard, 316. 7 Michel Schneider. "Musiques de Nuite" ("Night Music"), Paris: Odile Jacob, 59. 8 in particular: Philippe André "Robert Schumann, Folies et Musiques" ("Robert Schumann, Madness and Music"), Le Passeur. 9 Apocryphal Letter of "Femme Lengrenage à Erik Satie February 20, 1889" in "Correspondance presque complète" ("almost complete correspondence") Fayard / Imec, 2000, 21. 10 Erik Satie, Mémoires d'un Amnésique (Memoirs of an amnesiac), Paris : Champ Libre, 1977, 22. 11 CF Jean-Pierre Armengaud. Erik Satie, biography, Paris: Fayard, 2009, 619-625. 12 Alexander Scriabin, Notes et Réflexions, Carnets inédits (Notes and Thoughts, unpublished notebooks), Klincksieck, 1979, 20.