Impostors, antichrists, and satanists: Textual strategies of the central and eastern European fin de siecle (Friedrich Nietzsche, Vladimir Solov'ev, Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, Russia, Stanislaw Przybyszewski, Poland)

The creation of an ethics during the 1890s based on a persona of the Antichrist or Satan has met with disapprobation by scholars, who rely on literalist readings and are intent on categorically dismissing the Decadent period in literary history as immoral. The act of casting dispersion on the demonic literature of this period, however, betrays these scholars' failure, as moralists, to grasp the philosophical and rhetorical dimensions of Decadence. The tendentious dismissal of literary works that propose a fundamental opposition to the Judeo-Christian tradition—constructed around the Christ/Antichrist dichotomy by Decadent writers, such as the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, the Russian philosopher and poet Vladimir Solov'ev, the Russian historical novelist Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, and the Polish essayist and novelist Stanisław Przybyszewski—signals a fundamentalist reproach against possible viable critiques of the “impostor,” the inauthentic and hypostasized elements of culture.; As a symbol of a wider cultural dissatisfaction with the state of nineteenth-century philosophy, religion, and science, the fin-de-siècle Antichrist is often confused with diabolical aspirations on the part of Decadent writers. Close readings of pivotal texts, however, demonstrate that an elaborate fin-de-siècle aesthetic—based on the Kantian ethical tradition and a complex rhetorical practice—underlies the Antichrist texts and that a Nietzschean reevaluation of values is effected. Furthermore, rhetorical inversions of the Lebenskunst aesthetic of Decadence—including those based on self-contradiction, irony, and self-effacement—appear to mirror the anxieties of the turn of the century and reflect the aspirations of the controversial Nietzschean “sovereign individual ideal.” The “demonic” aspect of Decadence proves that the writers' search for a new epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics cannot be grasped through a literalist or moralist reading and that a consideration of the textual and philosophical strategies of Decadent writers must be employed.