scholarly journals Synthesizing Religions: Vasily Rozanov’s “Phallic Christianity”

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (6) ◽  
pp. 430
Author(s):  
Henrietta Mondry

Vasily Rozanov was one of the first Russian writers of the fin de siècle to create a nexus between the study of the history of world religions and the history of sexuality. He viewed Christianity’s asceticism as a source of the disintegration of the contemporary family. This article examines Rozanov’s strategy to synthesize religions and to use pre-Christian religions of the Middle East as proof of common physical and metaphysical essence in celestial, human, animal, and mythological human/animal/divine bodies. I argue that while his rehabilitation of the physical life by endowing it with religious value was socially positive, his self-proclaimed “mission of sexuality”, when politically motivated, was manipulative and incorporated the notion of the atavistic ‘survivals’. In conclusion, I explain that Rozanov’s monistic search for the divine in the physical body as well as his strategy to synthesize religions were additionally driven by his personal doubts in the preeminence of Christian eschatology.

1893 ◽  
Vol 39 (165) ◽  
pp. 217-224
Author(s):  
M. J. Nolan

At the present time, when our fin de siècle knowledge of “general paralysis” enables us to recognize under that generic term many types of the disorder, and when the relation between it and syphilis continues a rather vexed question, little apology is needed for introducing to notice the following cases. They illustrate unmistakably some of the instances in which syphilis is solely responsible for what. Is termed by Dr. Savage” A process of degeneration which ultimately produces the ruin we recognize as general paralysis.”∗ Whatever may be hereafter formulated from the present evolutionary crisis in the history of the disorder there can be but little doubt that syphilis will be one of its most intimate and important relations. The story of its methods is briefly sketched in the following two short life-histories—in one asserting itself in the offspring of its victims by right of impure heredity, in the other carrying death direct into the vital centres by the force of its malignant virus.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Linda K. Hughes

To expand understanding of imbricated journalism and high aestheticism at the fin de siècle, this essay examines Vernon Lee's journalism and slow essay serials, a form spread over space (viz., different periodicals) and marked by irregular temporal issue of installments before finding new cohesion when retroactively constructed as a book. Lee's prolific periodical publication, especially her aesthetic criticism, is rarely approached as journalism. Newly available letters and Lee's negotiations with editors clarify the occluded history of Lee's journalism and her slow essay serials, a distinctive serial form at the fin de siècle, which this article conceptualizes in closing.


2019 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Dana Seitler

This book explores the pivotal role that various art forms played in American literary fiction in direct relation to the politics of gender and sexuality at the turn of the century. I track the transverse circulation of aesthetic ideas in fiction expressly concerned with gender and sexuality, and I argue that at stake in fin-de-siècle American writers’ aesthetic turn was not only the theorization of aesthetic experience, but also a fashioning forth of an understanding of aesthetic form in relation to political arguments and debates about available modes of sociability and cultural expression. One of the impulses of this study is to produce what we might think of as a counter-history of the aesthetic in the U.S. context at three (at least) significant and overlapping historical moments. The first is the so-called “first wave” of feminism, usually historicized as organized around the vote and the struggle for economic equality. The second is marked by the emergence of the ontologically interdependent homosexual/heterosexual matrix—expressed in Foucault’s famous revelation that, while the sodomite had been a temporary aberration, at the fin de siècle “the homosexual was now a species,” along with Eve Sedgwick’s claim that the period marks an “endemic crisis in homo-heterosexual definition.”...


1999 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
pp. 75-117 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bojan Bujić

Like her crown, which according to the story shines in a constellation, L'Arianna as a work of art shimmers as a distant and mysterious object, and the loss of Monteverdi's score, apart from the famous lament, makes it one of the great ‘if onlys’ of the history of music. Artistic responses to L'Arianna range wide. In Gabrielle d'Annunzio's novel Il fuoco, Stellio Effrena and his group of aesthetes in fin de siècle Venice embrace Monteverdi, and Arianna's lament in particular, as a home-grown antidote to Wagner, elevating ‘Lasciatemi morire’ to the status of an Italian precursor of the ‘Liebestod’. Recently Alexander Goehr gave a new lease of life to Ottavio Rinuccini's libretto in his opera Arianna, first performed in September 1995, and, as if not to desecrate a hallowed object, he included in the opera a recording of the opening of Monteverdi's surviving fragment sung by Kathleen Ferrier.


Author(s):  
N.N. Misyurov

The problem of conceptual conflict of theory and practice is investigated on the example of the transformation of long-reigning rationalism under the influence of the "organic logic of life" (the basic concept of romantic philosophy). The formation of "non-classical" philosophical epistemology, an alternative to neo-Kantianism, Young Hegelianism and positivism, is considered in the context of the systemic crisis of scientific knowledge and the change of cultural paradigm at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. The situation of changing the philosophical paradigm itself - the result of criticism of rationalism, as well as changes in the epistemological basis of the "science of sciences" - is described as a kind of fin de siècle (similar to the processes that took place in art and literature) in the history of German classical philosophy. The article proves that disputes (provoked by the Feirbach's criticism of Hegelian philosophy, as well as the polemics of Young Hegelians with positivists, initiated by Nietzsche and his imitators, and then continued by opponents and critics of Nietzscheanism) led to serious changes in the methodology and principles of philosophizing. Formed by these discussions a specific philosophical discourse (the struggle against dogmatism and the justification of the "philosophy of life" were the focus of attention of the Western European scientific community) was the beginning of the formation and rapid development of a new philosophical science based on "non-classical rationality". The article concludes about the continuity of development, not only repulsion, but also attraction in the relationship between the "former" and the newest philosophy: both paradigms imply the "truth of the world" and the appointment of man as an equal and equivalent objects (and subjects) of philosophical study.


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