Count Eric Stanislaus (or Stanislaus Eric) Stenbock ( at Thirlestaine Hall (

Cheltenham Cheltenham (), also known as Cheltenham Spa, is a spa town and borough on the edge of the Cotswolds in the county of Gloucestershire, England. Cheltenham became known as a health and holiday spa town resort, following the discovery of mineral s ...

) – at Withdeane Hall in

Brighton Brighton () is a seaside resort and one of the two main areas of the City of Brighton and Hove in the county of East Sussex, England. It is located south of London. Archaeological evidence of settlement in the area dates back to the Bronze A ...

) was a

Baltic Baltic may refer to: Peoples and languages * Baltic languages, a subfamily of Indo-European languages, including Lithuanian, Latvian and extinct Old Prussian *Balts (or Baltic peoples), ethnic groups speaking the Baltic languages and/or originati ...

Swedish Swedish or ' may refer to: Anything from or related to Sweden, a country in Northern Europe. Or, specifically: * Swedish language, a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Sweden and Finland ** Swedish alphabet, the official alphabet used by ...

poet and writer of macabre fantastic fiction.

Life

Stenbock was the count of

Bogesund Ulricehamn is a Urban areas in Sweden, locality and the seat of Ulricehamn Municipality, Västra Götaland County, Sweden, with 9,787 inhabitants in 2010. History Ulricehamn, originally known as ''Bogesund'', has been populated at least since the ...

and the heir to an estate near Kolga in Estonia. He was the son of Lucy Sophia Frerichs, the daughter and heiress of Johann Andreas Frerichs, a Manchester cotton tycoon, and Count Erich

Stenbock The Stenbock family is an old Swedish noble family, of which one younger branch established itself in Finland and another younger branch in Estonia, both of them in the mid 18th century, of which the first was entered into the rolls of the Finnis ...

, of a distinguished Swedish noble family of the Baltic German House of nobility in Reval. The family rose to prominence in the service of King Gustav Vasa: Catherine Stenbock was the third and last consort of Gustav Vasa and Queen consort of

Sweden Sweden, formally the Kingdom of Sweden,The United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names states that the country's formal name is the Kingdom of SwedenUNGEGN World Geographical Names, Sweden./ref> is a Nordic country located on ...

between 1552 and 1560. Stenbock's great-grandfather was Baron

Friedrich von Stuart Baron Friedrich von Stuart (1761-1842) was a Courland nobleman and landowner. He was married to Henrietta Kant, a niece of Immanuel Kant. They are ancestors of Count Eric Stenbock, the ambassador Henning von Wistinghausen, Baron Dmitri Stuart, an a ...

(1761–1842) from Courland. Immanuel Kant was a great-great-granduncle of Stenbock. Stenbock's father died suddenly while he was one year old; his properties were held in trust for him by his grandfather Magnus. Eric's maternal grandfather died while Eric was quite young, also, in 1866, leaving him another trust fund. Stenbock attended Balliol College in Oxford but never completed his studies. While at Oxford, Eric was deeply influenced by the homosexual

Pre-Raphaelite The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (later known as the Pre-Raphaelites) was a group of English painters, poets, and art critics, founded in 1848 by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Michael Rossetti, James ...

artist and illustrator Simeon Solomon. He is also said to have had a relationship with the composer and conductor

Norman O'Neill Norman Houston O'Neill (14 March 1875 – 3 March 1934) was an English composer and conductor of Irish background who specialised largely in works for the theatre. Life O'Neill was born at 16 Young Street in Kensington, London, the youngest son ...

and with other "young men". In Oxford, Stenbock also converted to

Roman Catholicism The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the List of Christian denominations by number of members, largest Christian church, with 1.3 billion baptized Catholics Catholic Church by country, worldwide . It is am ...

taking for himself the name Stanislaus. Some years later Eric also admitted to having tried a different religion every week in Oxford. At the end of his life, he seemed to have developed a syncretist religion containing elements of Catholicism, Buddhism and

idolatry Idolatry is the worship of a cult image or "idol" as though it were God. In Abrahamic religions (namely Judaism, Samaritanism, Christianity, the Baháʼí Faith, and Islam) idolatry connotes the worship of something or someone other than the A ...

. In 1885, Count Magnus died, upon which Stenbock, as the oldest living male relative, acceded to the status of Count and to the possession of the family's estates in Estonia. Eric traveled to and lived in Kolga for a year and a half; he returned to England in the summer of 1887, during which time he sank deeper into alcoholism and drug addiction. Stenbock behaved eccentrically. He kept snakes, lizards, salamanders and toads in his room, and had a "zoo" in his garden containing a reindeer, a fox, and a bear. When he traveled, he invariably brought with him a dog, a monkey, and a life-sized doll. This doll he referred to as "le Petit Comte" ("the little Count") and told everyone that it was his son; he insisted it be brought to him daily, and—when it was absent—he asked about its health. (Stenbock's family believed an unscrupulous Jesuit had been given large amounts of money by the Count for the "education" of this doll.)

Work

Stenbock lived in England most of his life, and wrote his works in the English language. He published a number of books of verse during his lifetime, including ''Love, Sleep, and Dreams'', 1881, and ''Rue, Myrtle, and Cypress'' (1883). In 1894, Stenbock published ''The Shadow of Death'', his last volume of verse, and ''Studies of Death'', a collection of short stories.

Death

On 26 April 1895 Stenbock died from cirrhosis of the liver at his mother's home, Withdeane Hall, near Brighton; his death went unnoticed in the press, aside from a brief mention in ''The Times'' (30 April 1895). Stenbock had named More Adey as his literary executor. On 1 May the burial service was held in the Brighton Extra Mural Cemetery.

Legacy

The band Current 93 made an album of the same name of

incidental music Incidental music is music in a play, television program, radio program, video game, or some other presentation form that is not primarily musical. The term is less frequently applied to film music, with such music being referred to instead as t ...

inspired by Stenbock's '' Faust'' story. Stenbock's legacy is supported by the invitation-only Stenbock Society, notable like Stenbock himself for its infrequent activity. Marc Almond and

Michael Cashmore Michael Cashmore is an English composer and musician currently living in Berlin. He has created music under the name of Nature and Organisation since the early 1980s and more recently (2006) under his own name. Cashmore was a member of the g ...

released the two-track CD ''Gabriel & The Lunatic Lover'' in 2008 with two songs based on Stenbock's poems by the same name. This was followed in 2011 by the album ''

Feasting with Panthers ''Feasting with Panthers'' is the sixteenth solo studio album by the British singer/songwriter Marc Almond. The album is credited to Almond and Michael Cashmore, of Current 93 and Nature and Organisation, with both given equal billing. The alb ...

'' which included two more adaptations, "Sonnet XI" and "The Song of the Unwept Tear". All four poems were adapted and translated by Jeremy Reed. Strange Attractor Press published a collection of Stenbock's short stories, poems, and essays, ''Of Kings and Things'' in 2019.

Works

Poetry

* ''Love, sleep & dreams : a volume of verse''. - Oxford : A. Thomas Shrimpton & Son ; Simpkin Marshall & Co, 1881? * ''Myrtle, rue and cypress : a book of poems, songs and sonnets''. - London : rivately printed byHatchards, 1883 * ''The shadow of death : poems, songs, and sonnets''. - London : The Leadenhall Press, 1893

Short story collections

* ''Studies of death : romantic tales'' (London : David Nutt, 1894)

Biographies and other

* Adlard, John. ''Stenbock, Yeats and the Nineties ; with an hitherto unpublished essay on Stenbock by Arthur Symons and a bibliography by Timothy d'Arch Smith''. - London : Cecil & Amelia Woolf, 1969 * Costelloe, Mary. ''Christmas with Count Stenbock'' / dited byJohn Adlard ; frontispiece by Max Beerbohm. -London : Enitharmon, 1980. - Contains letters by Mary Costelloe * Reed, Jeremy. ''A hundred years of disappearance : Count Eric Stenbock''. - reat Britain? : J. Reed, 1995

References

External links

A Secret Kept: A Brief Life of Count Stenbock
*Gay and lesbian preservationists' concern fo

in

, England
Kolga
contains a picture of the Stenbock ancestral estate in Estonia
"The Other Side: A Breton Legend"
(full text) *
Eric Stenbock as a main character in the fiction at The Criterion, June 2017
(full text) {{DEFAULTSORT:Stenbock, Eric 1860 births 1895 deaths Deaths from cirrhosis German gay writers People from the Governorate of Estonia 19th-century Estonian poets Estonian male poets Baltic-German people Estonian nobility Alumni of Balliol College, Oxford Accidental deaths in England German male poets 19th-century German poets 19th-century German male writers Alcohol-related deaths in England Weird fiction writers