Decadentism

Italy

Italian literary criticism has often looked at the decadent movement on a larger scale, proposing that its main features could be used to define a full historical period, running from the 1860s to the 1920s. For this reason, the term Decadentism, modeled on "Romanticism" or "Expressionism", became more substantial and widespread than elsewhere. However, most critics today prefer to distinguish between three periods. The first period is marked by the experience of Scapigliatura, a sort of proto-decadent movement. The Scapigliati (literally meaning "unkempt" or "dishevelled") were a group of writers and poets who shared a sentiment of intolerance for the suffocating intellectual atmosphere between the late Risorgimento (1860s) and the early years of unified Italy (1870s). They contributed to rejuvenate Italian culture through foreign influences and introduced decadent themes like illness and fascination with death. The novel Fosca (1869) by Igino Ugo Tarchetti tells of a love triangle involving a codependent man, a married woman and an ugly, sick and vampire-like figure, the femme fatale Fosca. In a similar way, Camillo Boito's Senso and his short stories venture into tales of sexual decadence and disturbing obsessions, such as incest and necrophilia. Other Scapigliati were the novelists Carlo Dossi and Giuseppe Rovani, the poet Emilio Praga, the poet and composer Arrigo Boito and the composer Franco Faccio. As for the visual arts, Medardo Rosso stands out as one of the most influential European sculptors of that time. Most of the Scapigliati died of illness, alcoholism or suicide. The second period of Italian Decadentism is dominated by Gabriele D'Annunzio, Antonio Fogazzaro and Giovanni Pascoli. D'Annunzio, who was in contact with many French intellectuals and had read the works of Nietzsche in the French translation, imported the concepts of Übermensch and will to power into Italy, although in his own particular version. The poet's aim had to be an extreme aestheticization of life, and life the ultimate work of art. Recurrent themes in his literary works include the supremacy of the individual, the cult of beauty, exaggerated sophistication, the glorification of machines, the fusion of man with nature, the exalted vitality coexisting with the triumph of death. His novel The Pleasure, published one year before The Picture of Dorian Gray, is considered one of the three genre-defining books of the Decadent movement, along with Wilde's novel and Huysmans's Against Nature. Less flashy and more isolated than D'Annunzio, and close to the French symbolists, Pascoli redefined poetry as a means of clairvoyance to regain the purity of things. Finally, the third period, which can be seen as a postlude to Decadentism, is marked by the voices of Italo Svevo, Luigi Pirandello and the Crepusculars. Svevo, with his novel Zeno's Conscience, took the idea of sickness to its logical conclusion, while Pirandello proceeded to the extreme disintegration of the self with works such as The Late Mattia Pascal, Six Characters in Search of an Author and One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand. On the other side, the Crepuscular poets (literally "twilight poets") turned Pascoli's innovations into a mood-conveying poetry, which describes the melancholy of everyday life in shady and monotonous interiors of provincial towns. These atmospheres were explored by the painters Mario Sironi, Giorgio de Chirico and Giorgio Morandi. Guido Gozzano was the most brilliant and ironic of the Crepusculars, but we can also remember Sergio Corazzini, Marino Moretti and Aldo Palazzeschi.