Décadent

Now this is the tale of A. B. / The grotesque black and white devotee, / The décadent fakir, / The Yellow Bookmaker, / The funny-man over the sea.

“Is it not that we shall all prize classic simplicity, in phrase or form, more than any jewelled splendour of décadent luxury?” said the Lay Figure.

It is not always easy for the uninitiated to discover the inner connections between proper names and their Décadent meaning.

Nowadays—O irony of fate!—Moscow is enthusiastic over the Russian “Empire,” the “décadent style,” and Somov, as she was, yesterday, over Vasnetzov, Old-Russian palaces, cupboards, fairy-tales, and “bylinas” (old hero ballads).

The chalky pallor of his skin remarked upon by the narrator suggests, if not the décadent, at least the intellectual: he does indeed possess highly developed intellectual faculties, main evidence of which are his brilliant chess achievements.

The Décadent was speaking to his soul— / Poor useless thing, he said, / Why did God burden me with such as thou? / The body were enough, / The body gives me all.

It is true, that the senses have by the Décadents been declared the only purveyors, the only intermediaries, between ourselves and Universal Nature. But that charge, which to some would be a most terrible one, loses much of its character when we come to see what the Décadents understand by senses and discover that they mean something quite different from what our pseudo-philosophers ever thought; in fact there is nothing in their dictionaries that approaches what the Décadents mean.

The décadent, as he is now called, decomposes the page into the paragraph, the paragraph into the sentence, the word, the letter.

Somov is a décadent not only in the philosophic import of his art, but also in his very technique and painting.