Sissejuhatus: dekadentsi erinumbrite triloogia ja projekti raamistik / Introduction: A Three-Part Special-Issue Series on Decadence and the Project’s Framework

Abstract

Teesid: Käesolev sissejuhatus raamistab dekadentsi-teemaliste erinumbrite triloogia kolmandat osa, mis on välja kasvanud uurimisprojektist „Tsiviliseeritud rahvuse teke: dekadents kui üleminek 1905–1940“. Projekt käsitab dekadentsi ühtaegu üleminekuseisundite diskursuse ja esteetikana, mis väljendab moderniseeruva fin de siècle’i ühiskonna lagunemis- ja ebastabiilsuskogemusi, kuid avab ühtlasi võimalusi teisenemiseks ja taassünniks. Projekt toetub viiele lähte-eeldusele, mis rõhutavad dekadentsi seost kiirenenud moderniseerumise, identiteedi ambivalentsuse, naturalismi allakäigudiskursuste ning Nietzsche mõtlemisega. Uurimuse põhifookus on eesti dekadentsil (Noor-Eesti ja selle järeltulijad) dialoogis Soome ja laiemate Skandinaavia ning (Lääne-)Euroopa dekadentsi näidetega.

This introduction presents the third part of a three-part special-issue series on artistic—above all literary—decadence, developed within the research project “The Making of a Civilized Nation: Decadence as Transition, 1905–1940.” Taken together, the three issues (the first published in Keel ja Kirjandus 2024, nos. 1–2, and the second in Kunstiteaduslikke Uurimusi 2025, vol. 34, nos. 1–2) map the current state of Estonian decadence studies and position them within Nordic—especially Finnish—and broader European scholarly contexts. Because the earlier introductions were unable to elaborate on the project’s aims or conceptual framework, this essay outlines its theoretical foundations, methodological approach and principal activities.

The project understands decadence primarily as a discourse and aesthetic of transitional states. In rapidly modernizing fin-de-siècle societies, decadence registers experiences of decay, decline, fragmentation and instability while simultaneously enabling imaginaries of renewal. The project compares representations of decadence in Nordic and Baltic cultures with those in French, German, English and Russian art and literature. It proceeds from five premises:
(1) decadence is tied to accelerated modernization and its spatial, temporal, moral, biological and aesthetic upheavals;
(2) responses to such transitions are affectively ambivalent;
(3) decadence reflects volatile transformations of identity—national, racial, gendered, sexual and political;
(4) decadent aesthetics often merge with naturalist discourses of decline; and
(5) Nietzsche’s conception of decadence, along with his reflections on nation and race, provides an essential interpretive framework.

Decadence is approached in two interrelated senses: first, as a discursive network of practices that attribute both negative and positive values to decline and fragmentation; and second, as an aesthetic mode that interacts with naturalism, symbolism, impressionism, expressionism, modernism, as well as philosophical and (pseudo)scientific discourses. Given the hybrid nature of decadent aesthetics, the project examines two types of artistic decadence: so-called core decadence and, in a broader sense, examples of artistic decadence (see Lyytikäinen et al. 2020). This broader conception of decadence helps to explain its entanglements with realism, naturalism and modernism.

The project’s central case study is Estonian decadence, including the Young Estonia movement and its successors. Key writers, artists and composers—Gustav Suits, Friedebert Tuglas, A. H. Tammsaare, Johannes Aavik, Aino Kallas, Alma Ostra-Oinas, Sophia Vardi, Nikolai Triik, Konrad Mägi, Erik Obermann, Kristjan Raud, Mart Saar, among others—reinterpreted European decadence in dialogue with Finnish decadence (L. Onerva, Eino Leino, Joel Lehtonen, F. E. Sillanpää) while negotiating the tension between a “young” national culture and “overripe” European traditions. A. H. Tammsaare’s work emerges as a major example of Nietzschean-inflected decadent modernism. A crucial theme is the transition from rural, collective identities to urban, individualist ones, as well as the formation of a decadent-national style amid competing German, Russian, French and Nordic (August Strindberg, Knut Hamsun, Herman Bang, Amalie Skram, J. P. Jacobsen etc.) and above all Finnish influences.

The project is organized around three interlinked research clusters. The first examines decadence and accelerated modernization, using concepts such as Tuglas’s “deficit of racial spirit” to elucidate stylistic instability and liminality in early urban literature.
The second explores changing identities and the emergence of “new women,” analysing how gender norms, feminist agendas, and misogynistic discourse intersect in the works of Estonian decadent-modernist authors. The third cluster, “spiritual naturalism and affective aesthetics,” investigates how decadence mediates affect, emotion, colour symbolism, and composition in works by Tammsaare, Sillanpää plus artists such as Nikolai Triik, Konrad Mägi, Ado Vabbe, Natalie Mei, Erna Brinckmann, Ida Adamson, Oskar Kallis, Eduard Wiiralt and others, drawing on Nietzschean notions of affective struggle and the will to power.

Over four years, the project has expanded substantially: it has produced several PhD dissertations; organized academic courses and seminars on decadence; published translations (including Nietzsche and key decadent texts); and arranged summer schools, public events and international conferences. It has also stimulated new research into the post-war afterlives of decadence in Estonian literature and art. The recent conference “Peripheral Decadences and Forms of Nationalism” (November 2025) demonstrated the project’s broader contribution: integrating the small Baltic and Nordic cultures into global decadence studies and showing how decadent aesthetics could reshape national identities rather than merely threaten them.

Ultimately, the project argues that peripheral cultures were not passive recipients of metropolitan models. Rather, they reinterpreted and transformed European decadence in original ways, creating distinctive artistic idioms that challenge centre–periphery narratives and open new avenues for comparative research.