RECEPTION OF AUBREY BEARDSLEY IN UKRAINE AND RUSSIA AT THE BEGINNING OF THE XX CENTURY

Abstract

In his nostalgic record of the Victorian Decadence, Holbrook Jackson argued that Aubrey Beardsley’s ‘singularity ma[de] him a prisoner for ever in those Eighteen Nineties of which he had been so inevitable an expression’.

From the point of view of 2013, this statement was perhaps too predictable. Although interest in the Victorian artist has never been lacking, scholars within the so-called ‘Beardsley’s Industry’ have fixed their eyes on the British fin de siècle.

With the exception of Jane Desmarais’s 1998 study of the critical response inFranceto Beardsley’s works, critics have almost exclusively concentrated on what has influenced Beardsley rather than his world-wide impact on writers and artists. The article turns away from how Beardsley ‘emblematized’ paradoxes of the late Victorian era by shifting its attention to how his work and persona were adopted beyond the yellow nineties. In particular, the article focuses on early twentieth-century Russian and Ukrainian discourse on the artist and his vital role in the emergence of Modernism there.

St. Petersburgart-lovers and amateur designers who formed the World of Art group (Mir Iskusstva) considered Beardsley their ‘master’. The coterie spread their influence worldwide contributing to the celebrated decorative art of Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Russian scholars are beginning to discuss Beardsley’s influence on the literary tradition of the so-called Silver Age of Russian Culture (1900-1920), particularly, ideas on synaesthesia and theatricality.

The first exhibition of the Ukrainian Modernism inNew York(2006) drew attention to the painter Vsevolod Maksimovich, a self-proclaimed genius who died of a drug overdose at the age of twenty. Maksimovich stylized his artistic persona in accordance with the Decadent ethos of living life as a work of art, and paid a conspicuous tribute to Beardsley, the Victorian enfant terrible, in his sensuous canvases. Besides, Beardsley was an acknowledged influence on a prominent Ukrainian graphic artist Heorhiy Narbut. By exploring the production of meaning of Beardsley’s work in a different social and cultural milieu, the article challenges the basic image of the artist as a relic of the Victorian Decadence.