The Journal as Archive: Vesy and the Russian Reader’s Encounter with Decadence

Abstract

The journal Vesy [Libra], published in Moscow between 1904 and 1909, offered a markedly new venue for the waves of modernist authors and theorists emerging in turn-of-the-century Russia. It incorporated numerous nods to European literary trends and included regular contributions from Remy de Gourmont, frequent articles on Oscar Wilde, reproductions of artwork by Odilon Redon and Aubrey Beardsley, and a steady stream of reviews of recent books in French, English, German, and Italian. Yet it also published new works by the most prominent Russian Symbolists and decadents. Vesy’s aesthetic stance was abundantly clear to its readers, prompting a hostile critic to label it ‘the Koran of the Moscow Decadents’. This offhand dismissal contains a surprising degree of insight. The journal billed itself as a ‘bibliographical monthly’ that sought to combine Russian and Western, new and old, original and translation. True to the journal’s bibliographical identity, the mixture of materials included in the seventy-two issues of Vesy did indeed read like another breviary of decadence that collected the foundational tenets of the new tradition, accumulated over several decades from all corners of Europe, into a single space of publication. For Russian readers and authors, decadence was a balancing act. On the one hand, they sought to imitate authors and texts of the past that were imported with a badge of decadence that had already been established by European critics and readers, and on the other, they were simultaneously generating distinctly Russian iterations of what, for them, was an emerging modernist art form. Having created an instant, serialized, and widely accessible archive of decadent works, Vesy offers a curious indication of how decadence was read from a distance while also working as a template for transplanting it into new cultural spaces. This perspective helps flesh out a definition of decadence that highlights its open-endedness and malleability.