Word: fin-de-si
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NONFICTION: Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, Carl E. Schorske ∙My Many Years, Arthur Rubinstein ∙Show People, Kenneth Tynan ∙The Falcon and the Snowman, Robert Lindsey ∙The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe ∙The Russian Empire, Chloe Obolensky White House Years, Henry Kissinger
...fate of the culture they discuss and, as art history, are not pitched at the level of scholarship a European audience feels entitled to. But it is the work that counts, and must be seen, in all its energy and episodic magnificence: a vast panorama, from the haunted fin-de-siècle symbolist canvases of Mikhail Vrubel to the last attempts, by painters like Alexander Deineka, to combine a social message with a post-cubist idiom before the freeze...
...twining reflections of silver flesh and gold hair, is perversely liturgical-a parody (done, one should recall, for a public whose cultural background was still Catholic) of medieval head reliquaries. The image, however, is not a saint or a magdalen but that sibylline bitch of the fin-de-siècle imagination, the Fatal Woman, La Belle Dame sans Merci-enigmatic as a sphinx, cruelly indifferent as a Byzantine empress, wearing the features of the Divine Sarah and the aggressive glitter of a vintage Cadillac fender...
...their homeland. Yet the comparison with Verne was more than superficial. Both men began as romantic visionaries who sought careers in law, then in the theater, then in literature. Verne went on to science fiction; Herzl went on to Palestine. That bizarre journey has all the qualities of fin-de-siècle romance. It might have been told as a novel, a pageant-even as psychohistory. Instead, Israeli Journalist Amos Elon has chosen a method of slow accretion, scrupulously piling up dates and incidents, scarcely daring to speculate or interpret. The style is out of keeping with its subject...
Fictive Avatars. The phrase fin-de-siècle has long stood for a filleted sort of consciousness: the epicine, misty, dandified transcendentalism and café demonolatry whose sturdier ancestors were men like Baudelaire and Poe. There is a certain truth to this, as evidenced by a work like Jean Delville's Orpheus. A member of the symbolist circle, Delville (1867-1953) was a devoted admirer of Joséphin Péladan, leader of the Rosicrucians in France. Yet it probably does not help us much now to know that the sickly greenish-blue radiance in which Orpheus...