Decadence

Decadence (from the French for 'decline') is a state of mind and a set of crisis phenomena in the culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, marked by a feeling of weariness, disillusionment, and loss of faith, and by the aestheticization of extinction, death, refined beauty, and individualism. Decadence expressed the moods of the fin de siècle, a protest against philistinism and positivism, and a cult of the artificial and the exquisite. Its literary manifestations are the poetry of the 'accursed poets', Joris-Karl Huysmans's novel Against Nature, and the work of Oscar Wilde. Decadence is closely interwoven with Symbolism and early Modernism. In Ukrainian literature decadent moods — melancholy, individualism, aestheticism — appeared partly in the lyric of the 'Moloda Muza' and in the early work of certain modernists, but were largely overcome by the strong national-liberation and heroic pathos characteristic of Ukrainian culture of this era, in particular by the Neoromanticism of Lesia Ukrainka.