Sleepwalkers: between decadence and awakening

The article examines the phenomenon of decadence through the prism of somnambulism. The starting point is Gaito Gazdanov’s critical remark about the meaninglessness of the concept “art of decadence.” Through the analysis of fantastic literature works (Edgar Allan Poe, Nikolai Gogol, Guy de Maupassant) and Sigmund Freud’s concept of the uncanny, the author reinterprets decadence not as decline but as a special state of falling, in which the artist encounters other entities. The study distinguishes between the realistic and the Real in literature, drawing on Valery Podoroga’s works on the realistic tradition as a national-political myth.

The second part of the article analyzes the phenomenon of somnambulism through the theoretical constructs of Merab Mamardashvili, Andrea Cavalletti, and Giorgio Agamben, which helps to clarify the grounds for considering Vienna as the capital of the 20th century. Special attention is paid to the mechanisms of memory and oblivion that shape modernity, as well as to the phenomenon of personality doubling characteristic of the turn of the 19th–20th centuries. In conclusion, the author suggests viewing representatives of decadent art as “agents of falling,” through whom forgotten evidences manifest themselves, and decadence itself as a possibility of a special kind of awakening. The article contributes to understanding modernist culture and rethinking the phenomenon of decadence in the context of contemporary philosophical thought.