Pre-Raphaelite Intertextualities, Romantic Aesthetics and Love as Melancholy in Constantin Christomanos’ Tagebuchblätter (1898)

Abstract

In this paper, I investigate the cultural fashion of Pre-Raphaelitism which, in the late 19th century, inspired Constantin Christomanos to write a work based on his virtual interaction with Empress Elisabeth of Austria-Hungary. This literary piece, first published in German in 1898, was titled Tagebuchbla?tter. I review the Greek version, published in 1908 under the title ?? ??????? ??? ?????????????? ?????????. ?????? ???????????? (transliterated as: To Vivlio tis aftokrateiras Elisavet. Fylla Imerologiou).

The fin-de-sie?cle spirit that sprang during that time disseminated common aesthetic principles throughout Europe. The contribution of art to the formation of national culture was suggested as an ideological principle in Victorian England. The phenomenon expanded and led to the ideologisation of Art. Dante Gabriel Rossetti was inspired by the early Italians and the Stil Novisti. Translation became a new creation. This resonates with what Oscar Wilde will later quote in his work The Critic as Artist (1891). Rossetti, in the translation of Dante’s La Vita Nuova, mirrors himself, while Dante does the same thing in his own writing. It is a process of literary genealogy that moves between the two works. In the second case to be examined, that is, in Rossetti’s artistic work, there is the embedment of a literary subject within an artwork. Christomanos assimilates reversely the technique by Rossetti into his own literary work.

The last part of my paper aims to explore love as melancholy in this writing of Christomanos through an original multidisciplinary perspective, that is to say: theoretical, literary, aesthetic, historical, psychoanalytic, as well as gender perspective that ranges from antiquity to modernity. The painting Love Among the Ruins (1894) by Edward Burne-Jones perhaps best and vividly portrays Christomanos’ creative memories and self-reflection on the mood and feelings he experienced over his dwelling in the Austrian Empire, where he was assigned to serve as the Empress’ private instructor of Greek, bringing into light the tender erotic feelings he maintained for her (a fact that was previously addressed in earlier research: Christomanos 1990, 10-20). At this point, I suggest construing Christomanos’ love aesthetics through the scheme of the bodily humor of melancholy, by applying the rather romantic motif of unfulfilled love, which is thus completed only through decay and death ‘among the ruins’.