Between Otto Weininger and Vassily Rozanov: Constructing the Feminine and the Masculine in Dmitry Merezhkovsky’s Works

Despite his revolutionary views on Christianity, Merezhkovsky believed in the traditional role of God concerning gender distinction and was attached to the Plato’s idea of androgyns, considering the nature of Christ in androgynous terms. The combination of the notions of gender and personality, that is, the Mysteries of the One and of the Two, must lead, according to Merezhkovsky, to the historical unison of paganism and Christianity, to the Mystery of the Three, e.g. to the Society understood as the Kingdom of Heaven. In this aspect, he moves beyond Rozanov, who also wrote on the bi-gendered nature of Christ. Merezhkovsky widely uses Weininger’s idea of immanent bisexuality of a person while he dismisses Weininger’s thesis that a woman does not possess personality and metaphysical being. Taking into account Rozanov’s suggestion of introducing gender in religion and Weininger’s idea of bisexuality, Merezhkovsky, as the article shows, occupies a somewhat middle position.

NŐ ÉS FÉRFI

A tanulmány a XIX. századi filozófus, Arthur Schopenhauer és XIX-XX. század fordulóján élt Otto Weininger filozófus-pszichológus karakterológiáját és nő-képét írja le és hasonlítja össze. A schopenhaueri és a weiningeri filozófia ugyanis meglepő egyezéseket mutat a nő szerepéről az életben, a két nem közötti különbségekről, és a nők alsóbb rendűségéről. Kisebb kitérőkkel –mint például a pszichológia feladata, karakter és nem, a nemi szerepek kettőssége, a nő, mint diametriális lény– képet kapunk a két gondolkodó elméletéről. A tanulmány olyan pszichológiát mutat be, amely a mai pszichológia előtti lélektani próbálkozás volt, és egészen más szemszögből vizsgálta az individuum és a nemek viszonyrendszerét.

An Israel of the Imagination

Chapter 1 traces Stein’s writing about empirical and abstract Jewish racialism. It looks at her 1896 essay on intermarriage and the preservation of modern Jewish identity, titled “The Modern Jew Who Has Given Up the Faith of His Fathers Can Reasonably and Consistently Believe in Isolation.” Stein wrote the work at Harvard when she was both a Jewish racialist and an undergraduate scientist. Like many of her generation, Stein took inspiration from Arnold’s critical yet glorified depiction of a Jewish force shaping civilization and the psyche. In his book Culture and Anarchy, Arnold had, in part, developed his ideas from racialist thinkers who often saw intellectual and creative “excesses,” such as genius or virtuosity, as signs of a Jewish mental disease. The infamous Otto Weininger would follow Arnold in this vein. Dissenters to this position included William James, who taught Stein at Harvard. Stein’s participation in Arnoldian and racialist debates over culture and “the Jewish question” resulted in her ethical and aesthetic interest in the experimental practices that would come to characterize literary modernism.

Piękna paranoja i Freud, czyli afera plagiatowa wokół teorii dwupłciowości Wilhelma Fließa

The article presents the dispute between Freud and Fließ concerning the bisexual theory of the latter. According to Fließ, Freud inadvertently conveyed the main ideas of this theory to his patient, Hermann Swoboda, who included them in his article, which he published. Not enough of this. The latter conveyed them to Otto Weininger, who also drew on them in his famous book Sex and Character. The result was public accusation of plagiarism made by Fließ against Swoboda and Weininger and the breaking of friendship with Freud. In the article, I argue that in this case the issue of alleged plagiarism is problematic and at least ambiguous, not allowing the formulation of categorical opinions.

And Then Came Dance

Here for the first time in English are freshly translated essays on famous women in the arts, in contemporary Russian life, and especially in the world of classical dance written by Russia’s foremost ballet critic of his day, Akim Volynsky (1861–1926). Volynsky’s depiction of the body beautiful onstage at St. Petersburg’s storied Maryinsky Theater is preceded by his earlier writings on women in Leonardo da Vinci, Dostoevsky, and Otto Weininger, and on such illustrious female personalities as Zinaida Gippius, Liubov Gurevich, Ida Rubinstein, and Lou Andreas-Salome. Volynsky was a man for whom the realm of art was largely female in form and whose all-encompassing image of woman constituted the crux of his aesthetic contemplation, which crossed over into the personal and libidinal. His career looks ahead to another Petersburg-bred “high priest” of classical dance, George Balanchine; indeed, with their undeniable proclivity toward ballet’s female component, Volynsky’s dance writings, illuminated here by examples of his earlier “gendered” criticism, invite speculation on how truly groundbreaking and forward-looking this understudied critic is.

“The Rage of Caliban”

Chapter 2 focuses on works that mark the transition from fin de siècle aestheticism to works of high modernism. The primary focus is the role of embodiment in modernist aesthetics, specifically as it appears in music. The chapter looks at several works based on Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656) in which the figure of the court dwarf represented in the painting becomes a site for anxieties about bodily and sexual difference. Alexander Zemlinsky’s opera Der Zwerg (The Dwarf) from 1922 is the primary text, based on Oscar Wilde’s story “The Birthday of the Infanta” (1891). The libretto for Zemlinsky’s opera by George Klaren transforms Wilde’s story of recognition and betrayal into an allegory of dysgenic characterology, based on the work of Otto Weininger. What Wilde perceived as a story about the noble soul beneath the grotesque body, Zemlinsky transformed into a eugenicist allegory of man’s fatal alliance with the femme fatale. As a work that embodies elements of late Romantic chromaticism as well as modernist atonality, Der Zwerg is a site for studying musical representation of bodily difference.

Weininger, Otto (1880–1903)

Otto Weininger was an Austrian philosopher and racial theorist. Born in Vienna to Jewish parents, he committed suicide five months after the publication of Sex and Character (1903; English trans., 1906), which was based on his doctoral dissertation.