On the Contrary

The novel "On the Contrary" (1884) is considered the "bible of decadence." Contemporaries and descendants had different attitudes towards the experimental novel by Joris-Karl Huysmans, but in certain European circles at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, the book became a staple. Many of the novel's "findings" have gained wide popularity in European literature — the aesthetic anti-hero, disillusioned with bourgeois morals, the absence of plot, hypertextuality (references to Mallarmé with Verlaine, to Apuleius and Edgar Allan Poe), and a painful enjoyment of art and beauty. This is the book that Dorian Gray reads, the aesthetics of this work are addressed by Russian symbolists, and references to it can be seen in contemporary literary postmodernism. This is a book in which life imitates art, not the other way around.