Aesthetic and Philosophical Reflections on Mood

Stimmung and Modernity

Birgit Breidenbach

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000067613
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

This study explores the concept of Stimmung in literary and philosophical texts of the modern age. Signifying both 'mood' and 'attunement', Stimmung speaks to the categories of affective experience and aesthetic design alike. The study locates itself in the nexus between discourses on modernity, existentialism and aesthetics and uncovers the pivotal role of Stimmung in 19th- and 20th-century European narrative fiction and continental philosophy. The study first explores the philosophical and aesthetic origins and implications of Stimmung to, then, discuss its role in the narrative fiction of three key authors of modern literature: Fyodor Dostoevsky, Samuel Beckett and Thomas Bernhard. These readings demonstrate a significant shift towards an aesthetic of affective intensity and immediacy, in which the experience of the reading process takes centre stage as each author develops an aesthetic philosophy of Stimmung in their own right. Through its focus on the concept of Stimmung, the study thus unearths a fundamental link between existentialist concerns and narrative practice in modern literature.

1 Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Moody Modernity

In his excellent study Petersburg Fin de Siècle (2011), Mark D. Steinberg sheds light on the relationship between urban modernity and social mood in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe, detecting ‘a darkening, even despairing, public mood in the face of many troubling conditions’¹ in fin-de-siècle Saint Petersburg. Describing the crammed urbanised conditions of the Tsarist capital, Steinberg argues that the public developed an awareness of the moods that shaped social reality and actively integrated them into a discourse on modern life:

Anxious talk of emotion filled the urban public sphere in Russia during these years of disorder, drift, and uncertainty. Questions about mood, feeling, and affect—particularly what was called the ‘public mood’ or ‘social mood’ (obshchestvennoe nastroenie)—became literally the talk of the town, concerning not only particular problems like street life or death or debauchery, but the very nature of modern times. This emotion talk was intensely social: shared, circulated, and analyzed in the periodical press and other public spaces and interpreted as having social location, causes, and effects. And talk about public emotions was itself emotional: not simply a description of the feelings of others, but an anxious, obsessive, even panicked part of the public mood (indeed, it helped shape that mood).²

Mood in urban Petersburg thus became a crucial subject matter within the collective consciousness, and one that deeply informed the social imagination as well as artistic production and reception at a time when the notion of modernity was equally cherished and feared. The Russian word for Stimmung is настроение (nastroenie). As difficult as translating Stimmung into English is, the Russian case is very different, as nastroenie shares the semantic ambiguity that Stimmung possesses. Commonly used to designate social moods in particular – as in Steinberg’s obshchestvennoe nastroenie – the noun links etymologically to the Russian word for ‘to tune,’ настроить (nastroit). Indeed, its semantic development mirrors that of the German term as it initially referred to the act of tuning and was then, over the course of the nineteenth century, transferred onto psychological states. Like that of Stimmung, the meaning of nastroenie has remained elastic, and it has been used in diverse ways to articulate attunement, individual moods and collective forms of feeling since the nineteenth century.

While Steinberg’s study focusses on the first decade of the twentieth century in particular, the nexus of urban life, modernity and mood in Saint Petersburg had been a subject of enquiry at least since Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–81), one of the foremost literary architects of the city. Dostoevsky’s works are as deeply embedded in the notion of modernity as they are concerned with the influence it exerts on the individual in a psychological, social, political and spiritual sense. Not only do many of them openly address the clash between western modernity and the Russian people, but most of Dostoevsky’s best-known works are also set within the urban space of Saint Petersburg – a space that symbolically represents the ambiguity and intensity of modernity. Dostoevsky was one of the first literary writers to actualise the interdependence of existentialist questions and forms of Stimmung in his works and, as we will see in this chapter, he thus became a key contributor to the development of a modern aesthetic of attunement, pioneering ways of enacting and negotiating moods that would shape the development of modern fiction through an emphasis on the immediacy and spatiality of collective modes of affect. Through close readings of the affective dynamics in a selection of major works by Dostoevsky, we will consider the role that modernity’s urbanity, its emphasis on the crowds and their coalescing, often colluding, forms of affect, plays in repositing the problem of Stimmung as a core concern of modern narrative aesthetics and existential philosophy. Indeed, we will find that through its dependence on urban space and intersubjective experience, the notion of aesthetic modernity that is articulated in Dostoevsky’s works is fundamentally intertwined with Stimmung.

As one of the most influential novelists of early modernity, Dostoevsky comprehensively examined the human condition and the nature of existence in his works, to such an extent that he is often considered to be a founding father of aesthetic existentialism. Walter Kaufmann considers Dostoevsky’s novella Notes from Underground (1864) as ‘the best overture for existentialism ever written,’³ while Jeff Malpas finds that ‘[f]rom a purely literary perspective, the key figure in the development of existentialism is not so much Kierkegaard or Nietzsche as Feodor Dostoevsky.’⁴ By executing quasi-pathological studies of human existence on the fringes of sanity, reason and the law, Dostoevsky was at the same time also intently concerned with the effect of modernity on the human psyche. In All That Is Solid Melts into Air, Marshall Berman assigns Dostoevsky an eminent position in the development of modern literature, describing him both as an heir and aesthetic antipole to Baudelaire’s modernité.⁵ While Berman recognises the influence of the aesthetic fluidity and ‘gaseousness’⁶ of space and atmosphere championed by Baudelaire’s writing in Dostoevsky’s works, he considers the latter’s nineteenth-century Saint Petersburg to be the underdeveloped, eastern twin to the former’s dazzling modern metropolis Paris. Modernity, Berman argues, divided Dostoevsky’s Russia between the old capital Moscow and the superficially westernised façade of Petersburg, which was founded as a new and modern capital, between the higher classes’ desire for European progress and modernisation and the lower classes’ bewilderment with the effects of modernisation. According to Berman, modernity in nineteenth-century Tsarist Russia was hence ‘something that was happening only in the most jagged, halting, blatantly abortive or weirdly distorted ways,’⁷ a notion that permeates Dostoevsky’s portrayals of Petersburg and the modern condition.

As a result of the contradictions and problems associated with the idea of European modernity, many Russian intellectuals developed anti-western, Slavophile sentiments, emphasising the uniqueness of the Russian spirit in opposition to their western counterparts. Following his return from Siberia, Dostoevsky, too, developed a very critical outlook on Western Europe and modernity, which he explicitly expressed in his essayistic non-fiction.⁸ Nevertheless, according to Berman, the urban aesthetic of Dostoevsky’s texts – like Baudelaire’s – offers ‘primal modern scenes’ with ‘everyday encounters in the city street that are raised to first intensity […], to the point where they express fundamental possibilities and pitfalls, allures and impasses of modern life.’⁹ Kate Holland, similarly, suggests that ‘Dostoevsky […] examines the tempest of modernization, which has fractured society’s image into a multiplicity of fragments, so that it can no longer be imagined or visualized,’ while simultaneously believing ‘that the old artistic forms are no longer capable of representing society in all its multiplicity and complexity.’¹⁰ Despite Dostoevsky’s own scepticism regarding western modernisation, his works constitute, therefore, as much an emblem as a critique of an emergent sense of modernity in nineteenth-century urban Russia.

The notion of intensity that Berman – and before him Alex de Jonge¹¹ – observes in relation to the Russian novelist’s works will provide the point of departure for my analysis of Dostoevsky’s aesthetics of Stimmung as part and parcel of a modern inquiry into human experience that is inextricably tied up with existentialist concerns. The ‘comorbidity’ of a budding existentialism and an emergent modernity in Dostoevsky’s œuvre points towards the ways in which the far-reaching epistemological paradigm shifts that modernity engendered called for a re-evaluation of the conditions of existence and, by implication, of Stimmung that materialises in these novels. Dostoevsky’s preoccupation with the human condition vis-à-vis the emergence of modernity stylistically results in literary actualisations and explorations of affect and attunement, constituting one of the most prominent elements of his narrative style and simultaneously setting the scene for a modern aesthetic of Stimmung that would considerably influence subsequent literature.

After his life-changing near-death experience and imprisonment in a labour camp in Siberia – which were the consequences of his involvement with the progressive Petrashevsky Circle – Dostoevsky entered the most prolific phase of his writing career in the 1860s, a decade which in the Russian context ‘brought to the fore nearly all the problems with which modern man has grappled ever since.’¹² During this middle period of his artistic career – which was shaped by extensive travels through Europe, the deaths of his first wife and his brother Mikhail, gambling addiction and constant financial anxiety – Dostoevsky composed a series of what would be amongst his most read and influential works: Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment (1866), The Gambler (1867) and The Idiot (1868–9). The aesthetic features developed in these texts, and their portrayal of the human psyche in particular, demonstrate to what extent Dostoevsky ‘both anticipates and, through his enormous influence on twentieth-century art and thought, helps to shape modern consciousness.’¹³ My analysis of forms of attunement as, first, an integral element of existentialist concerns and, second, a crucial defining feature of aesthetic modernity in Dostoevsky’s works...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction. Stimmung and Modernity: Theoretical Explorations
• 1 Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Moody Modernity
• 2 Aesthetic Attunement in Samuel Beckett’s Narrative Fiction
• 3 Eine ‘Stimmungssache’: Thomas Bernhard’s ‘Trilogy of the Arts’
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index