ABSTRACT
At first glance, the title of this essay may seem perversely oxymoronic. The term fin-desiècle, after all, normally conjures up the anxious and despairing mood associated with the decadents of late 19th-century bourgeois culture, while the socialism of that same era was still in the full flush of its exuberant youth. Although the now familiar notion of a “crisis in Marxism” was in fact first introduced by Thomas Masaryk in 1898,1 the overwhelming majority of his contemporaries on the left looked confidently to the dawning new century for the realization of their hopes. Indeed, for many bourgeois intellectuals who sought a way out of the melancholic paralysis of fin-de-siècle culture, identification with the socialist movement was a frequent choice. Not surprisingly, many of these same intellectuals who later reflected on the phenomenon, such as Georg Lukács,2 damned the fin-de-siècle literati as the self-pitying spokesmen of a moribund class class about to be swept off the historical stage. Socialism, they insisted, must look for its cultural models to the earlier period of a bourgeois culture on the ascendancy, when healthier models of organic wholeness were produced by a rising historical class. There was nothing positive, so they claimed, to be learned from dwelling on a backward-looking, nostalgic phenomenon with no relevance to an expected socialist future.
