ABSTRACT
Pirjo Lyytikäinen explores Joel Lehtonen’s Mataleena (1905), a forceful ballad-like novel and decadent fairy tale about becoming a decadent poet, where the northern nature and the “wilderness” provide the imagery for the strong passions displayed by the narrator protagonist. The poet finds his roots in madness and decadent rebellion. Lyytikäinen focuses on the constellation of “decadent emotions,” the paradoxical simultaneity of contradictory emotions, and their presentation in the novel through the phantasmagoric and grotesque mother figures and a strange manifesto of the madmen—the imaginary family of the poet. The analysis reveals both the originality and the complex literary affiliations of Lehtonen’s Dionysian decadence.
