Paul LeppinRezensionen

‘The gaunt man looked at him searchingly from behind his round glasses, and held Severin’s hand in front of his face longer than he had any of the others.
You have experienced a destiny – he said when he looked up again – a great destiny, what was it?
I haven’t experienced anything – Severin said, and pulled his arm away.
Then it will come – You have a hand to be feared.’

Paul Leppin, alongside Kafka and Gustav Meyrink, was one of the 20th Century’s great writers of urban fiction; and, like Kafka and Meyrink, he took as his muse the city of Prague. Leppin’s Prague, like Rodenbach’s Bruges, is a city of insistent gloom, lassitude, and decay. Severin’s Journey into the Dark, perhaps Leppin’s most widely-regarded novel, is the sort of corrosive, suffocating book that could only have been written by the sort of wandering soul it seeks to paint a portrait of. And while the titular Severin (a reference, of course, to Masoch’s Venus in Furs—which connotation could be argued, perhaps, to suffuse the entire novel with an air of claustrophobia and pain) walks the deceptively well-lit pathway to decline, his ‘journey into the dark’ often takes second-billing to the atmosphere of pestilential deterioration Leppin conjures under the namesake of ‘Prague.’ But the city, decorated with wounded souls (as Severin’s own life is), is a mirror of the man: and its rain and filth and languor and gloom is as much an extrapolation of the inner decay of Severin himself as it is a symbol of anonymity and brooding fog.

The novel has a plot, but it consists solely of episodic interactions with the ghosts that comprise Severin’s circle in Prague; and we wander with him, through the soul-crushing ennui of office work, the effete salon of a withering aesthete, the private armory of an anarchist and madman, the personal residence of an occultist and sybarite, the bookstore of a filthy old man, cafes of languid dissipation and perversion: this is a Prague that knows no innocence, and hence only harm. Along the way, Severin wounds two women, damages irreparably a third, and nearly destroys a fourth. He is not an innocent caught in the sickly puddle of sludge that is leaking from the heart of Prague; if anything, his own ugliness is a facet of the jewel—which makes our sympathy for this lonely victim of terror and taedium vitae all the more distressing. Leppin’s genius manifests itself when it tickles the strings of universal experience, chiefly through painting an extreme and then allowing those on the other side to identify intimations of their own potential ruin in the journey towards perdition undergone by one particularly envenomed soul.

But Severin is seeking redemption. His nihilism, anxiety, selfishness, detachment, and dirt must absolutely be viewed in this context; the complexity of Severin’s Journey into the Dark develops within its ironies: a product of the Decadence, it displays a marked indifference to the fate of prior heroes of these sorts of fictions (Des Esseintes, Athanasius Pernath, etc). There is no ultimate awakening or absolution fated for Severin: his ruin is inevitable, as is the destruction wrought at his hands. This cynical world-view, common enough in Decadent literature, is particularly poisonous and all-consuming in the work of Paul Leppin.

Severin’s Journey into the Dark haunts me in lonely moments, as I step off a bus and into the intestines of a city or as the fog begins to roll in from the sea, carrying with it the acid, agony, and oily soot of voices crying out the praises of degeneracy, sex, and sloth. I recommend it to those who can handle it: like anything caustic, a high pain-tolerance does wonders at insulating one from its destruction. For a time, that is.

I like a little debauchery and degradation as much as the next, but I almost wearied of the self-loathing pathos of the title character before Leppin let the narrative escape outside Blaugast’s head. I understand that self-obsession is a defining feature of Decadent literature, but I prefer characters that embrace revelry, intoxication, and debauchery as a choice against the misfortunes of history and the tragedy of the human condition rather than as a mark of their own self-disgust. (Blaugast became a different book when Leppin told the story of the noble whore Johanna.)

The depravity is laid on thick (for to repulse the church ladies of early 20th c. Prague?), and some of the prose is more purple than poetic. The cesspools of destiny! Everything seethes and festers and reeks. About a third of the way in I realized I was not so much reading as observing Blaugast as an artifact, with Leppin presenting a kind of performance piece: Frank Moore without the mad, spastic cackle, or Saló without the fascism. But, yes, it was entertaining.

Blaugast, by Paul Leppin (November 27, 1878 - April 10, 1945), was written
in the late 30's but not published (in German) until the 70's. English trans. 2007. Leppin was a German writer who was born and lived in Prague.
Leppin pushes the boundaries of morality and prose style in Blaugast.
Leppin alternates between descriptions of mundane life in the
"underworld" of whores, drunks, addicts with wild torrents of stream-of-
consciousness poetry. Leppin's style and extreme subject matter are
unique and effective. The matter of fact descriptions and the wild poetic
prose creates a dramatic effect; both subject and style are matched in
vivid brutality and effect.

Wow, this was really different.

Published in 1914, this extraordinary, short novel is set in Prague, a city with dark streets and the smell of decay that is populated by tragic and beautiful women, students, nuns, doctors, Russian anarchists, rare book sellers who we see in small cafes, dark apartments, decadent salons, etc. Leppin was a Prague German who was a contemporary of Kafka and Meyrink. (Meyrink even appears as a character in the book.)

This expressionist and atmospheric novel is a devastating exploration of the dark side that describes Severin's wanderings, work, romantic affairs, and cruelties with a blend of decadence, self-absorption, fear, darkness, and Kafkaesque detachment. We see into the narrator's misery and despairing subconscious that is portrayed without the cynicism or nihilism of more modern writing. The tone of Kafkaesque detachment allows Severin to be haunted by the ghost of a beautiful, suicidal nun and to also sadistically leave two women without the writing ever becoming histrionic. Instead, Severin plainly describes his wanderings as a search for salvation, which he almost finds. However, while there are brief moments of happiness and potential salvation marked by sunshine and summer weather, Prague is in almost perpetual fog or darkness, and daylight rarely exists. The author, Leppin, describes Severin's restless nights as "the burnt out ends of smoky days." Severin sadistically cuts off his possible salvation before turning again to deeper and darker depravities.

The dark streets, churches, and cafes of Prague become a character in the novel as Severin wanders through the bright lights, Dionysian depravity, and loud, brittle laughter of the nightlife. We see the city's dark side -- dead babies, despairing lovers, suicidal doctor and nun -- while also experiencing the dirt, sleaze, violence, and decay. Severin's soul comes to mimic the sense of dispossession, irresponsibility, and sadism with which the city night breathes.