Ornament and Autonomy

A moment between pre-ignition and aftershock. There are so many unused spaces in the old university building, and even a dead wing full of mummified mice. Nana detaches herself from Vernon; she knows he recommends Pierre Bourdieu’s “Anamnesis of Hidden Constants” to his students. He is an accomplice. Nana does not long for an accomplice. She wants to be misunderstood in the right way.

“Leave me alone for a moment,” she asks. Vernon withdraws with a farewell air-kiss and pulls the door of the decaying seminar room shut behind him. The paint is flaking off the frame. Nana smells chalk dust and the stale scent of human presence, fermenting knee-deep in the Middle Ages. Everything here is at least a few hundred years old. Nana perceives a drowsy silence. On the shelves, discarded teaching materials and well-worn paperbacks are decaying. She notices a Reclam edition with a ruined spine. As if in a trance, she opens it. From the yellowed paper rises the heat of a bygone century. An eternal late summer of epochs:

“It was September, the quietest time of Parisian life. High society had gone to the seaside resorts; foreigners were driven away in droves by the oppressive heat. Nevertheless, on the sultry evenings the boulevards were filled with such dense crowds that they would have sufficed for the peak season of any other city.”

This is how Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861–1937) opens Fenitschka.

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Fenitschka is often referred to as a novella, although Lou Andreas-Salomé herself chose the subtitle “A Summer Story.” Both genre designations are valid. The work fulfills the classical criteria of a novella par excellence. It focuses on a clearly defined, “extraordinary event” (Goethe’s definition): namely, the shockingly emancipated appearance of a highly educated woman around 1900. It has a tight, chamber-play-like composition, few main characters, and a clear turning point in its psychological dynamics. The term “story” in German is the broader category. The author likely chose it to distinguish the text from the strict formal and moral conventions of the traditional bourgeois novella of the 19th century.

Especially when paired with An Indulgence (Eine Ausschweifung, 1898), Fenitschka is in academic contexts almost consistently classified as a volume of novellas or as a psychoanalytical novella.

As a writer, essayist, philosopher, and psychoanalyst, Lou Andreas-Salomé moved at the intersection of literature, psychology, and cultural theory. Her life connects the intellectual currents of fin de siècle culture with modernism; she was in close intellectual exchange with Nietzsche, Rilke, and Freud, while also developing an independent voice in world literature. Fenitschka occupies a special place in her work. At its center is a young woman who resists the expectations of her time. Fenitschka refuses bourgeois moral codes. She breaks out of the paternal sphere of authority and claims intellectual sovereignty. While bourgeois society largely pushes women toward marriage, adaptation, and emotional caregiving, Fenitschka embodies inaccessibility.

The heroine remains deliberately contradictory and difficult to grasp. This suspended state is mirrored in her relationship with an intellectual who wavers between fascination and irritation. The author portrays this psychological tension. Proximity emerges without resolving into fixed definitions. The core of the narrative lies in the impossibility of stabilizing a relationship into certainty when individual freedom is taken seriously.

*

Fenitschka does not operate within the categories of a salon novel for the complacent bourgeoisie. Nor does it resemble a literary equivalent of a painting by Gustav Klimt; it is not a work of art that merely peels away the thin veil of convention to expose the seething currents of desire and anxiety beneath. While Klimt immortalizes women in hypnotic, erotic golden tones—oscillating between the untouchable femme fatale and the vulnerable child-woman—Fenitschka escapes this purely male projection space. She is a subject in a world that tends to stage women as decorative objects. While the old world of the Danube monarchy revels in the glow of its own twilight, Fenitschka refuses the sweet sacrificial death of adaptation.

Fenitschka embodies a psychological paradox of her time. She is intellectually brilliant, erotically present, yet emotionally unavailable. She does not seek a father substitute in her lover, nor does she submit to the role of muse who derives her identity from the admiration of another. Like the ornamental lines in Gustav Klimt’s paintings, which simultaneously conceal and emphasize the body, Fenitschka remains elusive. Her inaccessibility is neither play nor pose. Rather, it arises from a steadfast insistence on autonomy that resists the interpretive claims of her surroundings. This is precisely what produces the irritation she provokes. Fenitschka refuses the order in which female identity is completed only through male recognition.

“In her black, nun-like little dress, which almost comically… enclosed her medium, rather unremarkable figure and was said to be a common outfit among Zurich female students, she initially made no particular impression on him.”

This is how the psychologist Max Werner first perceives the title character in a Paris café. He is attracted to her open, entirely unpretentious demeanor. She shows interest in his ideas. He misinterprets this interest.

Fenia / Fénitschka / Fenia Ivanovna—the variations mark social and semantic shifts, as well as the consequence of an unstable readability whose causes are not to be found in Fenia’s inconsistency. Her behavior remains remarkably constant.

Hours after the first encounter on neutral ground, a key scene occurs. In a Paris hotel, Max follows a pattern of interpretation that misreads the situation. His stance is not primarily driven by passion; he simply does not want Fenia’s supposed availability to remain an unused opportunity in his memory.

Fenia shows neither willingness nor indignation. She does not withdraw. Nor does she adopt moral defense. She refuses the register altogether. She rejects the dichotomous female images of the late 19th century. For the bourgeois man, a woman exists either as wife and mother or as a sexually available being. Max operates within this script.

Fenia’s behavior is characterized by disarming simplicity and directness. She articulates her goals precisely and meets Max with an unprejudiced openness. Her ease remains intact. When she meets Max again years later in St. Petersburg, she shifts to the informal “du.”

The fact that Max nevertheless labels her as complicated is the result of cognitive dissonance. As a psychologist, his professional and personal pride is built on controlling and naming dynamics. Fenia deprives him of any such power.