Brevik-Zender on Krysinska, ed. Larson, Schultz, Paliyenko and Wierzbowska (2025)

Romans et Nouvelles is Volume II.2 of six planned installments in the Œuvres complètes of poet, novelist, composer, and essayist Marie Krysinska (1857–1908), an editorial project helmed by Florence Goulesque and Seth Whidden. The present volume, which covers Romans, is divided into two parts containing, in the first, the 1896 novel Folle de son corps and, in the second, La Force du désir, published in 1905. Each novel is introduced by an informative critical essay written by prominent names in Krysinksa scholarship—Sharon Larson and Gretchen Schultz author the preface to Folle de son corps; Adrianna M. Paliyenko and Ewa M. Weirzbowska provide the introduction to La Force du désir—and each concludes with an extensive notes section providing historical, literary, and cultural context. Also included are reviews penned by the author’s contemporaries, which chart her Belle-Époque reception and indicate her prominence during this period as a well-established writer with an engaged readership. Much scholarship on Krysinska has focused on her as a Symbolist free-verse poet and on her three volumes of poetry (which comprise Volumes I.1 and I.2 of Œuvres complètes). The reedition of her two novels in the present volume brings welcome attention to Krysinska’s fiction, an understudied element of the author’s wide-ranging artistic production. 

Readers of Folle de son corps encounter a fragmented narrative presenting a loosely woven set of episodes. These follow New-York-born protagonist Madge as she passes through geographical spaces (America and France, with a stopover in Belgium), and married and single life, all the while experiencing an array of affective and erotic attachments. The author’s fluid approach to narrative structure allows for parallel storylines to develop without disturbing a central plotline. Interwoven chapters introduce polyvocality and modes of being that offer alternatives to dominant bourgeois conventions. For example, a story of intimacy between two women, Suzanne and Rose, exists in parallel with episodes structuring the heteronormative relationships with men enjoyed by Madge.

Thoughtful editorial choices, such as the decision to republish the original preface to Folle de son corps, add to the volume’s value. In this revealing essay Krysinska addresses herself to a future female readership to explain her approach to destabilizing gender conventions by conceiving of a woman protagonist who unapologetically takes up multiple sexual partners. Although some of these men endure tragic endings, the author rejects the moralizing judgement often present in literature featuring adventurous women who experiment in life and art. Instead, Madge is “une savouratrice d’amour” (134) and “une femme si complexement et si complètement femme” (134). The novel’s final chapter, describing the protagonist departing on the deck of a ship in search of “nouvelles aventures” (134), reinforces the image of a woman who, in more ways than one, refuses to settle. 

In their illuminating analysis of Folle de son corps, Larson and Schultz explore the novel’s prose-poem hybridity, attending to the text’s alternating departures from, and embrace of, the free-verse poetic style for which Krysinksa is more widely known. The creation of a sexually liberated but unvilified woman protagonist is highlighted as a rarity for this period when active female sexuality was more commonly linked to prostitution and the femme fatale. Also examined are the novel’s depictions of avant-garde artistic networks in Montmartre and at the Chat Noir cabaret, as well as its story of modern travel, which is foregrounded in Madge’s transatlantic circulation on a steamer ship. 

La Force du désir, the second novel in this volume, displays Krysinska’s interest in experiences that transport characters and readers through, as the title suggests, powerful expressions of desire, whether by way of sexual encounters or episodes of spiritual enlightenment. The form of this novel, as in Folle de son corps, consists of brief, non-sequential chapters which disrupt the very notion of a coherent plot. The author’s philosophical reflections on subjects ranging from humans’ pursuit of happiness to the true nature of art are intermingled with chapters anchored in the realist register: characters pay visits to the dressmaker; face an unwanted pregnancy; suffer the death of a child. Vivid scenes set in the Chat Noir expose the phantasmagorical stimuli of cabaret nightlife, and the novel features thinly-veiled and overt references to the contemporaries with whom Krysinska performed and observed there first hand.

In their richly insightful essay on La Force du désir, Paliyenko and Weirzbowska bring focus to Krysinska’s meditations on the commodification of art and, by extension, the work of the artist at the dawn of the twentieth century. They note multiple ways of reading the novel: as a roman à clef; as an esoteric text that initiates the reader, like the novel’s characters, in the search for a “trésor caché qui donne l’accès au pouvoir ou au savoir” (164); as a reflection of the author’s own experiments with the occult. Discussions of the novel’s intertwined meditations on Darwinism and the gendering of genius add further depth to the range of critical approaches that Krysinska’s works invite.

In both novels readers will find echoes of other fin-de-siècle authors, such as Rachilde and Colette, who were similarly interested in showing modern urban life through the perspectives of women who challenged patriarchal restrictions. Through their fragmented formats, focus on pleasure and desire, and development of characters who search for spiritual and aesthetic experiences lying outside of bourgeois normativity, Krysinska’s prose works also call to mind fiction by Decadents such as Joris-Karl Huysmans and Jean Lorrain. 

The republication of Krysinska’s two novels in this highly informative volume fuels anticipation for the remaining installments of her Œuvres complètes. On the whole this valuable collection of Krysinska’s complete works contributes to deepening scholarly knowledge of a long-forgotten women writer and her impact on the fin-de-siècle literary world and broader aesthetic developments of the period.