His full name is Oscar Fingal O’Flaherty Wills Wilde. Of Irish descent. He was born in Dublin on October 16, 1854, into a very prominent family. His father, Sir William Wilde, was a world-renowned ophthalmologist and author of many scientific works; his mother was a socialite who wrote poetry about Ireland and the liberation movement and considered her receptions a literary salon.
Young Wilde grew up in an atmosphere of poetry and affective-theatrical exaltation, which could not but affect his later work and lifestyle. After leaving school, he spent several years at Dublin’s privileged Trinity College before enrolling at Oxford. Here, influenced by the lectures of John Ruskin, the Romantic poets, and the art of the Pre-Raphaelites, the brilliant student’s aesthetic views are formed.
The cult of the Beautiful, of which Wilde was an ardent propagandist, led the young man to a rebellion against bourgeois values, but more of a purely aesthetic rebellion, which manifested itself not only in his elegantly beautiful poems but also in a deliberately flamboyant style of dress and behavior – an extravagant suit with a sunflower in the buttonhole (later the sunflower would be replaced by Wilde’s famous green carnation), artificially mannered, almost ritualistic speech intonations.
Almost for the first time in the history of culture, the artist, the writer considered his whole life as an aesthetic act, becoming the forerunner of the celebrities of the Russian Silver Age, the Futurists or the most consistent adherent of the epatage lifestyle – Salvador Dali.
However, what had become almost an artistic norm in the twentieth century was, for Victorian England in the late nineteenth century, inadmissible. This led Wilde to tragedy. Already Wilde’s first poetry collection – Poems (1881) demonstrated his commitment to the aesthetic direction of decadence, which is characterized by the cult of individualism, pretentiousness, mysticism, pessimistic moods of solitude and despair. His first experience in drama – “Faith, or the Nihilists” – also belongs to this time.
However, for the next ten years he did not work on drama, turning to other genres – essays, fairy tales, literary and artistic manifestos. At the end of 1881 he went to New York, where he was invited to give a course of lectures on literature. In these lectures Wilde first formulated the basic principles of English decadence, later elaborated in detail in his treatises, consolidated in 1891 in his book Convictions. The denial of the social function of art, earthiness, plausibility, the solipsistic concept of nature, and the assertion of the artist’s right to full self-expression are reflected in Wilde’s famous works – his fairy tales, however, objectively breaking out into the limits of decadence. It is impossible not to note the magical, truly mesmerizing charm of these very beautiful and sad stories, undoubtedly addressed not only to children but also to adult readers. However, from the point of view of theatrical art, something else is more important in Wilde’s tales: they crystallize the aesthetic style of polished paradox that distinguishes Wilde’s little dramaturgy and makes his plays a unique phenomenon, almost unparalleled in world literature.
Perhaps the only correct stylistic analogy to Wilde’s plays can be found in the dramaturgy of Bernard Shaw, for all the polarity of their creative and life principles. Before returning to drama, however, Wilde wrote his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), commissioned by an American publisher, as a kind of transition from fairy tales, in which the writer clearly outlined the range of his problems. The aestheticization of immorality, the concept of cynical hedonism, the spicy charm of the vice that flourishes in the luxurious interiors of aristocratic salons – all this would later pass into Wilde’s refined comedies.
Wilde’s plays were all written in the early 1890s: Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), The Woman Not Worth Noticing (1893), The Holy Harlot, or The Woman Sprinkled with Jewels (1893), The Perfect Husband (1895), The Importance of Being Serious (1895) – and were immediately staged on the London stage. They were a great success; critics wrote that Wilde had brought a revival to English theatrical life, a continuation of Sheridan’s dramatic tradition. As time passed, however, it became clear that these plays could hardly be classified as mere “comedies of manners.
Today it is Wilde who, along with Shaw, is rightly considered the founder of intellectual theater, which in the mid-20th century was developed into a current of absurdism. In the 1890s almost all of Wilde’s work was accompanied by high-profile public scandals. The first of these arose with The Portrait of Dorian Gray, when a broad discussion of the novel was reduced to an accusation of immorality. Then, in 1893, the British censorship forbade the production of the drama “Salome”, written in French for Sarah Bernhardt. Here the accusations of immorality were much more serious, since the biblical subject had been translated into a decadent style. The stage history of “Salome” came only at the beginning of the 20th century, with the rise of Symbolism: it was staged by the famous German stage director Max Reinhart in 1903; in 1905 Richard Strauss wrote an opera based on it; in 1917 Russia saw a performance by Alexander Tairov with Alisa Cohnen in the leading part. But the major scandal that shattered not only his career as a playwright, but his entire life, began in 1895, shortly after the premiere of the playwright’s last comedy. Wilde, defending himself against public accusations of homosexuality, sued the Marquis of Queensberry, father of his closest friend Alfred Douglas. But Douglas, who had effectively separated Wilde from his family and had been his lavish support for three years, testified at the trial as a witness for the prosecution. Wilde was convicted of immorality and sentenced to imprisonment.
The titles of Wilde’s plays immediately disappeared from theater posters and his name was no longer mentioned. The only colleague of Wilde’s who petitioned for clemency was Shaw. The two years the writer spent in prison turned out to be his last two literary works of great artistic power. They were the prose confession De Profundis (From the Deep), written during his imprisonment and published posthumously, and the poem The Ballad of Reading Prison, written soon after his release in 1897. It was published under a pseudonym, which was Wilde’s prison number, S.3.3. He wrote nothing else. Adopting the name Sebastian Melmoth, Wilde went to France.
One of the most brilliant and sophisticated aesthetes of nineteenth-century England spends the last years of his life in poverty, obscurity and loneliness. Oscar Wilde died Nov. 30, 1900 of acute meningitis caused by an ear infection. He died in a run-down hotel. His last words were, “It was either me or that ugly floral wallpaper. He was buried in Paris in the Bagno Cemetery. About ten years later he was reburied in the Père-Lachaise cemetery. In 1914 a winged sphinx of stone by Jacob Epstein was placed on his grave.
For a century admirers expressed their love for the great writer by leaving inscriptions and kisses on the monument, having previously covered their lips thickly with lipstick. Greasy cosmetics had a detrimental effect on the stone. The monument was cleaned and restored many times, but tourists coming from all over the world continued to kiss the stone angel. On the 111th anniversary of the death of the poet and writer Oscar Wilde, Paris authorities unveiled the renovated monument. The degreased stone sculpture is now surrounded by a glass barrier designed to keep the writer’s fans at a proper distance.
