MIHAI CAPŞA-TOGAN, Ideea de decadenţă în gândirea critică românească a secolului al XIX-lea. Ştefan Petică – religia frumosului şi estetismul (Idea of Decadence in the Romanian Critical Thinking of the Nineteenth Century. Ştefan Petică – Religion of Beauty and Aestheticism)

MIHAI CAPŞA-TOGAN
Doctorand, Universitatea „A. I. Cuza” din Iaşi, Facultatea de Litere;
E-mail: mihaicapsa@yahoo.com

Abstract
The Romanian symbolism and the modernism, in general, have had Baudelaire as a fundamental reference. The term that the British literates found to name this new aesthetic phenomenon was Preraphaelitism. The new style of making literature, especially poetry, gained consistency and shone about the same time as the spreading throughout Europe of the aesthetics and poetry of Baudelaire. In the full blooming stage of Preraphaelitism, to Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s name, there are added those of John Ruskin and William Morris.
No wonder that Romanian literature itself, which was then only at the stage of symbolism, without actually being in the current, was influenced by some of the leaders of post-Baudelaire period.
Immediately after 1880, the ambiance created by Alexandru Macedonski through the magazine “Literatorul” and through the literary club with the same name became known to the Romanian public. Among its writers, Ştefan Petică, the youngest and, parodoxically, the most erudite of them has great merit, along with Macedonski, to have been introduced in criticism and in the Romanian poets’ awareness the Romanian literary innovative ideas of the end of the century.

Keywords
decadence, art, religion, aestheticism, moral