Otto Julius Bierbaum - a Gnostic steppingstone between German Romanticism and the nascent Expressionism that had not yet taken root. It presents a vision of the grotesque not just as a way of life, but as a godly path to a higher vision, even when it appears to be but a manifestation of evil.

Otto Julius Bierbaum, Samalio Pardulus, Trans. by W. C. Bamberger, Illustrations by Alfred Kubin, Wakefield Press, 2019.[1908.]

“He stepped very close to me, and his eyes were terrible as he said, ‘Hear this, man from Tuscany, and remember it, because it is the truth: God was dead when He created the world’”

Buried in an isolated castle on the outskirts of a city in the Albanian mountains, the wildly ugly painter of blasphemies, Samalio Pardulus, executes works too monstrous to bear viewing, and espouses a philosophy that posits a grotesque world that reflects the ravings of a dead, grotesque god. Told through the horrified account of Messer Giacomo (a mediocre artist at once repulsed and uncontrollably fascinated by the events unfolding around him), Samalio Pardulus describes the simultaneous descent and ascent of the titular anti-hero into a passionate perversion of Catholicism in which love and madness become one, as a dark, incestuous incubus settles into a doomed family.

When it was first published, Otto Julius Bierbaum’s 1908 Gothic novella, the first of his “Sonderbare Geschichte” (weird stories), offered a Gnostic steppingstone between German Romanticism and the nascent Expressionism that had not yet taken root. It presents a vision of the grotesque not just as a way of life, but as a godly path to a higher vision, even when it appears to be but a manifestation of evil.
This first English edition includes the full set of illustrations by Alfred Kubin from the book’s 1911 German edition.

Otto Julius Bierbaum (1865–1910) was a German novelist, poet, journalist, and editor. His 1897 novel Stilpe inspired the first cabaret venue in Berlin a few years later; his last novel, the 1909 Yankeedoodlefahrt, produced a German proverb still in use today: “Humor is when you laugh anyway.”


The Samalio Pardulus of the title is a monstrous figure, a larger than life "wild ugly man" from an old and powerful family who:

did no take part in the life of his day, was deaf to every feeling those people called happiness or unhappiness. He cared nothing for pleasure itself.
     He knew only one desire: to be alone and to create around himself a new world of forms of his imagination, which made a powerful bid to present itself in images.

       His father's personal secretary, an exiled Florentine named Messer Giacomo, teaches him to paint, but Samalio Pardulus isn't satisfied with his teacher's tame brushwork and has much grander visions and ambitions:

His desire was to bring to light his innermost visions, render the wavering steady, the scattered insubstantial.

       Samalio Pardulus is related based on eyewitness Messer Giacomo's account in his: "diario (which, incidentally, was also boring because it was so monotonous)" -- much of it verbatim, but the editorial voice (neutral, in contrast to Messer Giacomo's) and hand nevertheless also prominent.
       Samalio Pardulus' art is dark and grotesque -- "full of the reviling of life, which in this art does not seem to be of God, rather of the devil" -- and he justifies it by claiming: "we are allowed to do what He is allowed to do: everything". And he certainly doesn't seem to accept any limits, pushing boundaries where he can.
       There is also true, sublime beauty in Samalio Pardulus' life -- but it seems out of reach: he has a sister, Bianca Maria: "who is as beautiful as he is ugly" -- and he apparently: "burns with an unseemly love" for her. She seems to emphatically not reciprocate these feelings, and is engaged to marry -- but then things go wrong. Very wrong. Soon, "eerie things were happening nightly at the castle in the forest".
       Bianca Maria and Samalio Pardulus' father, the Count, is confronted with the worst when he is called back home from a visit to Rome. Accompanied by a quivering Messer Giacomo, he is driven to extremes -- stamping out a horror, while also forced to recognize that he had failed to see what his son was capable of, and that: "art, practiced with this proud, heroic devotion, belongs among the greatest human things, among those that carry us over all depths and fog".
       If Samalio Pardulus achieved the highest of art, it is nevertheless anything but a happy ending: the Count has gazed into the abyss (and will continue to do so until his death), and his children have been crushed within it; the Countess is off to a monastery -- and, the one small blessing, dilettante Messer Giacomo vows never to pick up a brush again.
       A nicely overheated gothic grotesque, Samalio Pardulus is a dark tale of art, passion, and god. The lovely little Wakefield Press edition -- truly pocket-sized -- includes the Alfred Kubin illustrations made for the 1911 edition of the original, the black charcoal-dominated pictures a beautiful complement to the story, truly illustrating it, the shadowy technique showing and suggesting just enough, the final tableau of brother and sister a convincing portrait of that scene.
       A lovely-horrible little volume. - M.A.Orthofer
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