Gaston de Pavlovski and Mass Reading in France

Abstract

The name of the writer and journalist, cyclist, and motorist Gaston de Pawlowski (1874–1933) is most familiar to art historians (thanks to the virtuoso of 20th-century art, Marcel Duchamp, who noted Pawlowski’s book Journey to the Land of the Fourth Dimension (Voyage au pays de la quatrième dimension) as a crucial source of his own work in the 1910s) and theater historians (due to the literary-artistic and theatrical weekly Comoedia, which Pawlowski directed from 1907 to 1914 and where he regularly published his reviews on stage premieres along with new book releases). This article explores the connection between Pawlowski’s prose works and mass literature. It analyzes his experiments in the field of the feuilleton novel (dissected in the form of a pastiche) and his reviews of the relevant literary examples. The research pays special attention to the book Journey to the Land of the Fourth Dimension (Professor A. Tiraferri, who prepared the Italian translation of the book, describes it as a “serialized novel” or “un romanzo a puntate”) and its reflection of themes related to the highly popular realm of mass reading during the Belle Époque — the “novel of scientific miracles” (“roman merveilleux-scientifique”). At the same time, the book can be seen as an “open work” (opera aperta), accessible for appreciation both as engaging sciencefiction material and within the framework of socio-philosophical discourse, which begins to dominate towards the end of the book (Pawlowski had a background in sociology). This kind of bifocality and the humorous element inherent in Pavlovsky’s work generally resonates with the explorations of the early avantgarde