The Dark Magic of Words: Why Fascism and Illiberalism is So Seductive to Writers: Ed Simon Looks at Eduard Limonov, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Yukio Mishima, and Others (Ed Simon, June 23, 2025, LitHub)
Myth and fantasy are what the fascist trade in, of Russia made great again, or Italy made great again, or someplace made great again (it’s always some place), but at the expense of our souls. This is the danger of an artistic temperament at its most extreme, what Nietzsche celebrated as the “Dionysian” in The Birth of Tragedy, where the artist “enriches everything out of one’s own fullness: whatever one sees, whatever wills is seen swelled, taught, strong, overloaded with strength” until all of reality merely becomes “reflections of his perfection.”
Such idealization of pure experience is an idolatry of death, since such an artist can’t envision the world beyond their individuality, can’t conceive of others enduring after the poet’s extinction. Think of Limonov’s “Yes, Death!,” of D’Annunzio’s 1894 novel The Triumph of Death.