Satan’s Children (original: Satans Kinder) was written by Stanislaw Przybyszewski. Przybyszewski (1868-1927), a Pole, was renowned at the turn of the twentieth century as Poland’s greatest living writer and as one of the foremost writers in the German language. But he died forgotten and embittered. Since then literary critics have traced his influence on Eastern European Modernists and Decadents and cite him as inspiring the Young Poland artistic movement which revitalized Polish art and stirred Polish national identity at the turn of the twentieth century. Przybyszewski’s best-known novel is Homo Sapiens (1898), about the decadent self-destruction of an artist.

Gordon is a native of a Polish city, unnamed but implicitly either Gniezno or Pozna. At the start of Satan’s Children he is indulging his own lusts whenever possible and has taken the lovely Pola as a lover. Both Pola and her friend Stefan worship Gordon (Pola: “For me you are the greatest being – you are a god”) and he encourages Stefan to take revenge on society for having abandoned him. Stefan is dying of tuberculosis and enjoys the thought of revenge. Moreover, Gordon presents himself to Stefan and Pola as Satan, which encourages their worship of him. When Stefan and Pola press him for details, Gordon is ambiguous and evasive, but his answers allow the pair to continue to delude themselves. Stefan is willing to do whatever Gordon demands of him, asking only that Gordon allow him to take part in the “great destruction” of the city in which they live.

Gordon attracts other followers, his “Satan’s Children,” the oppressed masses of the city. His most important follower is Ostap, whose father is a clerk at the city hall and who provides Gordon with the keys to the town safe. Ostap worships Gordon but also hates him for having taken Hela Mierzeska, who Ostap loves, as a mistress. Gordon eventually tires of Hela and dumps her on the grounds that she was polluted by having had sex before she met Gordon. Hela tells Pola what she has done to her god, which causes Pola to stop worshiping Gordon.

Gordon uses his access to the town safe to acquire the blueprints to the town, and uses the blueprints to set firebombs across the city. Most of the city is damaged or destroyed in the resulting arson. But Gordon, who wants nothing more than to destroy the whole world through fire, comes into conflict with Hartmann, who works at the factory of Gordon’s uncle. Hartmann is a British terrorist who wants to overthrow the existing system and replace it with “new economic systems” which will be fairer to the proletariat, while Gordon is a nihilist wants to destroy the current social order and replace it with nothing. Hartmann brings in Botko, a professional bomb maker, and they begin plotting their own series of terrorist strikes. Ostap, who is weak-willed and emotionally frail, kills himself from guilt for his role in Gordon’s actions. Conflagrations sweep the city, most of the cast is killed through fire, disease, or murder, and at the novel’s end Gordon has begun plans, with Botko, for greater acts of terrorism in the future.

Satan’s Children is an interesting example of how the anarchist novel was written in countries other than England. Although the English press did pay attention to acts of anarchist terrorism on the Continent in the 1890s, the farther east the act took place, the less space the English press spent on it. In part this was due to a lack of solid information and to the traditional Western European bias against the countries of Eastern Europe. But anarchy and anarchist terrorism was a problem in Poland and Russia, not just England and France. For example, on September 10, 1898, in an act which horrified Poland, the Hapsburg Empress Elisabeth (1837-1898) was assassinated on the shores of Lake Geneva, one of the most prominent anarchist killings of the 1890s. The many assassinations and attempted (and successful) bombings of the 1880s and 1890s were the backdrop for Przybyszewski’s novel, as they were for the English authors of anarchist novels.

Satan’s Children has not aged well. Przybyszewski was a skilled writer, and he tells the story in a naturalistic fashion, but the combination of plot holes, shallow characterization, and melodramatic outbursts of hysterical emotion do not enthrall the reader. Interestingly, however, Przybyszewski touches on some of the reasons why anarchists turned to anarchy. Neither Gordon nor the other anarchists are portrayed as heroes, but the bourgeoisie of Satan’s Children come off little better. The poor of the city are mistreated and abused by those who have power, and it is clear that the poor have no outlet for their anger, which is why they turn to Gordon and his gospel of destruction. Przybyszewski specifically targets factory owners, who are shown as routinely preying, sexually, on young female factory workers. At the same time, however, it is the workers who are too selfish and short-sighted to successfully carry out Gordon’s plans, and at the end of the novel Gordon is planning to carry on anarchy without the help of the masses, making use of the “children of Satan” only when he needs them.

Gordon is a combination of vanity and nihilism. He is an amateur poet and affects dramatic airs. He uses women sexually only until he tires of them. His strikes his Satanic pose in order to flatter himself and gain him followers. But alongside this pose is his genuine hatred for the current social order as well as human civilization and even existence itself: “I mean to destroy not in order to build up again, but only in order to destroy...Destruction is my dogma, my belief, the object of my veneration.” As the city burns, he rants, “Still more! Still more! To destroy whole cities, whole provinces, a whole country, the world. That would be great joy.” When asked why he wants to destroy the city, he says, “Because I hate...and my hatred is holier than your love, for you have love in your brain. My hatred is older and deeper, because it existed before all love. Lucifer existed before the world, which has arisen from love.”

not drastically different from conceptions of Satan as a positive figure that were in wide circulation throughout Europe at the time...the Devil as the originator of art, as nature itself, and as the patron of intellectual activity and progress in technology can be found, for example, in Michelet...the enormously influential esotericist H.P. Blavatsky (1831-1891), chief ideologist of the Theosophical Society [see: Theosophy], also expressed considerable sympathy for the Devil, designating him the ‘spirit of Intellectual Enlightenment and Freedom of Thought’ in her gargantuan two-volume work The Secret Doctrine....where Przybyszewski does differ sharply from contemporary satanic discourse is in his elitist and social Darwinist sympathies. Convention dictated that Satanism would be employed to attack the strong that oppress the weak God symbolizing worldly power that should be toppled by the trampled masses. However, in Die Synagogue des Satan, Przybyszewski explains that Satan epitomizes the glorious ‘beauty, strength and splendor’ nature brings forth in its creatures through the process of natural selection. The Christian church, he says, wants to destroy all this, protecting and elevating instead ‘ugliness, sickness, the cripple and the castrated.’ If possible, the church would have castrated all of mankind...here we can discern a major and original strand in Przybyszewski’s satanic system: the celebration of evolution as a supreme value.¹

¹ Per Faxneld, “Witches, Anarchism, and Evolutionism: Stanislaw Przybyszewski’s fin-de-siecle Satanism and the Demonic Feminine,” in Per Faxneld and Jesper Aa. Petersen, eds., The Devil’s Party: Satanism in Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 59-60.