Count Eric Stenbock (1860-1895), a member of the Estonian branch of a noble Swedish family, was the most extraordinary of the decadent writers who flourished in London at the end of the nineteenth century. During his brief life he was responsible for three small volumes of melancholy and suicidal verse (Love, Sleep and Dreams; Myrtle, Rue and Cypress; and The Shadow of Death), suffused with Catholicism, homosexuality and a longing for pain and deat, and one extraordinary book of short stories, Studies of Death, in which he developed these themes into unhappy and haunting vignettes. By the time of his death from drug addiction and alcoholism, he was absolutely reliant on his confessor and was accompanied everywhere he went by a lifesize wooden doll that he believe to be his son. A suivre.
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