Description
Book SynopsisThe book examines Russian symbolist texts and turns the focus from their traditional historic-cultural interpretations to analyze the symbolist cognitive aestheticsaesthetics that govern links between poetry, art, and cinema and the sensory-emotional imagery they evoke. This aesthetics inextricably map mystical transcendence to a spiritual worlda realibus ad realiorathrough fluid transmutation. Anastasia Kostetskaya presents an innovative cross-disciplinary analysis of iconicitya relationship of resemblance between the artistic form and its meaning, the possibilities of which symbolist artists explored to create sublime emotional experiences for the reader or viewer. She challenges the strictly dualistic and hierarchical terms of traditional symbolist concepts. This study demonstrates that this counterdualistic tendency cognitively extends from liquescencea perception of fluid continuity between people and water. This analysis of interconnected symbolist media shows how symbolists rely
Trade ReviewA breath of fresh air in Slavic Studies, Russian Symbolism in Search of Transcendental Liquescence offers a genuinely new word in scholarship on Russian Symbolism across several genres. Proceeding from cognitive linguistics, it argues persuasively for the saliency of liquescence and its inseparability from The Feminine in the Symbolist aspiration to transcendence. Anastasia Kostetskaya’s intellectually bold, nuanced analyses of illustrative works by Blok, Bal’mont, Borisov-Musatov, and Evgenii Bauer elaborate her revelatory thesis in the spheres of poetry, painting, ballet, and film. Conceptual precision, rewarding attention to detail, and an assured command of materials distinguish this intriguing monograph. Provocative and pathbreaking, it is bound to stimulate lively debate and, optimally, foster kindred inter/multidisciplinary studies. -- Helena Goscilo, The Ohio State University
From the sensorial poetry of Konstantin Balmont, to the aqueous settings of Viktor Borisov-Musatov’s ethereal tableaux, ending with the dying swan in Evgenii Bauer’s cinema, the author captures the iconic agency of liquefaction as an expression of the sensation of transcendence in fin-de-siècle Russia. Expanding on the metaphor of water, the author dwells on the trope of water’s fluidity that penetrates, absorbs, and seeps into otherwise impermeable material to bring under close scrutiny its linguistic, imagistic, and kinesthetic transfer onto the work of three major figures of Russia’s Silver Age. Kostetskaya’s probing insight offers a most extraordinary examination of a singular Symbolist metaphor with the promise of long-term consequences for trans-medial studies in the modernist era. Such a rarified focus shifts our conventional wisdom surrounding the denouement of a cultural era and its aesthetic towards a new and revitalized vision of the totalizing nature of early twentieth century modernism. -- Myroslava M. Mudrak, The Ohio State University
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Symbolist Arts as Forms Symbolic of Human Feeling Chapter One: Liquescence: The Master Metaphor for Blending Strategies Chapter Two: In Boundlessness: The Ocean of Surging Emotion in Konstantin Bal'mont’s Cognitive Poetics Chapter Three: Quiet Flows the Soul across the Boundless and Beyond: Viktor Borisov-Musatov’s Symbolist Painting Chapter Four: Symbolism in Flux: The Moving Image as Transcendent Emotion Afterword: Тhe Dying Swan: The Transcendent Body Image on Symbolist Screen
