In this innovative study of Russian Symbolism, Anastasia Kostetskaya blends cognitive psychology with literary analysis to offer a new framework for analyzing aesthetic links across a range of artistic media. As a pioneering attempt to meld distinctive theoretical approaches and artistic genres, it will be of interest to scholars of Russian literature, art and film, as well as analysts of the broader cultural-intellectual history of the Silver Age.

The Russian Review

A 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