Polina Dimova

Vladimir Sharov’s "Before and During" (1993) delineates an imaginary genealogy of the Russian Revolution, beginning with the French writer and Romantic theorist Germaine de Staël. The heroine miraculously reincarnates in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russia and takes as lovers a glamorous list of philosophers, artists, revolutionaries, and ideologues who pave the way to the Revolution—from Nikolai Fedorov to Joseph Stalin. This paper focuses on one of these figures: the Russian mystical composer Alexander Scriabin. But what motivates Scriabin’s inclusion in this fantastic novel? How does Scriabin help us make sense of Soviet history? In Sharov’s phantasmagoric world, Scriabin becomes the mastermind of the Revolution, and his unfinished apocalyptic Mysterium ostensibly contains the plan for the tumultuous event, transcribed by Lenin during his meetings with the composer in 1914. Sharov thus depicts Scriabin as a precursor of Lenin and the new world order. While critics have traced the cultural origins of the Revolution to the millenarian projects of the Russian radical intelligentsia, the Symbolists, and the Futurists (Irina Gutkin; Boris Groys), the Soviet appropriation of Scriabin’s myth remains understudied. This paper traces Scriabin’s post-revolutionary mythologization and identifies the sources that inspired Sharov’s characterization of Scriabin. By interweaving snippets from Scriabin’s Notebooks, Symbolist verse, and philosophical and biographical texts, Sharov not only perpetuates Scriabin’s myth, but also paints an uncannily historical portrait of the composer. Sharov’s meticulously researched portrayal in fact captures all aspects of Scriabin’s cult. The composer is a prophet, madman, and messiah; an androgyne, synaesthete, and sensuous lover; a precursor of Lenin and the space age. Reflecting on Sharov’s fantastic collage of cultural documents drawn from the Scriabin mythology, the talk also considers the novel’s method: is it magically real, or magically historical (Etkind)? Ultimately, the paper imagines a Soviet Scriabin, just as Sharov reinvents the twentieth century as Scriabin’s Century.

"Революция как Мистерия: Скрябин в романе “До и во время” В. Шарова." Владимир Шаров: По ту сторону истории. Сборник статей и материалов; под ред. М. Липовецкого и А. де Ля Фортель. NLO, 2020. 550-87.

The chapter examines the relationships between Prokofiev’s early music and the poets that inspired him. Guided by Konstantin Balmont’s poetic characterization of him in the early 1920s as a “sun-sounding Scythian,” it looks at two specific facets of Russian Symbolism and post-Symbolism that informed Prokofiev’s works: the sun cult and Scythianism. Prokofiev’s luminous Scythianism encompasses the paradox of the lyricism of his early songs and the perceived barbarism of his rejected ballet Ala and Lolli, from which the composer derived his Scythian Suite. By analyzing Prokofiev’s collaboration with Gorodetskii on Ala and Lolli and the composer’s settings of Balmont’s and Akhmatova’s poems, we can understand how the incarnations of the sun god in the Russian Silver Age informed both the sunrise music and the aesthetics of horror in the ballet and the suite. The chapter also reflects on Ala and Lolli as an unrealized ballet in the shadow of Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.

The goal of this collective effort is to provide an overview of the course of Central european literatures in the twenty years following the fall of the Berlin Wall. The authors have highlighted works they consider representative of their countries' literary production and placed them in the ...