Papers by Polina Dimova
Energy Culture: Work, Power, and Waste in Russia and the Soviet Union. Eds. Jillian Porter and Maya Vinokur. London: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2023
Imagine the Earth connected from pole to pole by an electric current, running down billions of ca... more Imagine the Earth connected from pole to pole by an electric current, running down billions of cables coiled around the globe. 1 This is how Romantic realist writer Aleksandr Kuprin (1870-1938) envisioned the bright future of the Anarchist Union of Free People in his utopian story "Toast" (1905). 2 This article traces the polar flow of the electric current in Russian Silver-Age literature to define its distinct electric aesthetic of diametrical oscillations: from the North Pole to the South Pole and from the negative pole to the positive pole of the electric circuit.
ВЛАДИМИР ШАРОВ: ПО ТУ СТОРОНУ ИСТОРИИ / Vladimir Sharov: On the Far Side of History, 2020
Vladimir Sharov’s "Before and During" (1993) delineates an imaginary genealogy of the Russian Rev... more 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.
Rethinking Prokofiev, 2020
The chapter examines the relationships between Prokofiev’s early music and the poets that inspire... more 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.
This paper discusses the synaesthetically informed metaphors of light, fire, and the Sun in Russi... more This paper discusses the synaesthetically informed metaphors of light, fire, and the Sun in Russian Symbolism and shows their scientific, technological, and cultural resonance in the novel experience of electric light in Russia. The essay studies the harmonic synaesthetics of Aleksandr Skriabin's symphony "Prometheus, A Poem of Fire"-which also includes an enigmatic musically notated part for an electric organ of lights, along with Symbolist texts concerning light and electricity and the synaesthetic poetry of fire by Skriabin's close associate Konstantin Bal'mont. The article investigates how Skriabin's Mystic sonorities and his language of colored lights square with the peculiar Symbolist engagement with scientific notions of electricity and light at the Russian fin de siècle. Thus, it demonstrates the Russian Symbolists' fascination not only with aesthetic synthesis and mystic transfiguration, but also with the sciences and technology: both with divine light and with electric light.
Beautiful Colored, Musical Things": Metaphors and Strategies for Interartistic Exchange in Early European Modernism
Routeledge Encyclopedia of Modernism, 2016
Synaesthesia is the confusion or conflation of sensory modalities, where one sense is experienced... more Synaesthesia is the confusion or conflation of sensory modalities, where one sense is experienced or described in terms of another as in Charles Baudelaire's simile "perfumes sweet as oboes, green as prairies." Synaesthesia captures an already existing tendency in language to blend the senses as in "sweet melody," "velvety voice," or "loud colors," and psychologists have conducted studies that show our shared experience of weak audiovisual associations between low pitch and darker colors, or high pitch and lighter colors. In a strictly neurological sense, synaesthesia is a perceptual condition in which the stimulation of one sensory system (for example, hearing) triggers sensations in another sensory system (for example, vision). Cross-sensory associations form one-to-one correspondences that are stable, delicately nuanced, and highly
East-Central European Literatures Twenty Years After
East European Politics and Societies, 2009
The goal of this collective effort is to provide an overview of the course of Central european li... more 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 ...
Performing Salome, Revealing Stories. Ashgate Interdisciplinary Studies in Opera., Aug 2013
Shapes of Apocalypse. Academic Studies Press., Jun 2013
East-Central European Literatures Twenty Years After
East European Politics and Societies, 2009
The goal of this collective effort is to provide an overview of the course of Central european li... more 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 ...
BPS Working Paper Series. ISEEES. UC Berkeley., 2009
This paper discusses the synaesthetically informed metaphors of light, fire, and the Sun in Russi... more This paper discusses the synaesthetically informed metaphors of light, fire, and the Sun in Russian Symbolism and shows their scientific, technological, and cultural resonance in the novel experience of electric light in Russia. The essay studies the harmonic synaesthetics of Aleksandr Skriabin's symphony "Prometheus, A Poem of Fire"-which also includes an enigmatic musically notated part for an electric organ of lights, along with Symbolist texts concerning light and electricity and the synaesthetic poetry of fire by Skriabin's close associate Konstantin Bal'mont. The article investigates how Skriabin's Mystic sonorities and his language of colored lights square with the peculiar Symbolist engagement with scientific notions of electricity and light at the Russian fin de siècle. Thus, it demonstrates the Russian Symbolists' fascination not only with aesthetic synthesis and mystic transfiguration, but also with the sciences and technology: both with divine light and with electric light.
An Introduction to the Poet: Konstantin Pavlov. "Elegiac Optimism." "Capriccio for Goya." "You, Sweet Agony."
Metamorphoses. A Journal of Literary Translation., 2001
Book Reviews by Polina Dimova
Slavic Review 79 (1): 245-47, 2020
R eview s 717 ity" (Goethe for Nabokov; 259, 363). Moreover, the organization of these collected ... more R eview s 717 ity" (Goethe for Nabokov; 259, 363). Moreover, the organization of these collected essays rep resents well Jackson's "binding interest" in aesthetic and "moral-philosophical questions," as he explores transcendent realities in dialogue with various types of realism, competing artistic ex pressions of freedom, beauty, and responsibility, and individual choices in light of a shared in evitable final departure (vii).
Drafts by Polina Dimova
Rethinking Prokofiev. Oxford University Press. Eds. McAllister, Rita and Ch. Guillaumier., 2020
Pre-Proof Draft. "Rethinking Prokofiev," eds. Rita McAllister and Ch. Guillaumier. Oxford Univers... more Pre-Proof Draft. "Rethinking Prokofiev," eds. Rita McAllister and Ch. Guillaumier. Oxford University Press.
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Papers by Polina Dimova
"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.
Book Reviews by Polina Dimova
Drafts by Polina Dimova
"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.