Russian Symbolism in Search of Transcendental Liquescence : Iconizing Emotion by Blending Time, Media, and the Senses

This study explores symbolist aesthetics as methods for fluid transmutation from the cognitive to the spiritual. Kostetskaya examines the links between symbolist poetry, paintings, and cinema and their evoked sensory-emotional imagery in the context of iconicity and conceptual blending.

The book examines Russian symbolist texts and turns the focus from their traditional historic-cultural interpretations to analyze the symbolist cognitive aesthetics—aesthetics that govern links between poetry, art, and cinema and the sensory-emotional imagery they evoke. This aesthetics inextricably map mystical transcendence to a spiritual world—a realibus ad realiora—through fluid transmutation. Anastasia Kostetskaya presents an innovative cross-disciplinary analysis of iconicity—a 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 liquescence—a perception of fluid continuity between people and water. This analysis of interconnected symbolist media shows how symbolists rely on blending in their attempts to engender emotional flux through the pliable form. Fusing cognitivist and historic-cultural approaches in fluidly connected art modes, this book represents chronological, conceptual, and aesthetic continuity from poetry by Konstantin Bal''mont (1867–1942), paintings by Viktor Borisov-Musatov (1870–1905), and cinematography by Evgenii Bauer (1865–1917).