The Sixth Sense of the Avant-Garde

"This book is a treasure chest of personages and practices--everyone from Kandinsky to Blok, from Scriabin to Shklovsky, and multiple souls in between; everything from Dalcroze Eurythmics to the Foxtrot. It offers dynamic new ways to view the cultural history of this time. It all but exhorts its readers to go out and dance themselves. Many sources were crunched to make this book's chapters, and many exciting roads lead out of them into future projects." - The Russian Review

This volume examines kinesthesia--the sense of movement--as a foundation of personal knowledge and cultural innovation, claiming primacy of kinesthesia over the other senses in that it affords unmediated contact with the world. Grounding their analysis of this "sixth sense" in historical context, Sirotkina and Smith reference the attraction of late-19th-century Europeans to ancient Hellenic life, citing a joyful universalism that particularly appealed to late czarist and revolutionary-era Russians. Evidencing the spirit of "exuberant modernism," movement--particularly dance--is seen as central to avant-garde culture, infusing poetry, mysticism, literary analysis, graphic art, and theater. Andrei Bely's acute sensitivity to gesture becomes his verse, and Vladimir Mayakovsky is seen to compose "posters, like poems, with his whole body." The celebrated artistic union of Sergei Yesenin and Isadora Duncan comes to life as a shining instance of the primacy of movement across the arts, and Vsevolod Meyerhold develops his biomechanical exercises for training actors. The concluding chapter projects the avant-gardists' primacy of movement to present-day validation of kinesthetic experience as a vital source of knowledge. The translation is labored in places, but the extensive notes and suggestions for further reading compensate and make the book invaluable. Summing Up: Recommended. - CHOICE

What makes The Sixth Sense of the Avant-Garde an invaluable scholarly contribution is the persuasive and ambitious argument that the authors, Irina Sirotkina and Roger Smith, present in the book - an argument that extends well beyond literary and artistic studies of modernist practices. Specifically, they seek to reassess longstanding notions on the senses of perception ... [The book] provides an interesting perspective on avant-garde art, offering a wide-ranging overview of the ideas that preoccupied intellectuals at that time. As such, it can be of interest to scholars of various backgrounds. Furthermore, while the authors try to redefine and even dismantle some of the stable categories and bring attention to a concept of the 'knowing body, ' they also keep the content lively and engaging for their readers throughout the entire work. - Slavic and East European Journal