Tuesday, May 06, 2025

Polina Dimova Publishes At the Crossroads of the Senses: The Synaesthetic Metaphor Across the Arts in European Modernism

Polina Dimova published At the Crossroads of the Senses: The Synaesthetic Metaphor Across the Arts in European Modernism with Penn State University Press.

At the Crossroads of the Senses traces the sensory experience of synaesthesia—the physiological or figurative blending of senses—as a modernist phenomenon in Russian and European art and science. Inspired by Richard Wagner’s idea of the total artwork, modernist artists began to pursue multimedia projects that mixed colors, sounds, and shapes. Structured around twenty theses on synaesthesia, the book explores the integral relationship between modernist art, science, and technology, tracing not only how modernist artists perceptually internalized and absorbed technology and its effects but also how they appropriated it to achieve their own aesthetic, metaphysical, and social goals. Through case studies of prominent multimodal artists—Aleksandr Scriabin, Wassily Kandinsky, František Kupka, Andrei Bely, Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, Richard Strauss, and Rainer Maria Rilke—At the Crossroads of the Senses reveals the color-forms and color-sounds that, for these artists, laid the foundations of the world and served as the catalyst for the flourishing exchanges among the arts at the fin de siècle.

Rooted in archival research in Russia, Germany, France, and the Czech Republic, At the Crossroads of the Senses taps overlooked scientific sources to reconstruct the intellectual history of synaesthesia and advocates for a new kind of sensuous reading practice to offer a fresh perspective on Russian and European modernism.