A group member has participated in the Third student conference of Literary scholars and Linguists of NRU HSE Saint-Petersburg

On April 26-27, the Third student conference of Literary scholars and Linguists of NRU HSE has taken place. Svetlana Demidova has participated in the conference with a report on the topic «The Sun of Mysterium and the Sun of Scriabin: Motifs of Russian Symbolism in Constructing the Biography of Alexander Scriabin».

Starting his first 1916 book dedicated to Scriabin’s figure, L. Sabaneyev observes: «The creative path of Scriabin is a mirror of his spiritual life. It contains his intellectual biography in a more essential, exhaustive manner than any kind of a biography of facts». In 1925, in the preface to «Remembrances of Scriabin», Sabaneyev nevertheless focuses his attention on the factual material, seeing a necessity in disclosure of a panegyrical tradition of composer’s description which heavily mystified his figure. Sabaneyev takes as his main task an objective portrayal of Scriabin’s personality with all its flaws, in contrast to the design of the 1916 biography, in which Scriabin’s creative evolution was represented as an «orphic path of theurgy». This controversy appears to be an interesting case of fundamentally differentiated conceptualization of the biographical subject by the same biographer and on the same historical data.

Scriabin’s mythologization in the intellectual circles of the turn of the century was closely connected to his creative findings, placed in the sphere of contemporary mysticism. Interrelationship of Scriabin’s oeuvre with principal ideas of Russian symbolism gained the attention of many literati who, in their texts dedicated to Scriabin, formed the key aspects of his mythology. In Sabaneyev’s texts, direct borrowings from the works of Osip Mandelstam, Vyacheslav Ivanov and Konstantin Balmont could be traced, although, according to different pragmatics of «Scriabin»(1916) and «Remembrances of Scriabin» (1925), Sabaneyev implements them variably for creating composer’s image. One of the characteristic examples, in this case, is a transformation of the sun motif. While in the text of «Scriabin» it is attributed to the idea of «Mysterium», in «Remembrances» it is applied directly to Scriabin, which could be interpreted as an influence of the report “Scriabin and Christianity” by Osip Mandelstam and musical critique. With the support of Yuri Lotman’s article “Literary biography in the historical-cultural context” and Leon Edel’s theory of “New Biography”, the report discussed the issues of transformation of symbolist motifs in the construction of two different biographical subjects.