The Seventh Research Seminar «Magic, Astrology, and Science in Russian Modernism»

On September 23rd, the seventh session of the research seminar «Magic, Astrology, and Science in Russian Modernism» took place, at which Pavel Yushin gave a talk entitled «The Cover of the Journal “Makovets” and Pavel Florensky's Scientific Imagination».

Reconstructing the intellectual context of Florensky’s famous theory, the main features of which were outlined in Iconostasis and Imaginaries in Geometry (and which the poet Sergei Gorodetsky aptly called the «theory of inversion»), the speaker turned to several little-known materials. The starting point was the analysis of the engraved cover of the journal «Makovets» that was produced by Vladimir Favorsky in collaboration with Florensky. The iconographic elements of this image seem to be based on the tradition of allegorical interpretation of the Bible, while its main intellectual source is the unorthodox story of the Fall written by Mikhail Speransky and retold by Alexander Yelchaninov. The remainder of the talk was devoted to the commentary on Speransky’s story and its possible influences upon Florensky’s work, one of the results of which was his «theory of inversion».