The Research Group Continues Its Work: Another Session of the Regular Seminar «Magic, Astrology, and Science in Russian Modernism»
On May 8, as a part of the regular research seminar «Magic, Astrology, and Science in Russian Modernism», Svetlana Demidova delivered a presentation «On the Contexts of the Word “Konstellation” in chapter XXII of “Doctor Faustus”». The seminar was organized in an online form on the platform Skype.
The term «Konstellation» appears quite often in the modern musical discourse, and, as texts on the musical theory of the beginning of the twentieth century indicate, its usage couldn’t be considered new. In the first part of the report, relying upon works of A.J. Polak, Heinrich Schenker, Fritz Weimann, and Kurt Steinbrück, the speaker demonstrated that from the point of view of the protagonist of Mann’s «Doctor Faustus», the composer Adrian Leverkühn, the word might have belonged to the professional slang. On the other hand, sources for astrological connotations of the word (not unnoticed by Mann’s fictional narrator, Zeitblom) might be traced through Theodor Adorno’s «Philosophy of New Music» to the activities of the Cosmic circle and the philosophy of Ludwig Klages. Adorno, who remembered mystical overtones of the word and at the same time was acquainted with one of the certain intellectual tradition of the nineteenth century, highlighted the connection between astrology and positivism. The tendency of the members of the Second Viennese School to believe in the magic of numbers, according to Adorno, illustrated their proximity to that tradition of thought. In the second part of the presentation, with the support of the aforementioned observations, the speaker has detected a positivist subtext in Leverkühn’s speculations in chapter XXVII where the protagonist elaborates on the new astronomical discoveries and their connection to astrological knowledge. Besides, as a separate subject, the report provided a brief reconstruction of the history of Mann’s acquaintance with astrological and astronomical sources that might have influenced chapters XXII and XXVII of «Doctor Faustus».