The Notebooks of Alexander Skryabin by Nicholls Simon (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 781 Nicholls, Simon and Pushkin, Michael (trans). The Notebooks of Alexander Skryabin. Annotations and commentary by Simon Nicholls. Foreword by Vladimir Ashkenazy. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2018. xxi + 263 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Biographical Notes. Bibliography. Index. £53.00. Amidwarandrevolution,admirersofcomposerAleksandrSkriabin(1872–1915) compiled his philosophical notebooks from fragmentary sketches, preserving a creative world threatened by oblivion after his untimely death. Published in Russian in 1919, the mystical striving and thirst for unity expressed in these notebooks found little resonance within the newly formed Soviet state. Meanwhile, English-language scholarship was until recently dominated by Faubion Bowers’s unreliable biography of Skriabin (1969/1996), which luxuriated in an exoticized image of the composer as an extreme solipsist with delusions of godhood. In contrast to this caricatured image, music theorists tended to divorce study of the composer’s music from his cultural context and philosophical views (Baker, 1986). While recent studies have offered a more nuanced reading of the composer by situating his music and ideas within the historical context of the Russian Silver Age (Taruskin, 1997; Morrison, 2002; Gawboy, 2010; Smith, 2013; Mitchell, 2015; Ballard/Bengtson, 2017), Nicholls and Pushkin’s translation of Scriabin’s philosophical notebooks finally makes the composer’s meditations available in their entirety for an English-language audience. The task of this volume ‘is to present as clearly and fully as possible the documents that record the development of [Skriabin’s] world view’ (p. 1). Because any detailed analysis of the eclectic range of influences on the composer would threaten to be disjointed, Nicholls provides a brief overview as a launching point for scholars, musicians and audiences to delve deeper into the composer’s creative world. In his carefully crafted introduction and commentary, Nicholls contextualizes key concepts within Skriabin’s worldview , including the mystical calling for art to spiritually unify humanity, the apocalyptic expectation of a new era to be sparked by artistic creation, ecstasy as the basis of artistic creation, and the dual equation of the individual self with the divine principle and the artist’s creative work with the creation of the cosmos (p. 4). Skriabin’s philosophical directions creatively synthesized German idealism, Eastern philosophy (read largely through the prism of Russian émigré Helena Blavatskii’s theosophical writings), and contemporary trends in Russian Silver Age thought. Nicholls highlights the importance of religious philosopher Vladimir Solov´ev’s ideas about the theurgic power of art and their reception amongst Russian Symbolist poets (particularly Viacheslav Ivanov, Valerii Briusov and Konstantin Bal´mont), as well as other members of the cultural elite whose career paths intertwined with Skriabin (Boris Shletser, SEER, 97, 4, OCTOBER 2019 782 Leonid Sabaneev, Mikhail Gershenzon). Particular aspects of the Russian intellectual tradition with relevance for Skriabin’s creative world-view are highlighted, including an emphasis on feeling over thought, the ‘Russian idea’ (the claim that Russia has some unique spiritual task to fulfil in world history) and the importance of the concept of ‘unity’ (edinstvo). The heart of the book is a translation of the 1919 Russian-language publication of Skriabin’s notebooks alongside selected additional texts illustrating the composer’s evolving creative world. Many of the translated texts are fragmentary, representing less a well-reasoned world-view than a series of creative explorations. After a naive celebration of Orthodox Christian faith at age 16 (p. 49), a number of poetic texts and a libretto for an unfinished opera demonstrate an embrace of a Nietzschean world-view in which art is celebrated as a source of triumph over the sufferings of the physical world (pp. 50–61). These are followed by philosophical musings on questions of experience, knowledge, striving, the essence of space and time, ecstasy, creativity and the place of individual consciousness (pp. 61–115). Following this are two poetic texts with direct connection to musical works: the ‘Poem of Ecstasy’ (related to the symphonic work of the same name) (pp. 115–25) and ‘The Preliminary Action’ (the composition that Skriabin was working on at the end of his life) (pp. 125–73). Also included are excerpts from several letters and texts that shed further light on Skriabin’s philosophical development (pp. 231–44). Nicholls and Pushkin’s...