Abstract
In this chapter, I will draw attention to what I will call an “aesthetization of an Einsteinian world” in the work of two Russian thinkers, Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975) and Pavel Florensky (1882–1937). Under “Einsteinian world,” an expression I borrow from Bakhtin, I understand the uniquely modern intuition that all objects of experience exist in a unity of space-time characteristics. The “aesthetization” of this intuition, typical of modern man and postulated by relativity theory, refers to its application to the field of the arts, i.e., the aesthetical worlds, created by the arts. In the two cases here, it was the notion of the unity of space-time that lay in the background of Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope (literally, space-time) in literature and Florensky’s “reverse perspective” and “reverse time” in the art of the icon.
It is the theory of relativity, which made possible these notions. The two Russian thinkers’ ideas on the relationship between space and time in literature and in the art of the icon respectively could have been advanced only after Einstein’s ideas became widely known. In other words, there is a much closer link between the scientific idea and its “aesthetization” than in the common instances of borrowing terminology from one field of knowledge and applying it to another without any intrinsic connection between the two.
I thank Emeritus Prof. Caryl Emerson for her comments on this chapter.
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Antonova, C. (2022). Aestheticizing an Einsteinian World: The Idea of Space-Time in Russian Literary Theory and in Art Criticism. In: Emmer, M., Abate, M. (eds) Imagine Math 8. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92690-8_6
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