The Mona Lisa (from Volynsky’s book Leonardo da Vinci, 1898)

This is the longest and richest chapter from Volynsky’s revisionist 1898 study of Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance milieu which gave birth to him. Passionately, almost manically written, this piece constitutes Volynsky’s moral and aesthetic response to Leonardo’s painting, which he visited and studied at the Louvre. La Gioconda is clinically deconstructed, and the painting is seen as an example of corrupt beauty and demonic character, a precursor of the Nietzschean decadence and degeneration of the day, which Volynsky fully rejects. Filled with what can be called Volynsky’s sexuality of observation, the writing looks ahead to the critic’s later appreciation of dance, which was more than merely a supremely intellectual endeavor.

Introduction

HISTORIANS OF CULTURE LOOK at Russia’s Silver Age—the period of aesthetic activity roughly between 1895 and 1915—as one of the great artistic revivals of modern history, the initial phase of what eventually became more generally known as modernism. Even more than the previous Golden Age of Pushkin, Lermontov, and other Romantic poets some sixty years earlier, this period reveals a flowering of cultural refinement rarely seen on such a broad scale. Not only writers and poets but musicians, painters, and figures in the world of theater and dance cultivated a greater sensitivity to art, which placed a premium as much on the artists’ unique personalities as on the variety and quality of the original works they produced. An early and defining emblem of the new age was Sergei Diaghilev’s lavishly illustrated ...

From Volynsky’s Writings on Dostoevsky (1900; 1901)

Two articles on Dostoevsky’s strongest female characters, Nastasya Filippovna (from The Idiot) and the “Infernal Woman” Grushenka (from The Brothers Karamazov). Volynsky’s approach emanates from his belief that women’s bodies represent the aesthetic and metaphysical locus of the core Dostoevskian concern: the fate of beauty on this earth. Especially in his treatment of Grushenka, Volynsky posits the flesh’s potential to turn into spirit and the individual, carnal, and also sinister nature of beauty to disclose its fundamentally universal, divine, and benevolent foundation—all of which Volynsky will see fully realized in ballet.

Post-Revolutionary Writings on Ballet (1922–1924)

Continuing to view what was most likely the greatest number of preeminent ballerinas ever to have been assembled on a single stage within so brief a period of time, Volynsky recreates the vivid and increasingly vulnerable world of Petersburg/Petrograd/Leningrad’s storied Maryinsky Theater. In gripping language and with his characteristically admirable visual acuity and impressive mastery of dance vocabulary, Volynsky makes us feel as if we were ourselves spectators at these dance performances. With his male gaze always at work, Volynsky emblemizes the prophet who possesses lofty opinions about the past, present, and future of ballet in Russia, and with no less zeal as he fights any attempt to defeminize dance culture or marginalize the great art of classical dance.

Amor (A Romantic Sketch) (coauthored with Lou Andreas-Salome, 1897)

This fictional sketch co-written in 1897 by Volynsky and Lou Andreas-Salome was inspired by Tolstoy’s sensational and controversial Kreutzer Sonata. It also constituted the high point in the relationship between the two, which lasted from 1896 through 1898. An example of his sustained mentoring of young female creative artists, this exercise in the form of a philosophical discussion on the nature of love instantiates the paradigm of Volynsky’s intellectual patrimony. The story shows Volynsky’s very early concern with the issues of feminine sexuality and self-realization, as well as the relationship between external/material and internal/spiritual beauty, the latter of which classical dance will come to embody for Volynsky.

Pre-Revolutionary Writings on Ballet (1912–1917)

Volynsky’s unique and indeed obsessive fascination with ballerinas forms the core of these lyrically infused writings on classical dance: his observations of the female dancer’s anatomy, her psychic and emotional profile, and her body’s very essence. These articles on the leading Petersburg dancers of the time, as well as on some visiting performers from Moscow, reflect the critic’s undeniable proclivity toward ballet’s feminine component and the central figure of the female dancer. Volynsky’s sustained attraction to the female body as an object of aesthetic contemplation reveals the groundbreaking, if not occasionally controversial, quality of his observations. Volynsky saw more great ballerinas perform on a single stage (at the Maryinsky) than anyone before and, possibly, since, within so short a period of time.

Russian Women

Volynsky’s moving reminiscences of key women in his early life as a critic and journalist between 1891 and 1907 (Zinaida Gippius, Liubov Gurevich, Ida Rubinstein, Lou Andreas-Salome) is preceded by a theoretical introduction classifying two basic female types. Chronicling Volynsky’s beginnings as a major observer of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russian culture, these vivid portraits of some of the outstanding female icons of his time demonstrate the central presence of women in Volynsky’s intellectual and psychic development; they also provide valuable insight into the origins of his interest in dance, and in female dancers in particular.

Madonna (introduction to the Russian edition of Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character, 1909)

Volynsky wrote this introduction to the Russian edition of Otto Weininger’s literary bombshell Sex and Character, the translation of which from the German he supervised. Weininger’s attitude toward women was hostile and mean-spirited, but Volynsky here provides a corrective to the author’s controversial contentions, in which the critic nonetheless finds some beneficial, however misguided, use. The book’s grappling with the issues of gender and sex allows Volynsky to articulate some of his own ideas on the subject, especially on the topic of bisexuality, a subject that he had earlier approached in his study of Leonardo da Vinci. Volynsky found this Austrian Jew’s conflicts with his Judaism sympathetic, although unlike Weininger, he did not convert.