The Sixth Sense of the Avant-Garde

Irina Sirotkina is a lecturer at the Institute for the Theory and History of the Humanities, The Research University – Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russian Federation. She is a cultural historian who has published on the history of psychiatry and on the history of free dance. Roger Smith is Emeritus Reader in the History of Science, Lancaster University, UK and Associate Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russian Federation. He is an internationally well known historian and philosopher of psychology and the human sciences, the author of standard texts in the field as well as specialist studies relating to the history of mind and brain and the understanding of ‘being human’, including Inhibition: History and Meaning in the Sciences of Mind and Brain (1992), and The Norton History of the Human Sciences (1997).

List of illustrations

Preface

Acknowledgements

Note on text/translation

List of abbreviations

Introduction: Movement and exuberant modernism

Chapter 1 The sixth sense
The senses
Muscular feeling and kinaesthesia

Chapter 2 Search for deeper knowledge
The kinaesthetic intellect
‘The higher sensitivity’
Kinaesthesia and synaesthesia

Chapter 3 Expression in dance
The new dance
The Russian Hellenes
‘Ach, the devil take it, they’re dancing here again’

Chapter 4 Speaking movement
The perfect language: Andrei Bely on gesture
The dance-word: the creative union of Esenin and Duncan
Word plasticity: the budetliane and the bare-footed

Chapter 5 By ‘the fourth way’
The mystic arts
From Dalcroze to Gurdjieff
‘Presence’

Chapter 6 Thinking with the body
Mayakovsky dances the fox-trot
Brik-dance
Who thought up biomechanics?

Chapter 7 Art as bodily knowledge
Technique
Kinaesthesia in culture

Further reading
Notes
Index