Dostoevsky – Not a Defeated Idol in Akim Volynsky’s


In Dostoevsky’s artistic quest, Volynsky saw general paths of development of culture and literature. In his last book on dance, Kniga likovanii: Azbuka klassicheskogo tantsa (1925)[The Book of Exaltations: The Alphabet of Classical Dance], Volynsky espouses a new ‘motor aesthetics’, in which the language and rules of ballet, as well as the connection of classical ballet with other arts is set out, whereby the technique of the emergence of the human spirit is reflected in the movements of the human body. The Book of Exaltations is proof that Dostoevsky never became a ‘defeated idol’ for Volynsky. In the article Infernal Woman (1900), answering the question why exactly beauty is undefinable, Volynsky gives the brief but exhaustive explanation that the undefined is in the “dualism of the span of beauty” (‘размах красоты’). In The Book of Exaltations, Volynsky already operates with this accidentally found image of ‘the span of beauty’, transposed into the term ‘coupé’, expanding it to a synthetic judgment in the Kantian sense.