Boris Asaf'ev and the Soviet Musicology - E-thesis

need for empathy, by an urge to alienate oneself from individual being, but as an urge to
seek deliverance from the tortuitousness of humanity as a whole, from the seeming
arbitrariness of organic existence in general, in the contemplation of something necessary
and irrefragable. Life as such is felt to be a disturbance of aesthetic enjoyment. [--]
Popular usage speaks with striking accuracy of ‘loosing oneself’ in the contemplation of
a work of art. In this sense, therefore, it cannot appear over-bold to attribute all aesthetic
enjoyment – and perhaps even every aspect of the human sensation of happiness – to the
impulse of self-alienation as its most profound and ultimate essence. 232
Worringer’s concepts were a symptom of a growing antropological aspect of the
modernists and an interest to abstract art. Asaf’ev interprets the theories of Worringer
and Lipps theories in his “etude” about the Kiteže. He discusses the psychological basis
of the formation of Russian aesthetics, i.e. “artistic volition” in Russian art history and
development of Russian musical style. He writes:
232 Ibid., pp. 71–72.
Aesthetic enjoyment which arises as a result and in a process of percepting Kiteže is
founded in the given music on the basis of the harmonic reunification of two eternally
struggling tendencies of one’s “artistic volition”: process of exposing artistic
ideas/concepts into the schematic-abstract forms, and – into the natural-concrete organic
forms. The first process, in its highest spiritual form, appears in Gothic, the second –
appears in the Renaissance [--]. Most likely, a peculiar interpretation of these tendencies
took place in Russian art. If one takes a look to the origins of our icon painting in the
Egyptian portrait art, we pass trough the trial of Byzantine abstraction, the evolution of
which can be constructed only upon its incessant overcoming of linear-geometric
constructivity towards the creative impulses which in Lipps’ thinking approach the
understanding of “empathy” (Einfühlung) and which pull towards [founding] the artistic
construction on the basis of the organic world. [--] In the music and partly in creative
works of Rimskij-Korsakov one can observe an extremely interesting struggle of
processes: abstraction and empathy. [--] The first ones [his operas “May Night” and “A
Night before Christmas”] are dominated by lyrical pafos and the process of “empathy”
and the second ones [among others, the operas “Sadko” and “A Tale about Tsar Saltan”],
spiritual abstraction, linear-geometrical ornament, rhythm of confronting trivialities (or
sounding masses) – in short, [they are dominated by] the process that results from the
struggle of artistic volition to tear out the given object from the eternally flowing instabile
formation of visible world and to capture its absolute being, independent of the ties with
the phenomenon of the outside world, born by causality. [Thus] [o]bjective reality – is
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