N. Rimsky-Korsakov’s Cosmism in the Context of the pro-Ancient Aura of 19th Century’s Russian Culture.
Background. Based on the present information regarding the ancient understanding of cosmos available from various branches of research, which without any doubt proves that the cosmos is isometric to music, this article justifies the interpretation of Rimsky-Korsakov’s oeuvre through a triad of notions: worldview – cosmos – music. Objective. The article outlines a complex of factors that fueled Korsakov’s cos-mism through ancient “interpolations” in the Russian culture of 19th century. These factors were inherent to that culture’s unique spiritual and material body – a fact caused by the semiotics and the aura of St. Petersburg to a significant extent. The first feature is the Russian tradition of literacy, tightly connected to thorough studies of the ancient poetics and in particular the ancient theater; the laws of the ancient theater’s organization obviously contained traces of “cosmism”. The author of this work uses classical methodsof analysis of historical and theoretical musicology. Results.The ancient background of Korsakov’s opera plots is well-known. First, we should mention the orphism of “Sadko” and “The Snow Maiden,” where the motives of the Slavic culture naturally overlap with a deep layer of the classic mythology. The ancient notions, as well as Christian ones, fuel Korsakov’s understanding of Eros. This understanding also corresponds to some of the philosophical theories of that phenomenon. The immediate interest of Rimsky-Korsakov in the Ancient Greek culture was caused by his work with ancient subjects, in particular “Nausicaa” and “Servilia”. It seems that Korsakov stopped developing the ancient themes because he, raised in the context of 19th century’s historism, which presupposes drawing upon the national vocabularies of intonation corresponding to the space and the time of action in opera and to its characters, was simply unable to find himself in the antiquity due to the lack of necessary musical sources. Possibly, it was also important that he did not view the antiquity as a concrete and real historical locus; instead, he assigned it a value that excludes any particulars, any ties to a particular time or place. The very interest of Rimsky-Korsakov in the ancient heritage is significant: it moti-vates us to view him not only as a contemporary of the Silver Age poets with their ancient studies and of S. Taneev with his opera experiments, or as a predecessor of I. Stravinsky, but also as a creator that feels his ties to the sources of the European culture.What is also important: it is their “primordiality” that draws the antiquity and the Russian folklore together in the worldview of Rimsky-Korsakov. Such parallel is en-hanced by the thesis of G. Florovsky who claimed that paganism has not been overcome in the Christian Russia. It is curious that the Slavic paganism is depicted as a “dark side” of the national consciousness, which often emerges in operas of Rimsky-Korsakov, for example, the doubled worlds of “May Night” and “Mlada”. We can say that his pieces are always full of the feeling of primordiality that penetrates their whole structure and turns them into a “tree of life”, which grows from the absolute and primordial One and brings about the feeling of wholeness and organized unity. From this point of view, the dramatic collisions of his operas are seen in a new light: as the tragedy of falling out of one’s habitat, of social and intimate personal relationships. Turning to the pieces by Rimsky-Korsakov, we should note that the composer creat-ed such qualities of sound that would bear information about all the aspects of the world at the same time and would aim at the holistic (intellectual, perceptual, acoustic, visual, and plastic) perception. Such is the reason behind the musical metaphors employed by Rimsky-Korsakov, which tend to mythology: sound is perceived in its perceptual whole-ness, and intonation is perceived in clarity of lines and gestures, geometrical figures and colors. At the same time, expression is usually aimed not at creating dramatic or psycho-logical tension but at broadening the space of possible expression. This thesis is supported by several examples of Korsakov’s opera themes, including the operas “The Golden Cock”, “The Tsar’s Bride”, “The Snow Maiden”, “Sadko”, and “Christmas Eve”. The role of symmetry, which organizes the spatial coordinates of the composer’s musical cosmos, is explored on different levels of the musical text. Conclusions. Thus, Rimsky-Korsakov’s cosmos, nourished by the ancient ideas, is a spatially oriented continuum of sound; it is filled with active movement that is visible in plastic forms. Its intonational and physical nature is in harmony with primordial mani-festations and reactions of a human being, as well as with ways of creating meaning and communicating. From such point of view, the oeuvre that comprises a unique phenom-enon called “the musical theater of Rimsky-Korsakov” can be interpreted as a single “cosmos piece.” Its structure is composed of inner cycles: the pieces are connected by the same theme (historical operas), by genres (opera tales), by drawing upon particular layers of folklore from the year cycle. From aesthetical point of view, such repetition allows to look at the orderliness of the whole and its parts as the embodiment of the idea of beauty, which can be both hedonistically enjoyed or perceived as a value in itself, in a detached manner. Turning to the qualities of sound in Korsakov’s oeuvre, we should note its syncretic nature. For several reasons, the sound of Korsakov’s theatre obviously unites acoustic and intonational, visual, and corporeal or plastic aspects of expression. The first reason is Korsakov’s worldview that we equal to the notion of cosmos, to the idea that every-thing sounds. A particular case of this holism is the composer’s synesthesia. The second reason is the composer’s intention to explore the very foundations of the world, his tendency towards exploring primordiality, the primal source. Since pre-logical thinking and pre-verbal ways of communication are the features of the most ancient condition of cognitive, adaptational, and translational systems of the society, and since they are syncretic, they can be considered archetypal. The third reason is that Korsakov’s con-temporary integrative cultural tendencies, represented both in art and in philosophical aesthetics, stimulated the development of cognitive resources of music as a “universal art,” that is, its capability to embody not only affects (feelings, emotions) but also visual or corporeal images, phenomena, and landscapes, as well as gestures signifying human personality. The tendency towards broadening the area of music created that aesthetic background and, finally, that worldview which “condensed” into real objective enti-ties gaining audial forms. Thus, the composer’s music reached the notion of universal immanence, which was developed in late 19 th – early 20 th centuries by the Russian philosophers.