This book is a fully rewritten and expanded version of Irina Sirotkina, Shestoe chuvstvo avangarda: tanets, dvizhenie, kinesteziia v zhizni poetov i khudozhnikov (The Sixth Sense of the Avant-garde: Dance, Movement, Kinaesthesia in the Lives of Poets and Artists), published in the series ‘Avant-garde’, copyright the European University Press in Saint-Petersburg (EUSP), Russian Federation, in 2014, republished in a new edition in 2016. This English-language version is published by arrangement with EUSP, whose involvement is gratefully acknowledged. We sincerely thank the editor of the Russian text, Andrei Rossomakhin, for his deep interest and support.
The book owes much to a wide range of scholars and Russian institutions. It crosses borders between Slavic studies, dance and performance studies, history of art and literature, cultural history and history of science in order to draw on the riches of research in the humanities. The notes indicate our debts. Amidst all the scholarship on the Russian avant-garde, it is hard to overemphasize the contribution by a scholarly couple, John E. Bowlt and Nicoletta Misler. In addition to their own prolific writings and curatorship of exhibitions, they edit Experiment: A Journal of Russian Culture, twenty-one volumes (1995 to present) including academic inquiries into ballet, ballroom dance, theatre, gymnastics and body culture in early twentieth-century Russia. They have generously contributed their enthusiasm and knowledge to our project.
We also would like to thank Caryl Emerson, Lynn Garofola and Dee Reynolds for their encouraging interest in and support for the book.
The English text, based on a translation from Irina Sirotkina, Shestoe chuvstvo, is our own. We thank Sergei Zhozhikashvili for many explanations of the Russian language and much patience with his student, Roger Smith.
We are happily indebted to our experience of the Russian tradition of ‘musical movement’, to our teachers Aida Ailamazian and Tatiana Trifonova, and to all those with whom we have shared movement.
We acknowledge the following permissions:
Extract in chapter 2, from Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, trans. J. B. Leishman (1936), reprinted by permission of the Random House Group Ltd.
The epigram to chapter 6, © Vladimir Mayakovsky, author, and George Hyde, translator, from ‘How Are Verses Made?’, Bristol Classical Press, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
The epigram to chapter 7, from Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, copyright © R. J. Hollingdale, 1961, 1969, reprinted by permission of Penguin Random House UK.