Congratulations to Anastasia Kostetskaya on her successful defense of her dissertation on May 2, 2013! The Water of Life and the Life of Water: The Metaphor of World Liquescence in the Poetry, Painting and Film of the Russian Silver Age, was co-advised by Profs. Irene Delic and Helena Goscilo. 

In the thesis, Nastia explores a metaphorical blend which fuses domains of people and water. The Symbolist period in Russian culture emphasized intense cross-pollination and hybridization of the arts. The purpose behind these “poetics of blending” was to show the existence of a spiritual world beyond physical-material reality and that the boundaries between them were not insurmountable. In her dissertation, she claims that this vision of the creative process as pursuing various strategies of blending draws on the overarching metaphoric conceptualization of our world, and the human domain as its integral part, as not “solid,” but “fluid matter.” She employs conceptual metaphor and blending theory approaches from the field of cognitive linguistics to account for the following: how three interactive arts of the period – poetry, painting and film – use the metaphor of world liquescence in their attempts to transcend the material world – realia – and to reach spiritual reality – realiora.

The concept of world liquescence reveals itself not only in the choice of water as a physical substance present in the space of a given poem, canvas or film. The Symbolist arts with their close attention to the inner depths of the human psyche attempt to capture and symbolize the slightest stirrings of the soul through the domain of water and very often introduce this element through the plasticity of music. The “endless” Wagnerian melody reveals itself in poetry through protracted poetic meters and specific types of rhyme as well as various phonetic and semantic devices; in painting it is “endless, monotonic, impassive line without angles;” in early filmmaking it is the use of movement vs. stasis, special lighting effects and long takes, including (extreme) close-ups of a person’s face. In this connection we can also speak about moving water as a traditional metaphor for time: thus the introduction of music as a temporal element into both the temporal art of poetry and the spatial art of painting marks an attempt to convey its flow in both a congenial dynamic art and in a less congenial static art; film blends both temporal and spatial dimensions, and thus reveals time’s liquescence in both modes. The dissertation focuses on the following three artists of the period: the poet Konstantin Bal’mont, the painter Viktor Borisov-Musatov and the film director Evgenii Bauer. All three rely on blending art forms traditionally considered incompatible. They therefore offer rich materials for the conceptual integration and hybridization approach.

Anastasia has accepted a position as Assistant Professor of Russian at the University of Hawai'i Manoa. The Department is more than a little bit envious that she is moving to an island paradise, and wishes her well in the future.