Authors

Discussion

In his 2011 book, David Roberts traces the history of the concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk since 1789 and argues for a dual lineage of the total artwork, "a French revolutionary" and "a German aesthetic" (Roberts 2011) – to which, I believe, "a Russian spiritual" lineage should be added because Russia/the USSR was the third most important country after Germany and France where Wagner’s ideas about the synthesis of the arts were taken seriously and implemented systematically (Bartlett 1995, Gofman 1996, Girin 2013). The theoretical framework of the post-Wagnerian (non-dramatic) Gesamtkunstwerk (Lupishko 2022) and its relation to the Russian and Soviet historical avant-garde (1907-32) has not yet been systematically investigated, largely due to the problem of multidisciplinary. In my paper I will draw a conceptual continuity between the first futurist opera "Victory over the Sun" (1913) by Matyushin, Malevich, and Kruchenykh, and Mikhail Matyushin’s theory of expanded vision Zorved, developed at the GINKhUK in 1923-26, which became the basis of his only book Handbook of Colour (Matyushin 1932, 2007; Tillberg 2003, 2008; Wünsche 2015). It is known that other books were projected. I will try to determine the specifics of post-Wagnerism in Matyushin's approach to the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, comparing his achievements with similar contemporary projects and experiments (Scriabin, Kandinsky, Gidoni, Baranov-Rossiné).