Psychomotor Aesthetics: Movement and Affect in Modern Literature and Film by Ana Hedberg Olenina (review)

Reviewed by: Psychomotor Aesthetics: Movement and Affect in Modern Literature and Film by Ana Hedberg Olenina Anna Kovalova Psychomotor Aesthetics: Movement and Affect in Modern Literature and Film. Ana Hedberg Olenina. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. 416. $150.00 (cloth); $40.95 (paper); $39.99 (eBook). Ana Hedberg Olenina’s Psychomotor Aesthetics received the 2021 Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize, awarded for the most important contribution to Russian, Eurasian, and East European studies by the ASEEES (Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies). Olenina’s book has become a groundbreaking event in Slavic studies, but its significance spreads far beyond this field. The study mostly focuses on Russian modernist literature, criticism, and film. However, a close analysis of these texts and films as well as related events and names leads the author to explore the general effects of physiological psychology on art. By bringing together a wide range of sources, from rare archival materials to various theories presented by international scholars, Olenina establishes the deep and complicated connections between psychophysiology and the world of art and humanities at the turn of the twentieth century. Among the key figures that Olenina discusses in her book are the Russian formalists Viktor Shklovskii, Yuri Tynianov, and Boris Eikhenbaum; theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold; scientists Vladimir Bekhterev and Ivan Pavlov; poet Aleksei Kruchenykh; and film directors Lev Kuleshov and Sergei Eisenstein. Though the work of these figures has already been thoroughly investigated by scholars, one can hardly think of another study that would cover all these fields and reflect on their inner connections. In the Russian tradition, studies of literature, literary criticism, and performing arts have been relatively close, so Meyerhold, Eisenstein, and Shklovskii have historically been able to “meet” each other on the pages of academic books. But their relationship with science has not yet been consistently investigated in detail. By analyzing the impact of physiological psychology on various key figures and cultural institutions, Olenina manages to establish some crucial connections between art and science. In the introduction, Olenina proposes and defines the term psychomotor aesthetics as a “network of theoretical notions and practices that emphasizedmuscular movement, connecting it to cognitive and affective processes” (xiv) and traces her book’s focus: the Russian and Soviet avant-garde, considered within various intellectual connections to European and American art and history. She gives many examples of how physiological psychology impacted the creation and reception of art, and explains how her study connects with the work of other scholars, among whom Oksana Bulgakowa and Mikhail Iampolski feature prominently. The author also demonstrates that psychomotor aesthetics has deep roots in the fiction of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from realistic writers such as Leo Tolstoy and Aleksandr Kuprin to symbolists such as Andrei Bely and Stanisław Przybyszewski. Interestingly, all of these writers had a great impact on silent cinema, a main topic of analysis in later portions of Olenina’s book. Chapter one investigates futurist poetry and how it was reflected in the work of leading Russian formalist Viktor Shklovskii. Olenina shows that Shklovskii interpreted elements of [End Page 444] transrational poetry (zaum’) as “an outcome of a prolonged neurophysiological and cognitive processing of a certain phenomenon” (24). She discusses the foundation of Shklovskii’s conception in Russian scholarship (Aleksandr Potebnia’s studies in particular) and in the wider scope of Western thought and studies, including William James’s theory of the corporeal experience of emotion and Wilhelm Wundt’s ideas on the gestural origin of language. Chapter two draws attention to other prominent Formalist critics, such as Boris Eikhenbaum, Yuri Tynianov, and Sergei Bernshteyn, and to important Russian institutions of the 1920s that investigated poetic rhythms and intonations using the methods of psychology and neurophysiology. Olenina argues that this approach had a lot in common with theory and practice presented by western scientists, particularly American phonetician Edward W. Scripture. Crucially, Olenina does not speak here, or elsewhere, of “connections” in a vague, abstract manner; by bringing up different documents and historical sources, she always tries to establish whether one should speak of a direct influence or a typological similarity of views. In this case, she argues: “Without knowing each other, the Russian and American...