Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores the leitmotivic thread through Skryabin’s ‘middle-period’ works from 1903, which call upon archetypes of gender portrayal, and which appear to be encoded in his erotically programmatic fourth sonata, Op. 30. It explores Skryabin’s portrayals of womanhood, demonstrating the characteristic Russian Symbolist mediation of artworks through the figure of the Eternal Feminine. The book also explores Jacques Lacan’s famous Graph of Desire, on a route that leads through ego-formation to the production of fantasy and, ultimately, to the breakdown of desire and its diffusion into the Freudian drive. It draws its net tightly around this drive and proposes a theory of Skryabin’s late mystical harmony that elicits its myriad impulses, tensions and discharges and corresponds them to the Freudian, Lacanian and ultimately Kristevan models of human driving mechanisms.