ABSTRACT
At the 1904 Genevan International Congress of Philosophy Skryabin encountered ‘Panpsychism’, a doctrine that equated the universe with a conscious mind. Through Skryabin’s absorption of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky’s Theosophical macrocosm-microcosm theories, he viewed the birth of the cosmos as an identical process to the birth of consciousness in the human subject. In Skryabin’s music, as in his philosophy, a third response to the subjectivity crisis emerges: a kind of hyper-subjectivity that attempts to capture both the evolution of the universe and the construction and dissolution of the subject in musical form. For Skryabin, subjectivity is not awakened by identification with a being in the real world, but through community with Imaginary others located in the psyche itself. Theodor W. Adorno’s valorisation of Mahler’s music hinges on its authentic embodiment of the tensions inherent in Viennese society, but Skryabin and revolutionary Russian society share a rather more perplexing relationship.
