The Muse vs The Fashion (According to the Pages of N. Medtner's Treatise)

Abstract

The article is devoted to N. K. Medtner's treatise “The Muse and The Fashion” which has increasingly become the subject of research attention in recent years. Today's researchers highly appreciate the Medtnerian philosophy of music described in the book, which tends to early antiquity, Christian ideas about God and the aesthetics of symbolism. Meanwhile, the “polemical” part of the treatise devoted to the criticism of “non-personalized” musical contemporaneity is of no less interest. Partly echoing the book of the composer's elder brother E. K. Medtner (“The modernism and the music”, 1912), it has an independent value, revealing N. Medtner's attitude to the art of modernism and to the fashion factor – the second most important component of the Medtner dualistic formula. Such arguments coincide with the later scientific works devoted to fashion as a phenomenon of mass culture and endow N. Medtner's treatise with a weighty cultural mission.

Keywords

muse, fashion, antinomic dualism, antimodernism, musical meanings, paradoxes of conservation ideology (okhranitel’stvo)