Russian Studies in Philosophy

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A.F. Losev and the Philosophy of Resonance

IRINA BORISOVA

To cite this article: IRINA BORISOVA (2005) A.F. Losev and the Philosophy of Resonance,
Russian Studies in Philosophy, 44:1, 82-99, DOI: 10.1080/10611967.2005.11063507

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82 RUSSIAN STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY

Russian Studies in Philosophy, vol. 44, no. 1 (Summer 2005), pp. 82–99.
© 2005 M.E. Sharpe, Inc. All rights reserved.
1061–1967/2005 $9.50 + 0.00.

IRINA BORISOVA

A.F. Losev and the

Philosophy of Resonance

Losev in the mirror of mysticism

Losev’s place in the philosophy of resonance is determined in many respects by

the genesis of his views. From this perspective his conception of music proves to
succeed symbolism, romanticism, and other previous epochs with a mystical world
perception, including the Gnostics. The latter, strictly speaking, set the main direc-
tion [magistral’] (more precisely, the margin [marginal’]) in which all irrational
stylistic formations developed. In tracing this thread into the depths of centuries to
the Gnostics and the Romantics, whose world perception is connected with the
former, Losev described at the same time the sources of his understanding of mu-
sic. Strictly, his works are interesting mainly for their genesis: being the last Ro-
mantic (or mystic, which in essence is the same thing), Losev created a multivolume
monument to irrational styles, after absorbing and expressing many nuances of
mystical thought about music.
In Gnosticism, according to Losev, the world is nothing but the objectification
of the subjective experiences of Sofia itself. This world itself does not know either
its essence or its origin. Losev formulates the equation music-mysticism-romanti-
cism in which all unknowns are defined through each other. Gnosticism is able
only to seek eternally its truth and its beauty and without ever reaching either of
them. But this is precisely that which in modern and recent literature is called

English translation © 2005 M.E. Sharpe, Inc., from the original Russian text, “A.F.
Losev i filosofiia zvuchashchego.” Presented at an international conference on Aleksei
Fedorovich Losev, “A.F. Losev and Twentieth-Century Human Sciences,” Ohio State
University, Columbus, Ohio, October 18–20, 2002.
Irina Borisova is a candidate of culturological sciences and a lecturer in the
Department of Esthetics and Ethics at the Herzen State Pedagogical University in
St. Petersburg.
Translated by Taras Zakydalsky.

82
 SUMMER 2005 83

romanticism. This is a passionate withdrawal into infinity, which can never be

attained and which in the end is the achievement of the same subject who with-
draws into the unknown but vaguely perceived distance. In this sense Gnosticism
is, undoubtedly, an obscure prophecy of modern European romanticism (Losev
1992, p. 303. See also p. 288; emphasis added—I.B.).
And this is literally how Losev defines the musical world perception. In “Essay
on Music” [Ocherk o musyke], for example, he says: “The formless, passionate-
craving and sighing Quality of absolute music” (Losev 1995, p. 643). A possible
relationship: music, the musical as the interpreting authority both for mystical
doctrines and for romanticism. Compare Losev’s definition of romanticism, of
which the Gnostics had a “premonition”: “Romanticism is music that is restless-
passionate, endlessly trembling, eternally searching, and departing into the infi-
nite distance” (Losev 1992, p. 288).
It was, of course, precisely the Romantics who defined his understanding of
music as authentic mystical experience. This follows from his esthetic-philosophi-
cal works and is quite evident in the poetics of his literary works. The solution of
the philosophem of resonance within the framework of the triad myth–music–
word is the heritage that Losev received directly from them. This is connected with
the fact that romanticism first vividly and reflectively described the mysticism of
sound, which it received from the mystical and patristic traditions. The typical
mystical perception of the musical phenomenon (and recognized in this mystical
quality as specifically romantic) is presented in the anonymous article “On the
Newest Music” [O noveishei muzyke], published in 1820 in the Neva Spectator.
The reflections on the impact of music exclusively on feelings, not on reason, and
on the incomprehensibility of sensations, which are beyond the “mental world,”
culminate in a characteristic (and for me also a symptomatic, in Losev’s context)
identification of Romantic music as centripetal, that is, as aimed at the topos of the
Divine as the “main” unknown of that epoch: “In this relation, the nature of today’s
music is purely romantic, that is, it has no connection with that which exists, but
strives for the unknown, for that which is contained only in man’s presentiment”
(ibid., p. 97; emphasis added—I.B.).
To understand the idea of the musical world perception and the Romantics and
their followers, it is enough to grasp the meaning of “musical” and “resonance” in
the religious-mystical context. I shall show the reverse perspective of the mystical
in the prism of the Romantic in Losev’s works by examining several representative
topoi of that tradition.

The mystical tradition on sound and resonance

The sources of the attention to resonance and music that is characteristic of reli-
gious-mystical traditions belong to the most ancient layers of myth and go back to
the mythologem of sound or resonance. In contrast to the official religions of the
churches, mysticism is always explicitly mythopoeic, and it attempts to synthesize
84 RUSSIAN STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY

the new religious with the ancient mythical. It is no coincidence that some of Saint
Augustine’s reflections on music “expose him as a mystic” (K. Perl, cited by
Bychkov 1995, p. 569). The mythologem of sound and resonance gives birth to
two interrelated lines of further mythologization: the world, the universe as music
and resonance as the mystical substance of truth. Let me deal with the second.
In Boehme’s and Swedenborg’s mystical texts the mythopoeic tradition is clearly
outlined (see the known attention of Romantics to myth, which conditioned their
full reception of mystical texts). Besides the Pythagorean cosmic harmony, they
were obviously also influenced by mythopoeic cosmogonies, which identify cre-
ation with sound, resonance that proceeds from divine motion, vibrations (see also
the Vedanta concept of Nada-Brahma, the sound-God, who manifests the connec-
tion of resonance and the creating aspects of God). In this second topos of reso-
nance, it is possible to see the semantics of the musical as resonance (see the
concepts Klang, Shall, and Laut in Schelling’s Philosophy of Art [Filosofiia
iskusstva, pp. 221–3ff.]).
E. Swedenborg, without especially discussing the problem of art, cannot skirt
the problem of communication, mediation. In essence, this is the main and the
only theme of his writings—communication, contact with the other world, and
here the role of the phenomenon of resonance proves to be extraordinarily impor-
tant. Swedenborg, relying on his visionary experience, connects the truth of feel-
ing/thought precisely with the resonance of the voice: “The angels . . . in the sounds
and the voice of the speaker come to know all subtleties and trifles of his feelings
of love and thoughts, namely, in sounds they hear all his feelings, and in the voice,
his thoughts” (Svedenborg 1993a, p. 239). In resonance, knowledge or mystical
truth is translated. Here it is noted that the “sound” as such, in which feelings—
the emotional, subconscious sphere (so important for romanticism) are heard, is
distinct from the “voice,” which carries the intellectual, rational principle. The
sound contains true knowledge, ontological communication (James 1906, p. 421),
to which alone the religious person’s hearing must be attuned. John Chrysostom,
for example, writes about this: “Hearing is persistently and steadily directed
only toward one thing: it captures divine expressions and hears the full harmony
and spirituality of the chant whose power over the soul that surrenders to it is so
great that a man captivated by a melody will gladly forego food, drink, and
sleep” (Muzykal’naia estetika, p. 115).
As N. Losskii explains (from the same religious-mystical position), hearing, in
contrast to sight and touch, provides integral perception, and that whole com-
pletely overpowers the entire person. It represents the “deepest form of communi-
cation,” close to that which awaits us “in the highest realm of existence, in the
Kingdom of the Spirit” (Losskii 1917, p. 33). Therefore angels, according to
Swedenborg, do not need sight (“prophetic pupils”) in the process of knowledge:
they turn to “resonance.” In Explanation of the First Four Chapters of the Book of
Genesis, which is a part of Heavenly Mysteries [Arcana Coelestia], Swedenborg
also turns his attention to the symbolic meaning of voice, which he treats as an
 SUMMER 2005 85

internal sense, suggestion, and revelation (Svedenborg 1993b, p. 84). In this con-
text there arises a natural opposition between speech and writing, the spoken word
and its lettered inscription. Thus, L.C. de Saint-Martin, one of the most authorita-
tive teachers of the Romantics and, in particular, V.F. Odoevskii, understands “lis-
tening” as essential, living “explanation” without the words, and “writing” as “dead
depiction,” which can be correlated with the material, but not the spiritual (Sen-
Marten 1745, p. 466). The reverberating speech, of course, occupies a higher po-
sition, since the very sound of speech is already “living meaning,” the very substance
of meaning, while writing provides only the signs of this meaning. The mystics
saw truth in a “qualitative” unity of the sign and the signified.
We find one of the vivid conceptions of sound/resonance, which is representa-
tive of the tradition, in Jakob Boehme’s Aurora, which Russian Romantics val-
ued highly. Here there is still no projection of musical harmony on the universe,
a projection that is characteristic of rationalized consciousness. In his works,
Boehme correlated sound with the creation of the world, which he obtained from
different mythopoeic systems. Boehme described sound-mercury as the “sixth
spring spirit in the Divine power,” one of the seven spirits that unceasing give
birth to God the Father (Ekkhart 1998, p. 263). “And this sound is the Divine
kingdom of joy and rejoicing, in which Divine and gentle love play takes place in
God, hence the forms, formations, and all possible appearances” (ibid., p. 292).
Hence the correlation of sound with mercury, which in the given system of con-
cepts signifies the function of vital activity, growth-increase, and expansion in
the forms of nature, that which gives impulse and inertia (Gaskell 1930, p. 496).
Sound is described as movement taking place in God. Describing the process of
the birth of God by the seven spirits, Boehme points out that the birth is ac-
companied by resonance: “For when the spirits move in each other with their
light, revolve, rise, then unceasing life is born . . . ; and sound or ringing pen-
etrates through all seven spirits into the heart and rises in the heart in a lightning
of light, and then voices and the kingdom of joy of the Son of God appear; and all
seven spirits celebrate and rejoice in God’s heart, each according to its quality”
(Ekkhart 1998, p. 264). Divine creation (= the creation of God) is identified with
the movement that generates resonance. Sound, ringing, “sweet singing” are found
in opposition to the “hard knocking,” which is correlated with the topos of sin and
the image of Lucifer (in a series of oppositions such as dark–light, fire–pleasant
warmth) (ibid., p. 260). Let us focus attention on this series of oppositions.
Everything that is connected with the heavenly, the divine, is medial, it bears or
can bear information, it promotes intercourse, universal contact, communica-
tion. In mediality mysticism sees a method of “qualifying” the good and divine.
And here is a very big role for sound, which gives rejoicing to the heart of man
as if he were in heaven (ibid., pp. 292–93). The philosopher’s solution of the
problem of the relation of sound and word is clear. Boehme explicitly describes
sound as an aspect of the word, as a kind of substratum that facilitates the real-
ization of the word by transforming it (It, of course) into structures of existence.
86 RUSSIAN STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY

“The word is sound, which ascends in the lightning of fire in the world. . . . The
sound of the word of God must rise through painful, bitter death and give birth to
body in half-dead water” (ibid., p. 365).
The word is God, the Divine power, sound is the most divine work, creation
(as a process), the creative movement of the world (from chaos to harmony). In
sound the word is realized. Naturally, the problem of the utterance of the word
and the mystics’ attention to it arises here (see Boehme’s extensive reflections
on the symbolic meaning of all the elements of word “Sprach” articulation (ibid.,
pp. 322–23). There is also an expressive passage in Meister Eckhart, the great
teacher of the Romantics, which describes the appearance and manifestation of
the “inner word” in the “external,” in sound or utterance: “When any word is
perceived by my understanding, it is so incorporeal and pure at first that it is
truly the word until such time as I present it to itself and convert it into an image,
and only, third, is it pronounced through the mouth [sounds and assumes flesh—
I.B.] and then these are only the manifestation of the secret word” (cited in Toporov
1989, p. 232).
The divine resonating (= creating) Word of mystical theology is the source of
the Romantic opposition of poetry and music that rises to the invariant of expres-
sion-silence. Here music is correlated with silence and proves to be its sign. Let us
recall Meister Eckhart again: “Hence the prophet speaks: I want to sit and be silent
and listen to what God says in me. Because it is so secret, this Word came in the
night, in the mist” (cited in Toporov 1989, p. 232).1 The mystical image of the
word that resounds in the night silence, be it the silence of the Divine Night or
the Great Noon, is surrounded in the literature of romanticism with mysterious
resonance that reaches the hero in the deepest silence. This is one of the typical
examples of perception by the artistic consciousness of romanticism of the
mythopoeic, artistic nature of mystical works.2 The heritage of antiquity—the re-
verberating cosmic movement, the musical structure of the universe—is absorbed
by religious-mystical consciousness into the elemental force of the musical and
gives rise to the belief that imageless and wordless music can express the inex-
pressible and unutterable. “And Whom do the sounds of jubilation suit more than
unutterable God? For unutterable is He Whom you cannot express. But if you
cannot express Him and yet cannot keep silent, then what remains for you but your
jubilation, but your wordless gladness of the heart, when the immeasurable full-
ness of gladness overcomes the fetters of style?” (Variations on St. Augustine’s
Psalms, cited in Bychkov 1995, pp. 479–80).

Romantic topoi in A.F. Losev’s discourse

On this foundation, there appears the Romantic concept of the musical as one of
the manifestations of mystical feeling that determined very much in the subse-
quent tradition of the description of musical impressions. The most interesting
contribution was made, perhaps, by the German Romantics (see Makhov 1993).
 SUMMER 2005 87

However, their experience together with the direct absorption of the mystical tra-
dition through the primary sources was perceived and deeply thought through on
Russian soil, from the connection with which Losev, like Antaeus, derived much
of his strength. His esthetics is one of the links in this chain.

Dm. Struiskii, the author of numerous musical reviews and articles on music, who
also wrote under the pseudonym Trilunnyi, voicing his view of music, enthusiastic
as usually, accompanied it with the following comments: “Music is objectness,
limitless, it does not give birth to separate concepts, but stirs up the general from
which everything flows; consequently, by its immaterial form, it is closer to the
soul than all other arts. Because of its novelty, this thought will seem strange to
many people and insulting to worshippers of poetry” (Trilunnyi 1831, p. 290).
Music is described as a first principle, arche, and original source that has no
quality, image, or boundaries and creates everything, the whole world from itself.
The main word here is flows. Music is described consciously and consistently as a
divine principle, as a topos of God Himself. All the basic signs of divine “quality”
are transferred to music, which proves to be the push to creative movement. Losev
also understands the Logos at the beginning as resonating word. In the same con-
stants he gives a phenomenological description of music in Music as a Subject of
Logic [Muzyka kak predmet logiki]: “Music is all in some kind of time, it all
strives. There is no standing and solid music. It is a continuous elusiveness and at
the same time omnipresence. . . . Dynamism and instability, ceaseless change are
the fundamental characteristics of this continuous, restless unity–multiplicity”
(Losev 1995, p. 421). And here sympathetically appears also “unity–multiplicity,”
an almost exact quotation from the famous “Wisdom Tablet,” which contains the
Gnostic description of God through antinomies. Losev gives a more detailed
antinomian image of music in the “Essay on Music” [Ocherk o muzyke]:
The eternal Striving and Will, the eternal Fire and Darkness, Excitement and
Grief, chained in the Form and bound with its formative synthesism, in a real
musical work and an esthetical experience will oscillate eternally between the
indivisible poles of Enjoyment and Grief, Being and Consciousnesses, God and
the World, Personality and Abyss, Day and Night. Since any musical experience
is the one and eternal agonizing-sweet Antinomy . . . , which in real works of
music is given in its disclosure and inexhaustible variety, it is possible to distrib-
ute everything we know from the history of music between the two mentioned
poles. (Losev 1995b, p. 643)
Both the general conception of musical experience (the musical as the manifes-
tation of the divine) and the very language of description again refer us to the
Romantic revelations about music. The possibility of converting these antinomies
into one musical experience depends on specific properties of musical discourse
such as “fusion and interpenetrability” and “external parts” (here I refer to
88 RUSSIAN STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY

Odoevskii’s short story “The Ball” [Bal], which Losev did not only comment upon
but cited in full in his treatise. I shall say more on this below). And further on
Losev turns to mathematical and chemical analogies, the role of which in mysti-
cism is well-known (Losev 1995a, pp. 443–44).
The Romantics receive and describe music as the absolute, all-embodying au-
thority. Thus, for A. Serebrianskii music is “abundance,” “luxury,” “fullness,” “the
abyss of shadow and light in harmonious sounds,” and “the whole world with all
its changes, vicissitudes, and variety.” Preoccupied with the ontology of this phe-
nomenon, Serebrianskii, following Saint-Martin and other mystics, tries to ex-
plain it in terms of the mystical tradition by the concept of microcosm and concludes
this passage of his with a rhetorical maxim that the strings of genius “sound with
universal life” (Serebrianskii 1838, p. 7). Representing the entire world in its di-
vine quality and emanating the whole universe from itself, music for romanticism
was the subject of apophatic esthetics and remained in its divinity indescribable
and inaccessible to other arts. Odoevskii, the author of the famous Russian Nights
[Russkie nochi], discussing the connection of music with the “higher questions of
philosophy,” wrote that “you cannot express music in either painting or poetry; it
is indefinable, because it is an expression of the soul at the stage of its ultimate
depth” (Russkie esteticheskie traktaty, p. 183). This is to say that music is the soul
of the soul of the soul, and so on, “the essence of essence.” Connected with this is
the irrationality of its semantics (credo quia absurdum), the power of feeling aroused
by it, and the estrangement of music. In a note of 1866 on “Music and Life” [Muzyka
i zhizn’], Odoevskii formulated the same thought in an aphorism to the effect that
one can talk about music only in music (ibid., p. 483). Practically repeating
Odoevskii verbatim, Losev asserts that “to understand musically a musical work, I
do not need any physics, physiology, psychology, or metaphysics, but only music
itself and nothing more” (Losev 1995a, p. 483). Losev’s recognition of the self-
sufficiency and self-worth of music as a phenomenon, as we see, belongs fully
within the framework of Romantic esthetics and represents the Russian musical
meta-language.
Since music is identified with the divine creative power, it undoubtedly must
comprehend all the fullness of the world, the entire macrocosm. The whole world
begins to be understood as music. A. Serebrianskii expressed this idea with the
certainty of a neophyte: “Speechless colors, the product of the chisel, the ocean of
waters, the ocean of humanity, everything—from the stars in their courses to the
grass in the fields—is music, everything is the word it realizes; the soul understood
it and created for itself as a memento of its visage an incorporeal harmonious
sound” (Serebrianskii 1838, p. 9).
One of Losev’s main dogmas goes back to these Romantic topoi: “Music is a
being sui generis; it is as motionless-ideal, finished-formed, clear, and simple as
any simple axiom . . . it is amazing how esthetes do not want to notice the objectiv-
ity of music” (Losev 1995a, p. 483). Logos, being, and music have equal ontologi-
cal rights.
 SUMMER 2005 89

A characteristic property of music, according to romanticism, is its hermeticism,

closed nature, irredeemable mysteriousness, which goes back both to the mystical
traditions of antiquity and to the biblical tradition, which is rich in musical imag-
ery. “My mouth shall speak of wisdom; and the meditation of my heart shall be of
understanding. I will incline my ear to a parable: I will open my dark saying upon
the harp” (Psalms, 48: 4–5). Music is a self-sufficient, self-content phenomenon,
which does not yield to identification or to (adequate) description. Hence music is
comprehended as other; for example, in N.V. Gogol’s “St. Petersburg Notes of
1836” [Peterburgskie zapiski 1836 goda]: “In music its greatest part is inexpress-
ible and unaccountable. Musical passions are not everyday passions; music some-
times only expresses or, more exactly, imitates the voice of our passions so that, by
resting on them, it can rush in a splashing and singing fountain of other passions
to another sphere” (Gogol, vol. 8, p. 183).
The mysterious is concealed in art generally and in music especially. This, first,
is the mystery of creation (a symbolic repetition of the mystery of Creation). In his
Conversations on Music [Besedy o muzyke], Odoevskii remarks that the artist
must make the listener-spectator “a participant in the mystery of his creation, a
priest of his sanctuary, a complementary interpreter of the thoughts and feelings
that are not expressible in words” (Odoevskii 1956, p. 464). And second, this is the
mystery of the creator, “the hiding place of the human organism,” as Odoevskii said
in the note “Lagrua in the Role of Anna” [Lagrua v roli Anny]. Specifically, this
hiding place contains “materials, from which musical works are constructed,” “there
are many doors in this hiding place, and not every door opens for everyone, or each
door is opened by a different key, sometimes by a wrong one. A master key has not
been found yet (ibid., p. 242). The master key represents, of course, the ascent by
the mystical ladder and initiation into the sacraments of the inner language.
Mystery is immanent to authentic art. Thus, apropos Wotan’s game Odoevskii
remarks that there is “nothing inexplicable” in it that could excuse a violation of
the fundamental laws of art (ibid., p. 165). We find an explication of this under-
standing of music in A.D. Ulybyshev’s Notes [Zapiski]. The author of a study on
Mozart, which is still relevant today, writes that music is a kind of Freemasonry,
since it can draw people closer in several hours than in several years” (Ulybyshev
1935, p. 187). Comparing music with Freemasonry, Ulybyshev emphasizes its
externally closed nature, its mysteriousness and internal openness, and its spiri-
tuality, which is common for all people. But if there is no mystery, then there is no
authentic art. Romanticism realized this early on and this determined its prefer-
ence for “absolute,” instrumental music, whose mystery could not be attributed to
words. Sonate, que me veux-tu?
Anticipating his attempts at the artistic description of music, which is attained
in creating a myth, Losev formulates the concept of mystery as the “essence of
mystical imagery or myth” or music: “We frequently try to transmit the ‘content’
90 RUSSIAN STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY

of music . . . by symbolic images that point to some unspoken mystery that hides
under these images. This mystery is the subject of music. It is indivisible and
unrevealable, it is sensed agonizingly-sweetly by the heart and boils in the soul. It
is the eternal chaos of all things, their eternal essence. And, by saturating our
imagery, filling it with mystery, and making imagery symbolic and mystical, mu-
sic forces these images . . . to preserve in them the mystery of a certain mystical
fusion and interpenetration. Such is the essence of mystical imagery or myth”
(Losev 1995a, p. 446).
In the same treatise Music as a Subject of Logic, following his idea that music
can be described only by music or partly in artistic form, Losev creates an exalted
prose “poem,” glorifying religious ecstasy and conveying metaphorically musical
experience. “When I saw myself on the path of ascending to the fullness of centu-
ries and God’s Memory and was embraced already by the blissful delights of
eternity’s kisses, . . . then did I see the mystery of music and its conciliar action in
the world, perceive by pure passion the Universe moving toward restoration, and
comprehend the secret ways. What can I say in mortal language about the mystery
of the conciliar actions of music?” (Losev 1995a, p. 474).
The religious is connected naturally with the mysterious and the future.3 Ro-
mantic poetics receives a generous tribute, which includes all the topoi of the de-
scription of musical texts.

The musical sphere forms a nonempty intersection with the sphere of human
consciousness. However, the domain of the intersection is the sphere of mystical
experience that is inexpressible in words. For the Romantic everything that is
accessible to rational, discursive thought is irrelevant. The quantity of free vari-
ables is infinite. Music, being an element of the paradigm of the “inner” and
true, is, in the opinion of Romantics, a manifestation of pure being. But while
Losev expressed this thought in the scientific categories of logico-philosophical
discourse, Serebrianskii, with his cosmogonic enthusiasm, expressed it in char-
acteristically Romantic metaphors: “Here is the powerful, eternally free wind,
scattering the dust of the earth! It amazes us with its musical whirlwinds”
(Serebrianskii 1838, p. 14).
The music listener experiences catharsis, contact with the pure substance of
being that purges the soul of the rags of “the external man” and reveals it to itself.
The inexplicable charm of the musical cathartic suffering is a favorite topos of
Romantic and pre-Romantic esthetics (see, for example, L’vov, p. 6). There is a
characteristic passage in Gogol’s article “On Little Russian Songs” [O malo-
rossiiskikh pesniakh]: “From them, from these sounds [of the song—I.B.] one can
surmise . . . the past sufferings as precisely as one can a past storm with hail and
pouring rain from the diamond tears that cover from foot to top the refreshed trees
when the sun throws its evening rays; the rarefied air is pure, in the distance the
 SUMMER 2005 91

lowing herds jingle like bells; the bluish smoke—the herald of rural supper and
contentment—rises in bright rings into the sky; and evening, a quiet, clear evening
embraces the peaceful earth” (Gogol, vol. 8, p. 97).
Gogol introduces the motif of sacrifice. Music is compared to a purging thun-
derstorm, which conjoins two central mythologems of water (rain) and fire (light-
ning) as punishment and purification (see “the past sufferings”). The smoke, which
rises “in bright rings into the sky,” like the “evening rays” and the “quiet, clear
evening,” points to the restoration of the disrupted hierarchical structure of the
world and rises to the hovering sounds of W.H. Wackenroder in the air. In “Fanta-
sies on Art” [Fantazii ob iskusstve], we are reminded even more clearly of the
mythological correlates of many subjects of religious mysticism: “I sincerely de-
lighted how from a speechless void a beautiful string of sounds suddenly bursts
forth by itself, rises like sacrificial smoke, hangs in the air, and then again quietly
descends to the earth” (Vakenroder 1977, p. 160).
Another and more important pretext is the interpretation of music (singing) as
prayer-sacrifice to God, which goes back to the psalm-singing tradition and devel-
oped subsequently in the patristic tradition (see, for example, John Chrysostom).
In its context, the Romantic museopoetics was formed. The mystical conception
of music as prayers was accepted also by Saint-Martin and the corresponding place
in his book is marked off in Odoevskii’s copy (Sakulin, I, 1, p. 413). Apparently,
the definition of the first prayer as the first music in Struiskii is derived from here:
“[In man] there is an independent idea; he can express it with unconditional sound:
the first prayer was the first music” (Trilunnyi 1830, p. 193). Unconditional sound
is that very “fundamental tone” of the first creation, the sound (similar to the sound-
brahma in the Indian tradition) from which came all being. Musical experience
coincides with the religious-mystical experience of direct intercourse with God.
This is, perhaps, one of the most important topoi of the mystical tradition, which
none of the later authors who wrote on the esthetics of music bypassed. It is no
coincidence that images of causeless tears and impulses of courage and awe that
imitate the Romantic topos of the musical catharsis appear in Music as a Subject of
Logic: “This is the universal inner flowing fusion of all objects. That is why music is
capable of provoking tears—because of what object, we do not know; it is capable of
calling forth courage and manliness—for whom and for what, we do not know; it is
capable of inspiring awe—of whom, we do not know. Here everything is merged,
but it is merged into a kind of undifferentiated everyday essence. . . . It is possible to
experience but not to think these objects distinctly” (Losev 1995a, pp. 420–21).
Compare this also with his lyrical “poem” on music in which one of the leitmotifs
is the tears of suffering and enjoyment in musical experience: “It is necessary to
understand and to master this combination, mutual fusion, and indivisible unity of
suffering and enjoyment in music to the end. . . . One wants to cry after music. The
prophetic heart trembles and quivers” (Losev 1995, p. 475). According to Losev’s
interpretation, it is possible, perhaps, to place an equals sign between music and
prayer, especially in his artistic experiments. This is quite clear in the already cited
92 RUSSIAN STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY

lyrical fragment on music. But note also: “In the sad melody of Tchaikovsky’s
romances, in the moans of the sobbing soul of the ‘Moonlight’ sonata . . . is there
not simultaneously a refined enjoyment, a secret work of laudatory songs? But the
reverse is also true. In Schubert’s naive and dreamy song, in Rimsky-Korsakov’s
compositions of solar rejoicing is there not prayer, tears, pruritic suffering, ago-
nizing moans, and complaints?” (ibid., p. 475). This entire, one of a kind, “poem
of ecstasy” thematizes music as prayer, as an ecstatic appeal to the Divine: “Musi-
cal excitement—this inner, final interpenetration of gladness and grief, pleasure
and suffering, gaiety and sorrow. . . . The familial and intimate, the aching-close
and the familiar-dear appears. And with it also the great, enormous, Divine and
worldly. Choking with tears, one wants to pray, to fall in a frenzy, to kiss the Earth
and to embrace It” (ibid.). “When I immersed myself in the waves of Eternity and
floated in the ocean of Divine life; when I prayed in solitary and saw visions; when
the wreaths descended and the glory of martyrdom approached. . . . To live musi-
cally means to pray to everything” (ibid., p. 479).
Musical experience abounds in praying and cathartic images supported by a
serious intertext. From those lying at the surface and already mentioned, let me
point to only two explicit references: to Odoevskii and to the sermons of Meister
Eckhart. A number of images of music clearly refer back to Odoevskii’s “The
Ball”: “To feel musically means to laugh and to roar laughing (roaring laughter
and sobbing are the same: spasms), to laugh loudly over fresh graves, to dance
with exposed skeletons, to smile innocently and sweetly at the crash of crumbling
worlds, and to glorify universal conflagrations” (Losev 1995a, p. 475). “To live
musically and to feel means to transform Being into a resounding infinite instru-
ment of Eternity and to drown everything in it, except sound. To live musically
means to be in spasms, for music is the spasms of the world, which are affirmed as
the Eternal and the Divine” (ibid., p. 480).
Odoevskii’s short story “The Ball” from Russian Nights naturally drew Losev’s
attention because of the closeness of its poetics to his conceptions in the treatise
Music as a Subject of Logic, where a few pages before the cited fragment Losev
reprinted its full text. Music is realized as an “unspeakable mystery,” the “eternal
chaos of all things,” this is how Prince Odoevskii understood it. Therefore Losev’s
interest in the figure of Prince V.F. Odoevskii and his philosophy of music, which
is especially vividly presented in Russian Nights, one of the most interesting texts
of Russian romanticism, is quite understandable. Losev writes about “The Ball”:
“The whole picture of the ball, despite a multitude of diverse elements constituting
it, is something integral and whole. One image is internally related to another; one
penetrates another. Here is a merger of all external parts and images into one inte-
gral myth. And the essence from which this myth is made is music. Music forced
such images, which are related to each other because they are born from one mu-
sical womb, to exist” (Losev 1995a, p. 448).
It is obvious that Odoevskii’s themes and Losev’s commentary on them
are fully included in the “hypertext” of Losev’s worldview.
 SUMMER 2005 93

One of the final passages of Losev’s “poem” clearly refers to Eckhart’s ser-
mons, which do not abound in musical images but somehow insinuate them into
the world and God: “And yet one more, last gesture about You, my Bride, about
You, my Eternity, my divine flesh! What is music and its being from the point of
view of our categories of cause and purpose? What is the Being of pure music and
of the resounding waves of universal space, which is visible without image, au-
dible without ear, and shocking without touch?” (Losev 1995a, p. 480). One must
give credit to Losev’s hearing: he proved to be one of the most sensitive readers of
Eckhart. I shall cite a fragment of Meister Eckhart’s sermon “On the Anger of the
Soul” (in M. Sabashnikova’s translation) with an extensive quotation from the
“Song on Songs,” which in the tradition of Christian apophatics describes the Di-
vine, God, in Whom the soul resides: “The soul speaks like the bride in the ‘Song
of Songs’: ‘I have crossed all the mountain summits, I have overcome my own
feeble self, I have reached the power of the eternal Father: there, no sound is au-
dible; there, no light is visible; there, where no odor is detectable, I smelled; there,
where there was nothing, I tasted; there, where there was no resistance, I touched!
Then my heart became bottomless, my soul insensible, my spirit lost its image, and
my nature lost its essence.’ What it hears there is ‘without sound,’ for it is an inner
understanding and occurs in the primordial sense” (Ekkhart 1998, pp. 80–81).
This characteristic passage shows not only to what extent the religious-mysti-
cal discourse goes out to meet the Romantic philosophy of art, but also to what
extent Losev mastered and expressed the nuances of the richest tradition of mu-
sical esthetics. In both texts the discussion deals with the mysterious “nonsounding
resonance”: authentic music (= the sound of the divine word) is that which is
audible without sound, without the ear, that is, is accessible outside of human
corporality.

The mystical context and the role of the sea–the moist in romanticism has already
been examined in the literature.4 In particular, its relation to visions and poetry has
been pointed out. Furthermore, it has been shown that the Romantics were aware
of water as a medium.5 The question of the connection of the aqueous medium
with the unconscious, which emerges in this context, has also been repeatedly
examined from different points of view.6
The resonance’s property of mediumness in romanticism is confirmed by the
explicit correlation of the watery sphere and the sphere of the musical. The con-
nection of sound or music with water, moisture, and the sea, which is characteris-
tic of all mythopoeic systems and inherited by the mystical tradition, is natural and
logical in the system of romanticism: two topoi that have a similar composition of
the paradigm are correlated. Mediumness is one of the elements that unite these
two paradigms. This closeness appears most vividly in artistic works (see, for ex-
ample, Odoevskii’s “The Year 4338” [God 4338], and Ulybyshev’s “Dream” [Son]),
94 RUSSIAN STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY

but it is not difficult to find its manifestation also in the esthetics of romanticism.
Thus, D. Struiskii writes about the inclination of the soul for the colossal, so that
“mountains, waterfalls, and abysses no longer need beauty of form in order to
captivate man” (Trilunnyi 1833, p. 785). And Struiskii describes an imaginary
work that would be more enrapturing than Mozart’s compositions and represent
only a single scale, but one that “beginning with the highest sound, would go back
gradually to its beginning and from time to time below it, and finally would drone
like Ivan Bell in Moscow, and then, spreading wider and wider, would turn into the
rumble of the ocean” (ibid.).
What is valuable in this image of verbal of music is the manifestation of the
work as a paradigm of the sacral, which is characteristic of romanticism. Hence
the tendency toward the “naturalness” and “spontaneity” of genius and art, which
is typical of this period: natural creation is similar to divine creation, while con-
trivance and pretentiousness are attributes of the Inventor. The most marked “stage”
of the scale is named the “beginning” and the word “to go back” instead of “to go
down” is applied to it. This stage represents the rumble of the ocean. The scale is
seen under the metaphysical aspect as a paradigm of being, which unfolds from
the “ur-sound,” the resonating rumble of the ocean. The watery sphere is repre-
sented not only as a mechanism generating music/art but also as possessing the
immanent property of resonance.
As I assume, the Gogolian image of music as a “splashing and singing foun-
tain” (this image is also typical of Odoevskii’s artistic prose), Nadezhdin’s identi-
fication of music as the reverberation of the “river of time flowing past us” (Russkie
esteticheskie traktaty 1981, p. 461), F.P. L’vov’s assertion of the approach to and
fusion with the “source of the life” in singing (L’vov 1834, p. 6), all these images
and maxims come from the same complex of ideas.
The musical is understood as immanent to the watery; resonance is given the
attributes of the watery element: obviously, the symbol in which these two mutu-
ally complementary halves are conjoined is rooted in the depths of mythopoeic
consciousness, in the deep sphere of the unconscious. For this reason, the texts of
the most different traditions coincide on this topos. For example, the Rig-Veda
says: “three times seven cows yield speech-milk,” and the singer summons the
help of “three times seven flowing rivers.” The Judeo-Christian tradition produces
similar texts: “Give ear, O ye heavens, and I will speak; and hear, O earth, the
words of my mouth. My doctrine shall drop as the rain, my speech shall distill as
the dew, as the small rain upon the tender herb, and as the showers upon the grass.
Because I will publish the name of the Lord: ascribe ye greatness unto our God”
(Deuteronomy, 32:1–3). “The river of God, which is full of water” (Psalms, 64:10).
“The sea is beautiful, when the waves rise and break against the shore, or when
it waters the cliffs with snowy foam, or when the water’s smoothness is coated
with ripples under the breath of a gentle breeze, and in the serene peace the
purple distance spreads before the eye . . . when it does not fling stormy waves
against the shore but caresses it and greets it, as it were, in a friendly embrace: and
 SUMMER 2005 95

how sweet the sound, how pleasant the noise, how harmoniously the waves run!”
(Ambrose of Milan).
The complex of representations of the interpenetration of music, moisture, and
soul goes back to the mythopoeic idea of the universal fluid, alkahest, the liquid
world soul (Ovsianiko-Kulikovskii 1892, May; Vainshtein 1994), which had a spe-
cial, conceptual significance for the Romantics. Here lies the original cause of the
Romantics’ ability to think in metaphors (the ability to see the penetration of all in
all); here, in particular, is the original cause of their capacity to see music as the
universal medium. This was clearly asserted by F. Schlegel in one of his early
works: “in the fluid rhapsody it is possible to find a transition to whatever one
wants” (cited by Makhov 1993, p. 14). The basis of the association of music with
the fluid, liquid quality is its powerful and total impact and its irresistible penetra-
tion, as Odoevskii points out in his previously cited article: “the sounds that seem-
ingly reach you from some other, distant world concern all the sensations of the
soul and produce the lofty, refined enjoyment that leads the listener to rapture.”
In Serebrianskii’s “Thoughts on Music” [Mysli o muzyke] different, although
similar, mythologems of romanticism are intricately interwoven: “Speechless col-
ors, the product of the chisel, the ocean of waters, the ocean of humanity, every-
thing—from the stars in their courses to the grass in the fields—is music, everything
is word realized by it; the soul understood it and created for itself as a memento of
its visage an incorporeal harmonious sound” (Serebrianskii 1838, p. 9). The arts
are created by Logos-Word, but they are as if in chaos until the musical gives them
beingness and ensures them communication. Furthermore, music is understood
also as harmony in Pythagoras’s-Kepler’s sense; therefore it includes everything,
from the heavenly bodies to grass, but two oceans are particularly noted, the ocean
of waters and the ocean of humanity. Thus, everything, created by God-Logos
(including the act of creation itself, see the “product of the chisel”) obtains beingness
through the medium of music. And finally, music itself as medium and as harmony
is manifested as the memory of the soul (hence memory is associated with the
watery and the fluid, see Viazemskii’s poem “Funeral Repast” [Pominki]: “And
event after event / Flows memory’s current”).
The image of music as the language of the city-ocean receives an original de-
velopment in M.Iu. Lermontov’s early text “Panorama of Moscow” [Panorama
Moskvy]:
Like an ocean, it [Moscow—I.B.] has its own language, a sonorous, sacred, praying
language! . . . Hardly does the day break when from all its gold-cupolaed churches
rings the concordant hymn of bells like a strange, fantastic overture by Beethoven
in which the thick roar of the contrabass, the crackle of the kettledrums, and the
singing of the violin and flute create one great whole; and it seems that the bodyless
sounds assume visible form, that the spirits of heaven and hell twirl under the
clouds in one diverse, immeasurable, rapidly rotating round-dance! (Lermontov
1969, vol. 4, p. 114)
The bell ringing of all urban churches is similar to the rumble of the ocean: on
96 RUSSIAN STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY

the one hand, because of its overtones, and on the other, because of the many
sources of sound, which create the effect of spaciousness and stereophony. Hence
appears the image of the “visible form” of “bodyless sounds,” which are identified
with the “harmony of heaven and hell” and form the third, resonating ocean that
connects the two others, the watery and the celestial. A characteristic image of
communication as a “round-dance,” circling, rotation appears (cf. Prince
Odoevskii’s “The Ball” and Losev’s analysis of it).
For Losev music is the generative elemental force, a real intelligible chaos. No
wonder the image of music as a bosom, the image of a musical bosom often ap-
pears in him. It is characteristic that in reconstructing chaos as an image of ancient
mythologo-philosophical thinking, Losev describes it in the same terms as music,
as reverberating. It is a majestic, tragic image of cosmic primal unity in which all
being is melted, a universal principle of continuous and uninterrupted, infinite and
ceaseless becoming. See at least his article “Chaos” [Khaos] in the encyclopedia
Myths of the Peoples of the World [Mify narodov mira]:
The characteristics of chaos that are regularly repeated in the most varied tradi-
tions include the connection of chaos with the watery element, infinity in the
time and space, rareness approaching the void or, on the contrary, the confusion
of all elements (the amorphous state of matter, which excludes not only objectness,
but also the existence of elemental forces and the basic parameters of the world
in a separate form). . . . But probably the most important feature of chaos is its
role as the bosom in which the world is conceived, as the container of a certain
energy that leads to creation. (p. 581)
In Music as a Subject of Logic, the musical is directly linked with chaos:
Pure musical being is that ultimate formlessness and chaos. Absent here are not
only spatial formulation, the separation of one spatial object from another. Here
any other formulation is also absent. Here there are no ideal unities whatever,
which would resist chaotic and formless multiplicity. . . . From this point of view
the special merging of sounds that accompanies music deserves attention. The
sum of sounds in music is always immeasurably greater than are actually present in
that posited sum. Furthermore, music constantly moves and flows, changes . . . is
received as something whole and simple, as something at the same time fluid-
formless. (Losev 1995a, pp. 420–21)
This is expressed in artistic form in the cited artistic fragment: “music is the
greatest Chaos, or since, according to the general principle of musical synthetic
fusion and reunification, it is simultaneously the greatest Structure and Chaos, we
can say that it is a Chaocosmos, which is eternally striving, agonizingly self-
enjoying, and self-forgetfully submerged in the game. For what is the union of
Torment, Gladness, Being, Consciousness, and Eternal Striving—beyond the lim-
its of the logically designed world—if not Chaos and not Chaocosmos? What is
musical passion, if not Chaos, which spins and curls and reunites personality with
the Primordial-One and destroys any personal formation?” (Losev 1995a, p. 478).
Further on Losev describes the many-sidedness of Chaos and its representation
 SUMMER 2005 97

in various musical works (in Skriabin, Wagner, Rimsky-Korsakov, and others).

Here Losev develops mythopoeic ideas about sound, relying nevertheless on
the Romantics, not on mythopoeic texts themselves. It was the Romantics who
realized this conception both in their esthetic and their artistic texts. The musi-
cal in romanticism (as in some other mystical discourses) is immanently present
in the watery and the fluid. The qualities of the watery element are attributed
to resonance, to music, and often music is compared directly with chaos. Music-
chaos precedes being.

Reprise

Thus, in the mystico-religious context of romanticism, music is not subject to

other arts and is self-sufficient; hence any kind of concrete interpretations are
irrelevant and even impossible for the phenomenon of resonance (therefore sound
recording and depiction in music are not acceptable). In Odoevskii’s opinion, music
cannot and should not express anything concrete, defined, just as paint cannot and
should not be used in sculpture (Odoevskii 1956, p. 467). Music should not at-
tempt to express that which it cannot express. In this connection Haydn’s (and
later Cui’s) work was the Romantics’ favorite example at which they directed their
irony. Music must express that which the “spiritual organism” needs (ibid.) and
“that which is represented in the form of the very real sensations but which the
chisel, brush, and word are powerless to express” (ibid.). The chisel, brush, and
word present to their spectator and reader concrete images, and the referent of
their works is more or less definite. Not so music, but it is precisely its “uncom-
mon expression” that is so valued by Romantics. The musical can be the expres-
sion of abstract and indefinite but invariably lofty categories—spirit, soul, religious
idea, future salvation, being—that which we can only think or feel.
Actually, Losev’s concept of music-chaos (like many other components of his
musical esthetics) is a continuation and development of the Romantic philosophy
of resonance. What is symptomatic here is that Losev continues the Romantic
discourse on music not only in scientific genres, but also in artistic ones. The
constants of Romantic discourse on music are only too frequent in Losev’s prose
(the significance of which should not be exaggerated, but they are interesting and
important for correlating his esthetico-philosophical views). Let me turn once more
to the same narrative, an extensive quotation from which will provide a summing up:

The Being of music is eternal Striving. It is all in its own, nonsolar Time. This
time is completely nonuniform, in contrast to scientific and logical time. It is
compressible and expandable, it is not form, but Being itself, its eternal Mutabil-
ity and Fluidity. It is eternal Striving. Not motion merely, but precisely Striving.
Music does not know fatigue. In it are the sighs and the moans of him who is
sentenced to be executed. In it are the rejoicing spaces of Noon. In it is the loving
whisper of the mother above the cradle of the peacefully sleeping infant. Both
sun and night. In it are the prayers for a bright death, the curse of a stormy and
98 RUSSIAN STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY

criminal life, the tender skies of one’s native land, and the holy places of one’s
first days. And the Fire, teasing, caressing, sly and elusive, holy in all religions
and purifying, raised by lamps to the sky and descending in thunderstorms and
storms; and the tender, transparent, bright, eternally moving element of Water,
which suddenly loses its transparent tenderness and sleepy smoothness and erupts
in waves and waterfalls, rains and downpours, the symbol of the inexhaustible,
eternally moving, and eternally rustling eternity; and the loving, tender Air, ap-
peasing the soul with an intimate touch and tearing out century-old trees with the
roots; the Sky and the Sea and the Underground Darkness are in music, in the
elemental force of its being, in the frenzies of the musician and his listeners, the
servants of the Eternal. (Losev 1995a, p. 477)
This culminating passage of the “poem” is an encyclopedia of Romantic topoi,
which the Romantic tradition used more or less successfully to describe music and
as the musical meta-language of its age. In Losev’s philosophical-esthetic and
artistic works, the field of musical esthetics rises above romanticism in a memo-
rable monument and a sign of the fact that worthy doctrines of music are born only
in the meanders of great irrational styles, on their fertile soil.

Notes

1. Long before L. Wittgenstein, Meister Eckhart in his Sayings vividly described the
religious topoi of silence on the Divine because of its unutterability: “I say that God is
unutterable. It seemed to one of the oldest teachers who discovered the truth long before
God’s birth, before the Christian faith became what it is today, that everything he might say
about things will contain something alien and false. For that reason he wanted to remain
silent. . . . And if he could not speak even of things, then we should observe complete
silence about Him Who is the first cause of all things. We say God-Spirit. But it is not so: if
God were Spirit then He would be utterable.” St. Gregory says, “In essence, we cannot
speak about God. That which we say about Him we must babble” (Ekkhart 1998, p. 129).
Let me note that the expression–silence antinomy is after all closer to the Eastern than
the Western church, which after Thomas Aquinas tended to accept the possibility of ex-
pressing and describing the divine truth. We may take this to have been the real reason for
Meister Eckhart’s excommunication. In his texts, N. Losskii quite rightly saw a possibility
for the reconciliation and polemics of the Eastern and Western churches.
2. On the possibility of such an approach to the study of the mystics, see V.N. Toporov’s
article on Meister Eckhart (Toporov 1989). Let me note that Boehme’s or Swedenborg’s
works are also saturated with mythopoeic constructs and images.
3. On the poetics of mystery, see Smirnov 1996.
4. See, for example, Goncharov 1996, pp. 276–77, 286; Iampol’skii 1993, pp. 162–67;
and Evzlin 1993, pp. 56–66.
5. Iampol’skii 1993, pp. 162–67, 423.
6. See, for example, Jung 1991, p. 108ff; Toporov 1995, pp. 575–622; and Toporov 1989.

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