Article révisé par les pairs
| Résumé : | The essay offers an expansive and multi-stratified investigation into the role of esoteric traditionswithin the development of Russian modernity, reframing occultism not as an eccentricdeviation but as a foundational epistemological regime integral to Russia’s aesthetic, philosophical,and political evolution. By analyzing the arc from Petrine-era alchemical statecraftto the techno-theurgical aspirations of Russian Cosmism and the esoteric visual regimesof the avant-garde, this essay discloses the deep ontological entanglement between sacralknowledge and modernist radical experimentation. The work foregrounds figures suchas Jacob Bruce,Wassily Kandinsky, and Kazimir Malevich, situating them within broadertransnational currents of Hermeticism, Theosophy, and Rosicrucianism, while interrogatingthe role of occult infrastructures in both late-imperial and Soviet paradigms. Drawing onrecent theoretical frameworks in the global history of esotericism and modernist studies,the long-read article elucidates the metaphysical substrata animating Russian Symbolism,Abstraction, Malevich’s non-Euclidian Suprematism and Moscow Conceptualism. Thisstudy contends that esotericism in Russia—far from marginal—served as a generativematrix for radical aesthetic innovation and ideological reconfiguration. It proposes a reconceptualizationof Russian cultural history as a palimpsest of submerged sacral structures,where utopia and apocalypse, magic and technology, converge in a distinctively Russiancosmopoietic horizon. Ultimately, this essay reframes Russian and European occultism asan alternate technology of cognition and a performative semiotic universe shaping not onlyartistic modernism but also the very grammar of Russian historical imagination. |
