The subject of the project is a transdisciplinary discourse on the emotional dimensions of the effects of art in the early Soviet Union. The aim is to shatter a historically established dogma that denies the emotive aspects of the work and influence of theoretical and artistic avant gardes.

The focus of the investigation will be on an institution that has so far been seriously neglected by scholars although it was in its day an interface between “psychophysiology” and aesthetic theory, namely the GAKhN (“State Academy of Artistic Sciences”), which from 1923 to 1929 was a meeting place for avant garde artists, philosophers of the Russian phenomenological school, as well as psychologists and neurologists engaged in the experimental exploration of responses to art and such things as the affective effects of perceptions of color, form and pace. Another focus will be on the functionalization of neurophysiological reflexological concepts for producing artistic affects. The particular significance of the emotive effects in combining the experimental-psychology and poetological approaches is to be described on the basis of the example of declamation research.