Demon Ex Machina: Maximilian Voloshin and the Anxiety of Technology

• In Event: Humanity’s Liberation or Decline?: Representations of Technology in East/Central European Cultures in the Early 20th Century

Abstract

Maximilian Voloshin (1877-1932), a poet, artist, critic, and translator primarily associated with fin de siècle, acquired his Kodak camera in 1905 in Paris and experimented with various modes of photography. His quick impressionistic snapshots of city life serve as his ego document, his self-portraits – as a means of introspection in conversation with his poetry, and his carefully staged portraits of Margarita Sabashnikova (1882-1973) and other models as a new full-fledged medium competing with painting. For Voloshin, the compositional precision, the fashioning of the models, and exquisite interiors go hand-in-hand with technical imperfections. Despite the abundance of photo material in Voloshin’s archive, in his 1909 essay “Stereoscope,” he expresses his anxiety about photography's mechanistic nature, which to him was "deeply hostile" to the essence of human life. This paper explores Voloshin’s technological skepticism expressed in his essays alongside his personal diaries and poetry that echo his visual experiments. I envision his work as symptomatic of a crisis of the modernist hierarchy of arts that also suggests a transition to the avant-garde visual culture.

Author

• Elena Leonenko, UC Berkeley