This book turns to history to show just how significant movement and the sense of movement were to pioneers of modernism at the turn of the 20th century. It makes this history vivid through a picture of movement in the lives of an extraordinary generation of Russian artists, writers, theatre people and dancers bridging the last years of the tsars and the Revolution. Readers will gain a new perspective on the relation between art and life in the period 1890-1920 in great innovators like the poets Mayakovsky and Andrei Bely, the theatre director Meyerhold, the dancer Isadora Duncan and the young men and women in Russia inspired by her lead, and esoteric figures like Gurdjieff.

Movement, and the turn to the body as a source of natural knowledge, was at the centre of idealistic creativity and hopes for a new age, for a 'new man', and this was true both for those who looked forward to the technology of the future and those who looked back to the harmony of Ancient Greece. The book weaves history and analysis into a colourful, thoughtful affirmation of movement in the expressive life.

Review
"What makes The Sixth Sense of the Avant-Garde an invaluable scholarly contribution is the persuasive and ambitious argument that the authors, Irina Sirotkina and Roger Smith, present in the book – an argument that extends well beyond literary and artistic studies of modernist practices. Specifically, they seek to reassess longstanding notions on the senses of perception … [The book] provides an interesting perspective on avant-garde art, offering a wide-ranging overview of the ideas that preoccupied intellectuals at that time. As such, it can be of interest to scholars of various backgrounds. Furthermore, while the authors try to redefine and even dismantle some of the stable categories and bring attention to a concept of the ‘knowing body,’ they also keep the content lively and engaging for their readers throughout the entire work." - Slavic and East European Journal

About the Author
Irina Sirotkina is a lecturer at the Institute for the Theory and History of the Humanities, The Research University – Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russian Federation. She is a cultural historian who has published on the history of psychiatry and on the history of free dance.
Roger Smith is Emeritus Reader in the History of Science, Lancaster University, UK and Associate Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russian Federation. He is an internationally well known historian and philosopher of psychology and the human sciences, the author of standard texts in the field as well as specialist studies relating to the history of mind and brain and the understanding of 'being human', including Inhibition: History and Meaning in the Sciences of Mind and Brain (1992), and The Norton History of the Human Sciences (1997).