No self-respecting modernist phenomenon is complete without a manifesto. The Russian futurists bound theirs in buckram, Filippo Marinetti splashed his in Italian and French newspapers, while Oscar Wilde made a treatise on aestheticism the prologue to a novel. In her wide-ranging and ambitious study of the synaesthetic metaphor, Polina Dimova opens with “Twenty Theses on Synaesthesia.” They range from categorizing syneasthesia as a “neurophysiological phenomenon” (#2) to “mystical perception” (#7) to “primordial human perception” (#12) to “a methodology for the comparative study of literature and the arts” (#20) (1). The final assertion is the one that most consistently informs this book, but the other nineteen are regularly present in Dimova’s presentations of the range of synaeasthetic aspects of modernist art, literature, and music. They typically pop into the text as parentheticals that remind the reader of the disparate nature of synaesthesia and its capacity to function as a broad category that encompasses much of modernism. As a methodology, it offers fertile ground for a scholar with Dimova’s breadth of expertise to engage with the myriad people, places, and things that constituted modernity.

The opening chapters of At the Crossroads of the Senses lay the foundation for Dimova’s assertion that synaesthesia and its corollary devices are at the center of the arts from the mid-nineteenth century well into the twentieth. She charts the parallel evolution of scientific and aesthetic discourses, finding resonances between “embodied cognition, aesthetics, technology, and science” (18) and in so doing claims a unifying role for synaesthesia as a phenomenon that “helps us resist the fragmentation of experience, knowledge, and modernity itself” (15). The anchors to Dimova’s definitional work are Richard Wagner and Charles Baudelaire, standard bearers for modernist interart practices whose works and theories align themselves with medical and psychological notions of synaesthesia. Dimova establishes this natural affiliation with a thorough overview of theories of synaesthesia that parallel the development of modern neurological understandings and show the relevance of synaesthesia for modernity as it came to fruition at the fin de siècle.

Dimova demonstrates the various manifestations of synaesthesia and syneasthetic devices in the fin de siècle with two prominent examples. She traces the “interartistic transformations” (73) of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé with emphasis on the visual (Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations) and musical (Richard Strauss’s opera): the extensive online digital companion to the book offers numerous additional images of artworks discussed and allows the reader to listen to the musical examples. Dimova roots the mobility and unity of this work in Wilde’s combination of vision, voice, and dance. An equivalent synthesis of the arts can be found in Aleksandr Scriabin’s symphony Prometheus. Dimova’s extended analysis of this work pulls together discourses of mysticism (associated with symbolism), technology (associated with advances in electricity), and music. These two chapters demonstrate Dimova’s interest in the holistic nature of synaesthetic tendencies.

The book’s central chapters on Vassilii Kandinskii, Frantisek Kupka, and Andrei Bely are its strongest and most compelling examples of the methodological virtues of synaesthesia for the study of the arts. By bringing together synaesthesia and the embodied, cognitive experience of modernist art and literature, Dimova shows the power of abstraction to expand the boundaries of reality while she also models a scholarly approach that utilizes synaesthetic techniques to recapture the resonances and cohesive dissonances that define modernism. Kandinskii, Kupka, and Andrei Belyi all use multi-media, interart forms that convey the multisensory creative potential of syneasthetic art. By offering close analyses of the symbolic nature of the colors, sounds, and material qualities of these works, Dimova affirms the centrality of transformative practices in modernism and taps into synaesthesia’s potential to harness art, science, psychology, and mysticism in structuring the encounter between this world and the other. This meditation on fragmentariness and wholeness propels the book into its final chapters, which focus primarily on Rainer Maria Rilke. The more external types of recovery that motivated the previous chapters becomes internalized in Rilke’s subtle multi-sensory poetic combinations of plastic arts, myth, and memory.

The book’s capaciousness and ability to construct coherent analysis of such varied works is a testament to the author’s erudition and the applicability of her notion of synaesthesia. That breadth is evident in how widely the term “synaesthetic” is employed in the text, as a modifier for a host of disparate terms: art, translation, metaphor, anticipation, color, image, correspondences, work, experimentation, technology, leap, analysis, and life. It emerges as a sweeping concept that is so ubiquitous and saturated in meaning that it verges on the cusp of meaninglessness. At the Crossroads of the Senses at time straddles that line but ultimately lands on the side of meaningfulness, thus making this an informative and relevant work for all of those interested in the many faceted gem that is modernism.