The word “karpalistika” was coined by Vladimir Nabokov in the novel “Pnin”, designating this neologism (from the Latin carpe – hand) a gesture in the cinema.
The word “karpalistika” was coined by Vladimir Nabokov in the novel “Pnin”, designating this neologism (from the Latin carpe – hand) a gesture in the cinema. Yuri Tsivyan, one of the most profound researchers of early Russian cinema, breathed life into Nabokov’s fiction. He declared Carpalistics a scientific discipline about “movement and gesture in art” and dedicated this book to it. Based on Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin and Ivan the Terrible, Charlie Chaplin’s films, Stern’s prose, Mayakovsky’s, Kuzmin’s, Khlebnikov’s poems, and Rodchenko’s photographs, Yuri Tsivyan analyzes the role of physical and verbal movement in the overall design. The researcher recalls: gesture is the fundamental principle of art. And he quotes a theatrical review by the future psychologist Vygotsky: “The stage gesture does not follow the word, but precedes it, like lightning and thunder … gives the text meaning, psychological and spiritual.” This meaning is revealed by Tsivyan, gazing intently at the sharp turn of Ivan the Terrible’s head, raising Chaplin’s bowler hat, the stroke of Tristram Shandy’s cane, and with difficulty refraining from tying the end of his book with a bow in imitation of Stern.
New Literary Review, 336 p.