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Abstract: This article explores the role of sound in the artistic world of Elena Guro, one of the key figures of Russian modernism and early futurism. In literary studies, her work has traditionally been examined primarily from a visual perspective, while the sonic dimension has remained on the periphery of scholarly attention. However, Guro possessed a broad musical sensibility, and sound in her works functions not as a passive background but as an active agent of meaning-making. The study adopts an inter-media approach to trace how Guro develops a unique sonic aesthetic, manifested in the musicality of textual structure, the creation of multilayered acoustic landscapes and a subtle engagement with the boundaries between the “expressed” and the “unexpressed”. Her musical imagination encompasses both classical and contemporary art. Influenced by Symbolist poetics and modernist musical concepts, her texts are saturated with musical imagery and resonate with the structural principles of symphonic thinking. Guro masterfully reconstructs soundscapes of the city and nature, blending auditory, visual, and olfactory impressions into a synesthetic artistic experience. Urban acoustics in her work convey alienation and the pressure of a mechanized environment, while nature embodies harmony with the cosmos. Sound becomes a mediator between tradition and modernity, the natural and the urban, forming the basis of an organic synthesis of these opposites. The article pays special attention to Guro’s reflection on the relationship between sound and power, particularly in her focus on those deprived of voice – marginalized groups, animals, plants, and inanimate objects. In her poetics, silence acquires a voice, and quietness takes on a comforting and penetrating force. For Guro, synesthesia and the personification of sound express not only an intuitive perception of the universe as an inspired whole, but also a feminine, almost maternal care for the world. It is in this sound that her unique “feminine string” manifests itself.

About the author(s) :

Wang Siqi

Shanghai International Studies University (Shanghai, People’s Republic of China)

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0009-0006-9832-7889

Publication Timeline:

Date of receipt: 09.06.2025; date of publication: 31.10.2025

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