This evening presentation will present new research on the life and work of Eugen Gabritschevsky. Join scholars Anne Sauvagnargues, Kurt Johnson, and Valérie Rousseau as they discuss Gabritschevksy’s relationship to entomology, surrealism, the natural world, and other topics.

Kurt Johnson, “Parallel and Convergent Landscapes: The Existential Abyss, Entomological Metaphor, and the Dialectic of Science and Art in Gabritschevsky and Nabokov”

These two Russian emigres, both known for their science and art, starkly contrast in the ways they ultimately lived life (though the “divide” may be far less than it seems). This presentation will explore how each appears to have navigated the existential challenge of “being”—the multiple forms it took in their science and art, the entomological themes inevitably at play—but how they ended up, apparently, on two sides of a “consciousness divide” (one “happy,” one “bereft”).  Further, what do we know today in science that might help heal this historic divide between “factual realism” and “metaphorical/metaphysical realism,” and their play in our lives?
http://folkartmuseum.org/programs/perspectives-on-eugen-gabritschevsky/?ID=14541