This thesis considers in tandem the verbal and visual production of the Russian modernist poet and artist Maximilian Voloshin (1877-1932), whose work, I argue, was polarized between the spiritual and the material realms. This tension between spirit and matter is manifested in his poetry, prose, and visual works, as well as in his life-creation practices (zhiznetvorchestvo). I contend that Voloshin understood his creative task as being to display the true essence of things by purifying ideas or symbols of their material “layers”, thereby recognizing the otherworldly in physical objects. One of Voloshin’s most crucial concepts is the “Apollonian dream”. He understood this as a source of the transcendental that coexists alongside the tangibility and concreteness of his poems and landscapes and his emphasis on form. This spirit-matter dyad is reflective of the profoundly eclectic nature of Voloshin’s creative corpus which emerged at the intersection of Naturalism, Symbolism, and Acmeism
