Music, Word, Image: Creative Explorations at the Border of the Arts (Pavlo Tychyna and Mikalojus Čiurlionis)

This article examines the artistic trajectories of Pavlo Tychyna and Mikalojus Čiurlionis at the intersection of music, language, and visual art, exploring how they blended different genres and media in their work. It also considers how their creative experiences reflected new artistic horizons in the early twentieth century. Through an analysis of their visions, the author compares “figures of consonance”—fundamental units that reveal the deep harmony among various artistic media in modernist art and its affinity for synesthetic impulses. The study supports the assertion that the biographies and works of Čiurlionis and Tychyna exemplify the realization of this impulse. Although rooted in national cultures shaped during the Romantic era, both artists envisioned the future, responding to the urgent challenges of the twentieth century. At a time when a rational, positivist worldview was on the brink of collapse, they reinterpreted the primordial Dionysian flow of existence in musical terms. Through the Apollonian mediation of image and form—whether in poetry or painting—they connected this artistic vision with the eternal process of individuation, the emergence of the human voice from the grand symphony of the universe.