科研之友
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摘要
This paper examines the role of music in L. Ulitskaya’s novels. It is clear from Ulitskaya’s statements that music has played an extremely important role in her life, which is reflected in her oeuvre: music as a theme and an aspect of the heroes’ lives is a fundamental factor in many of her works. This paper tries to explore the poetic function of music in these works. Based on the analysis of The Funeral Party, The Kukotsky Enigma, The Big Green Tent, and Yakov’s Ladder, three basic aspects of this function can be distinguished: the creation of a referential background, the creation of a specific musical discourse, and the structuring of the different levels of the text. The creation of the referential background is linked to the shaping of the world of the heroes: the activities of some heroes take place in real places (music schools, concert halls, etc.) specific to a given historical period and linked to specific works by specific composers. Musicians who have played an important role in Russian culture served as prototypes for several of these heroes. Ulitskaya’s musician heroes relate to music in a variety of ways: as a recipient, as a creator, or as a theoretician, and they all recognize music as a principle of life. The formulation of feelings and ideas about music, taken as a whole, creates a well-defined musical discourse in the works, which interacts with other discourses (e.g. scientific, religious, etc.) related to non-musician heroes. The creation of a referential background in itself is not, and the musical discourse is only partly an intermediary phenomenon. The interaction between music and literature as two artistic disciplines is most evident in the use of musical structures. The paper presents two examples where the macro- and micro-structures of texts are organized by the principle of the musical rondo. In The Funeral Party, the alternation of the present of the protagonist’s dying and of past episodes related to minor characters constitute the musical rondo form, while in an episode of The Big Green Tent, the rondo form is drawn from the alternation of different forms of utterance (the narrator’s voice / the hero’s inner voice / the interweaving of the narrator’s voice and the hero’s voice). All in all, Ulitskaya’s works make extremely varied use of the literary representation of music. The musical world created in them, which is specific to a limited part of the plot, is presented in conjunction with other segments of culture and their modes of representation, resulting in a very rich, syncretic poetics of the novels.
