Songs of the Soul: the Novel Humiliated and Insulted by F. M. Dostoevsky in the Language of the Musical Vladimirskaya Square

The article deals with the problem of recoding a literary work from a verbal system to a musical one that causes transformation both at the libretto and score levels. The subject of the study is the “translation” of the novel “Humiliated and Insulted” by F. M. Dostoevsky into the “language” of the musical “Vladimirskaya Square”, in which the writer has two co-authors: librettist Verbin and composer Zhurbin. The author compares the novel text with the libretto, as well as their semantics with the meanings introduced by melodic constructions, and searches out examples of verbal and music codes’ convergence, using corpus, textual, intertextual and semiotic analysis methods and data from Russian National Corpus related to Dostoevsky's use of the lexemes of the semantic clusters “Music” and “Singing”. The study analysed the ideological field of the novel and the musical, the plot, the system and the images of the characters and the narrator. The musical parts of the characters are seen as the as “songs” of their souls in comparison with the key episodes of the original source, and the leitmelodies, which form, based on the verbal characteristics of the characters, their images in the musical code. The author draws a conclusion that it was possible and appropriate to transcode Dostoevsky's melodrama into the melodic system of the musical.

Keywords

Dostoevsky, novel, melodrama, musical, music and verbal codes' convergence

Received

28.12.2021

Publication date

28.12.2021

Number of characters

26220

Cite

GOST	Akulov A. “Songs of the Soul”: the Novel “Humiliated and Insulted” by F. M. Dostoevsky in the Language of the Musical “Vladimirskaya Square” // Russkaya Rech’ – 2021. – Issue 6 C. 112-127 [Electronic resource]. URL: http://ras.jes.su/rusrech/s013161170017983-0-1-en (circulation date: 02.05.2024). DOI: 10.31857/S013161170017983-0
MLA	Akulov, Andrej A "“Songs of the Soul”: the Novel “Humiliated and Insulted” by F. M. Dostoevsky in the Language of the Musical “Vladimirskaya Square”." Russkaya Rech’ 6 (2021):112-127. DOI: 10.31857/S013161170017983-0
APA	Akulov A. (2021). “Songs of the Soul”: the Novel “Humiliated and Insulted” by F. M. Dostoevsky in the Language of the Musical “Vladimirskaya Square”. Russkaya Rech’ (6), pp.112-127 DOI: 10.31857/S013161170017983-0

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