2016 # 3 (17)
Bogdanova O.A.
On the Origin of a Literary Concept “Polyphony”
Abstract
The article asserts that the musical term “polyphony” was for the first time introduced into literary discourse in connection with the analysis of novel by F.M. Dostoyevsky not by M.M. Bakhtin in “Problems of Dostoevsky’s Art” (1929) but by V.L. Komarovich in the article “Dostoevsky’s Novel A Teenager as an Artistic Unity” (1924). The common sources of their discovery are traced, on the one hand, in the work of the Russian symbolist poet and philosopher V.I. Ivanov, and the Danish esthetician B. Christiansen – on the other. If Ivanov’s role as a forerunner of Bakhtin’s views was observed by researches long ago, but the role of the philosophical bestseller by Christiansen “Philosophy of Art” (Russian translation: 1911) in the development of the concept of literary “polyphony” was for the first time raised in this article. Also the differences in the semantic content of a new term were marked here by both researchers of Dostoevsky. Komarovich perceived “polyphony” of the work in the context of “teleology” marked by Christiansen and linked it with “superempirical” unity of art structure. Bakhtin fundamentally opposed the character’s “voices” to the author’s generalized will and referred to the incompatibility of the both.
Key words
polyphony, polyphonic novel, F.M. Dostoevsky, M.M. Bakhtin, V.L. Komarovich, V.I. Ivanov, B. Christiansen, “teleology”, the dominant, the author