THE CONFLICT OF MUSIC AND WORDS IN THE KREUTZER SONATA

In this work the issues of love and jealousy, raised in Leo Tolstoy’s short story The Kreutzer Sonata, get their development through the light of the ratio of “tone” and “defeat”. The poetic text analysis, together with the interpretation of the semantic content, is carried out through the prism of parsing the motive and sonic structure, the meaning of the names, things and actions. On the basis of the double of the main character and his opponent, exploring the story expands to the peculiarities of the ratio of music and words.

On the one hand, Pozdnyshev’s monologue consists of two parts: the theoretical justifi cation of the reasons leading to the act of murder (schemes), and the hero’s family story as the duplication of real public life on the basis of common signs (story). On the other hand, the story consists of two languages’ confl ict: the hero’s story of the search for the correct word and the tale — fi nding this word, which replaces the template stories, and forms a new story. So the event is complemented by the retold story, and the syuzhet is complemented by the story of narration. The creation of the story language serves to it, because the process of creating narrative about jealousy is associated with the change of sign systems. According to our analysis, jealousy controls the hero’s consciousness that requires love, so as to be protected from the separation with his wife. The hero is in fear that after the collapse of their verbal communication, his wife fi nds common ground with another man through music. Thus the subject of our analysis is the motive of tone (music) and defeating (by words or swords) that deploy this theme. This is thematised through sound redemption not only in the narrative, but also formally: the narrative demonstrates what it says. In addition, the sonic connection sets a new implementation of the hero’s image. For this reason, in this paper the images of rivals and wife are examined in linguopoetic terms. In the prose the sound contains the fugitive narrative in general. It contains sound or the sound deployment has the interpretation of the theme. Audio replays (see tone and note, defeat and feud, etc.) reorganise the narration. Parallels of sonic shells suggest that the semantic world of sound is richer, and therefore the history of the act contains many more meanings than its conceptual telling. That is the way of how poetic thinking can reveal what seemed to be hidden in the external world. Attempts to restore the history of the murder from hero’s memory, require both deviations from the conceptual schemes and the unity of image, meaning and sound (see names). Tolstoy’s text unites the sign and the meaning through the hero’s story. Rethinking in the form of a story telling destroys the schematism built on the concepts of love, music and words. This article provides a representation of this textual activity also on the level of things.