The Music of rural Life in the novels «Sandro from Chegem» by Fazil Iskander and «The Shaanxi Opera» by Jia Pingwa: harmony of Nature and the Past

The article analyzes the novels of F. A. Iskander "Sandro from Chegem" and Jia Pingwa "The Shaanxi Opera" from the point of view of the presence of musical images associated with specific musical works, performers, genres, directions, etc. Music influences the themes and issues, the images of the main characters, the character system, the plot, the motivational structure of these books. In Fazil Iskander's novels "Sandro from Chegem" and Jia Pingwa's "The Shaanxi Opera", music is what preserves the old, rural culture, provides cultural continuity in an urbanizing and simplifying world. The music of the Qin opera and Abkhazian songs reveal in the novels the rhythm, respectively, of Chinese and Caucasian rural ‒ labor, family, love, and natural existence. The music of Fazil Iskander and Jia Pingwa allows them to characterize the heroes of their works, to create an otherworldly harmonic chronotope. The music in "Sandro from Chegem" and in "The Shaanxi Opera" affects human and natural reality, considering them for themselves as an opportunity to sound in space. Finally, the music in these works can overcome death, carrying the memory of oneself through despair, farewell to the deceased and the transition from life to life. The relevance of the article is determined by the high interest of modern literary criticism in comparing works created in different national cultures, in particular in Russian and Chinese, as well as to the artistic interaction of literature and music. The novelty of the article is due to the previously unseen comparison of the novels of Fazil Iskander and Jia Pingwa in terms of identifying the forms and analyzing the functions of their musical component, as well as from the point of view of their belonging to similar literary phenomena ‒ "village prose", "root-searching literature".

Fazil Iskander, Sandro from Chegem, Jia Pingwa, The Shaanxi Opera, musical images, village prose, root-searching literature, comparative analysis, intermediality, harmony