Musical images in the novels “The Master and Margarita” by M. A. Bulgakov, “The Great Gatsby” by F. S. Fitzgerald and “The Song of Endless Longing” by Wang Anyi: from earthly noise to ethereal harmony

The article analyses the novels "The Master and Margarita" by M. A. Bulgakov, "The Great Gatsby" by F. S. Fitzgerald and "The Song of Endless Longing" by Wang Anyi from the point of view of the presence of musical images associated with specific musical works, performers, genres, instruments, etc. in them. Music influences the themes and issues, images of the protagonists, character system, plot, composition, motive structure, and stylistic features of these books. In all three novels the presence of two spheres – earthly space and other-worldly reality – is revealed. These spheres, having opposite axiological connotations, manifest themselves also through music. New York, Moscow and Shanghai are portrayed by the writers as cities existing within the real or conventional "jazz age" – in a broad sense within the era of "nervous excitement" against the background of past and approaching turbulent changes. Jazz in "The Master and Margarita", "The Great Gatsby" and "Song of Endless Longing" symbolises the illusory romanticisation of earthly life, which in fact is full of ugly, suffering and transitory things. The heroes of Bulgakov, Fitzgerald, Van Anyi in the final stories, being killed, pass into otherness, leaving behind a coarse and vulgar world filled with earthly noise, characterised by falsity or cacophony, and hearing harmonious music associated with natural sounds or coming from metaphysical soundlessness. The relevance of the article is determined by the high interest of modern literary studies to the comparison of works created in different national cultures, in particular – in Russian, Western and Chinese, as well as to intermedial phenomena, in this case – to the interaction between literature and music. The novelty of the article is due to the comparison of the novels of Bulgakov, Fitzgerald and Wang Anyi, which has never been made before.

Michael Bulgakov, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, Wang Anyi, musical images, jazz age, travesty, romanticisation, comparativist analysis, metaphysical transition, harmony of silence