Refraction of the traditions of the genre of the novel of formation in the work of composer Sergei Slonimsky

Abstract

In recent decades, the work of composers has increasingly found itself in the research field, which involves the use of scientific experience from various related fields of knowledge: musicology, literary studies, aesthetics, psychology, pedagogy and other disciplines. The reason for this is often the field of activity of a musician, which is traditionally considered peripheral (performing, pedagogical, musicological, literary, etc.). To alarge extent, this applies to the multi–vector work of one of the largest Russian composers of the second half of the twentieth – early twenty-first century, Sergei Slonimsky, the author of scientific works and textbooks, a brilliant improviser pianist, a tribune-lecturer-educator. The creative power of the composer, which had not dried up until recent years, was organically combined with the creative power in the field of artistic expression. The literary heritage, which is significant in scale, allows us to study it as a field of activity that has interrelations and parallels with the figurative content, plots, ideas of instrumental, theatrical and other works. In this context, the book «Burlesques, elegies, dithyrambs in despicable prose», published in 2000, is of particular interest, whose analysis of the content, where irony and grotesque are freely intertwined with lyrical and psychological imagery and philosophical reflections, allows us to discover the signs of the novel of upbringing (or the novel of becoming). S.M. Slonimsky's «Memoirs of School Years» published in 2016, as well as the manuscript of the composer's essay «The Reluctant Brawler: Chronicle of Chronic Stress – 1943–1971», commented on in the autumn of 2024 by the widow of the composer R.N. Slonimskaya, initiated the task of comparing and comparing the thoughts recorded in them, reflections on moral and ethical issues with the meanings of significant instrumental and the composer's theatrical opuses. The results of solving this problem using an interdisciplinary approach form the basis of this article.