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

Dubakov Leonid ORCID: 0000-0003-1172-7435 PhD in Philology Associate Professor, Faculty of Philology, Shenzhen MSU-BIT University 518172, China, Shenzhen, Guojidaxueyuan str., 1 dubakov_leonid@mail.ru Other publications by this author

Go Sin' Graduate student, Faculty of Philology, Shenzhen MSU-BIT University 518172, China, Guangdong region, Shenzhen, Guojidasueyuan str., 1 galina.99@qq.com

The novels of M. A. Bulgakov "The Master and Margarita", F. S. Fitzgerald "The Great Gatsby" and "Song of Endless Longing" by Wang Anyi are separated from each other in time and written within different national cultures. However, there are similarities between these books. Music plays a special role in these works. Each of them ‒ some more, some less ‒ embodies the so‒called "jazz age" ‒ in Fitzgerald's definition ‒ the era of nervous fun, otherwise known as "feasting during the plague" (after it or before it) or fin de siècle ^[2]. In the novels of Bulgakov, Fitzgerald, and Wang Anyi, jazz sounds, and this music symbolizes an illusory romanticization of earthly life, which is actually full of suffering. The main characters of these books finally pass into otherworldliness, leaving behind them earthly noise and hearing music of a different, unearthly harmony.

Mikhail Bulgakov's novel The Master and Margarita (1940) is one of the classic works of Russian Soviet literature. It has been repeatedly analyzed in both Russian and foreign literary criticism, paying attention to the various components of the text and proceeding from different points of view. One of the important elements of this book is musical imagery. They allow us to comprehend the logic of the plot development of the novel, trace the genesis of individual characters, and identify the general intonation of the narrative. In this regard, A. N. Komisarenko, in relation to "The Master and Margarita," speaks of the compositional form of "a novel within a novel," but not referring to the Master's novel about Yeshua Ha-Nozri, placed inside the Moscow story, and the musical and figurative level of Bulgakov's text ^[8]. About the same B. M. Gasparov: "the whole action of the novel constantly has a musical background" ^{[5, p. 81]}. Indeed, the novel "The Master and Margarita" has a complex musical concept and a complex musical-figurative structure. A.V. Nikulina in the book "Music of M. Bulgakov's novel "The Master and Margarita" examines in detail many musical aspects of Bulgakov's text: musical realities (timbres, instruments, genres); the dramaturgy of the book (paying attention to the formation of intonation ideas in the context of the philosophical prototypes of the novel and the musical principles of the organization of the sounding material); the specifics of the musical genre of Bulgakov's novel. The researcher concludes that the "musical myth of the novel", in which "two myths converge ‒ the evangelical and romantic (Wagnerian)", is a unifying substance," and this explains "both the concept of musical space in the context of the "music of consciousness" and the incongruous combination of styles and trends" in Bulgakov's hypertext. At the same time, "romanticism and the Bible (as well as the twentieth century) express the accents of the consideration of sleep in world literature, forming the musical myth of Bulgakov's novel The Master and Margarita" ^{[10, p. 254]}.

But probably the main idea that defines the features of the novel's musical concept and its musical-figurative structure is that the novel's plot is built on the contrast of two "sound-semantic spheres" ‒ the sphere of satanic cacophony and the sphere of ideal sound.

The world of Moscow in the 1930s. (correlated with ancient Yershalaim) in Bulgakov's book is the "space of undifferentiated pitch" ^{[10, p. 252]}, the world of infernal noise ‒ in particular, jazz, which sounds in the restaurant at Massolit, in the apartment of Professor Kuzmin, and finally, jazz, which plays at the ball of Satan. The jazz played in the book is cheerful in its own way, but at the same time it is vulgarized by those who listen to it and who dance to it. Even a piece of music that initially did not carry a vulgar meaning, like the foxtrot "Hallelujah", taking into account a different tradition of the correlation of religious content and musical form in Russian culture, its recoding in Russian translations in the late 1920s and taking into account the speaking surnames of dancing writers and dancing macabres, in the context of the novel turns into openly blasphemous ^[18], in "the mass on the contrary" ^{[10, p. 156]}, in prayer, which became a popular musical piece ^{[5, p. 83]}.

B. M. Gasparov also draws attention to the fact that Moscow appears in the novel as an apocalyptic comic farce. And this parallel is reinforced "by the constant "musical arrangement" of the action. Thus, the Homeless Man's pursuit of Woland is accompanied by continuous musical (and, moreover, operatic-"ballroom") accompaniment ‒ "the roar of the polonaise", followed by Gremin's aria ("Eugene Onegin"). Margarita's departure for the sabbath is also performed to the roar of waltzes and marches" ^{[5, p. 85]}. And so on .

Some of the novel's characters make inharmonious loud animal sounds ‒ howling, whining, growling, hissing, screaming, squealing, wheezing. Music does the same: "the hoarse roar of a polonaise burst out of the basements" ^{[3, p. 62]}, "a thin voice was no longer singing, but howling: "Hallelujah!"" ^{[3, p. 69]}.

Bulgakov subjects recognizable musical plots of world classics to total travestification: these are reduced references to Goethe-Gounod's Faust, Pushkin-Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin, and a comic retelling of Pushkin-Rachmaninov's The Miserly Knight, etc. Bulgakov travests famous musical works in various ways ‒ for example, the already mentioned foxtrot "Hallelujah" (dances by Massolitov writers, the syncopated mocking sparrow-Azazello dance, the macabre ball at Woland's) or the song "The Glorious Sea ‒ the Sacred Baikal" (the heroic plot about escaping from penal servitude is painfully and comically embodied by Soviet employees exhausted by social work).

The names of some characters directly hint at the names of world composers, and this connection "reduces" literary images. M. A. Berlioz, who evokes Hector Berlioz, his "Fantastic Symphony" and associatively his opera "The Condemnation of Faust", unlike his prototype and like his hero, is blinded by his intellectual pride and lack of faith. Ivan Bezdomny arranges a "wild Parsley in a restaurant" ^{[3, p. 133]} and ends up with Professor A. N. Stravinsky, again, unlike his prototype‒ I. F. Stravinsky, who does not accept or nurture, but, on the contrary, destroys human complexity, which may have religious and mystical roots.

At the end of The Master and Margarita, when the main characters find themselves in another world, Bulgakov introduces soundlessness and silence into the novel, which contrast with the comic noise of the previous chapters: "Listen to the soundlessness," Margarita said to the master, and the sand rustled under her bare feet, "listen and enjoy what you were not given." in life, silence" ^{[3, p. 438]}, "Margarita's words flow in the same way as the stream left behind flowed and whispered" ^{[3, p. 438]}. The urban infernal apocalyptic cacophony remains in the past for the heroes, it is replaced by natural harmony (the rustle of sand, the whisper of a stream ‒ the sounds of nature, of which the heroes become a part: Margarita's voice "flows") and romantic peace (the last chapter is called "Farewell and eternal Shelter", and this is a transparent reference to F. Schubert, about which is explicitly stated in the text and the words from the song of which "Shelter" were previously sung by Woland). B. M. Gasparov considers the place where the Master and Margarita found themselves to be hellish, since the topos of the last chapter coincides with the topos of Margarita's dream from the beginning of the second part, in which she saw everything inanimate ("a silent flock of rooks" ^{[3, p. 251]}) ^{[5, p. 89]}. According to A. V. Nikulina, "The sphere of "soundlessness" becomes a "border zone" between the apocalyptic music of the novel and the "heavenly music" of the masses" ^{[10, p. 253]}. In this connection, I recall Dante's limbo, where the poet places the great non-Christians and which looks not like the first circle of hell, but as a kind of gloomy intermediate territory between hell and heaven. On the other hand, the juxtaposition of light and peace outlined in "The Master and Margarita": "He did not deserve light, he deserved peace," Levi said in a sad voice" ^{[3, p. 411]} – does not look unconditional. The "soundlessness" that Margarita encourages the Master to listen to is not an apophatic, but a cataphatic category. "Soundlessness," like Pontius Pilate's "abyss," is more reminiscent of J. Boehme's Ungrund, which preceded the divine reality, just as the Woland of this novel does not look like an unambiguous devil.

F. S. Fitzgerald's novel "The Great Gatsby" (1925) is considered one of the main works embodying the spirit of the so-called "jazz age". In the essay "Echoes of the Jazz Age", the writer defines jazz not only as a musical genre, but as "a state of nervous tension" ^{[15, p. 65]}, as a time of reckless fascination with the romance of life that came after the war. According to Nick Carraway, Jay Gatsby has a "romantic fuse", a "rare gift of hope" ^{[14, p. 3]} (he is a romantic hero ^[9] who is confronted with a harsh reality). Daisy, hearing the nightingale singing in the garden, asks her husband if it is romantic, while she herself "almost sang, did not speak" ^{[14, p. 10]}; later, she sees for herself "romantic possibilities" in the "motley" evening at Gatsby's ^{[14, p. 51]}. Nick Carraway looks for "romantic-looking women in a crowd" ^{[14, p. 28]}.

Gatsby's evenings are full of music: "the orchestra played golden music with cocktails" ^{[14, p. 20]}, "the famous tenor sang an Italian aria, and the famous contralto sang a jazz song" ^{[14, p. 23]}, finally, "To the final sounds of the Jazz History of Mankind" ^{[14, p. 25]} According to Vladimir Tostov, which is performed at the request of the owner, the girls began to flirt with men. This musical play, invented by Fitzgerald, turns a private party at Gatsby's into an almost universal event, hinting at an eternal inter-sexual love game. It's as if the whole world, except for Gatsby, is immersed in a "state of nervous tension" in this scene. Daisy lived in an artificial world in which "orchestras introduced new rhythms every year, reflecting in the melodies all the sadness and ambiguity of life. To the moan of saxophones, who sang the sad complaints of "Beale Street Blues" all night long, hundreds of gold and silver shoes pushed sparkling dust on the parquet" ^{[14, p. 71]}. The image of sparkling dust under the feet of the dancers, as well as the image of their faces, which resemble the petals of a "fallen rose, driven across the floor by the breath of longing pipes" ^{[14, p. 71]}, and the image of "empty, carefree laughter", bursts of which fly from the ground to the "summer sky" ^{[14, p. 23]}, they talk here about the fun and at the same time the vanity of the "jazz age".

O. S. Kamysheva in the article "Concepts through the prism of musical metaphors in F. S. Fitzgerald's novel "The Great Gatsby" draws attention to the fact that music is implicit in many components of this book. The voices of the characters are musical in different ways (for example, Daisy has a "singing" voice), sounds are made by cars ("horn sounds are a metaphorical melody" ^{[6, p. 144]}), musical metaphors characterize nature ("Sun glare is bells sparkling in the light" ^{[6, p. 144]}). Music itself is portrayed by Fitzgerald, including through metaphors, and for the most part these metaphors are anthropomorphic: music acts as a living force in the novel.

In addition, according to Y. S. Shakhmatova, in The Great Gatsby, "jazz is a compositional motif." <...>: it reflects life itself, its instability, rhythmicity, surprise, unpredictability, improvisation" ^{[17, p. 252]}. We can also talk about the phonostilistic features of the novel, revealing its musical character: the writer actively uses alliteration, assonance, onomatopoeia, rhyme, sound anaphora, epiphora, zeugma, rondo, tautacism ^[1].

Throughout the story, Nick Carraway hears music that manifests itself in people and in New York reality, and most often it is the music of passions: the charm and hope of Jay Gatsby, the gradually losing charm of Daisy, the noisy and "overwrought" "jazz age", jazz to which empty people selflessly dance. At the end of the book, Nick Carraway looks at the house of the murdered Gatsby and imagines a topos of the past, when there was no big city yet, and that for the Dutch pioneer sailor "Rustle <...> trees, those that later disappeared, giving way to the house of Gatsby, was once the music of the last and greatest human dream" ^{[14, p. 85]}. The romance of earthly music with echoes of rudeness and indifference in the finale of "The Great Gatsby" turns into the romance of fate music, in which hope for a miracle sounds at all times.

The title of Wang Anyi's novel "A Song of Endless Longing" (1996), the image of its main character Wang Qiyao, individual fragments of the plot and some of its key motifs transparently refer to the 9th-century poem of the same name by Bo Juyi (and to his poem "The Lute"). A. I. Kobzev and N. A. Orlova in the article ""Song of Endless Longing" in verse and prose: about the poem by Bo Ju-yi and the novel by Wang An-yi,"it is hypothesized that Wang Anya's book is "not a chronological description of a woman's life from the 40s to the 80s, but her recollection of her earthly existence after death."" ^{[7, p. 756]}. "Song of Endless Longing" is like Wang Qiyao's last song from a posthumous or posthumous existence. The word "song" in the title also indicates the predominantly lyrical nature of the narrative in the book. And this lyricism is manifested primarily in musical images.

Specific singers, genres, songs or melodies express the inner world of Wang Qiyao (and girls like her) and other characters, becoming their sound counterparts, and also characterize the era of the 1940s and its echoes in Shanghai in the 1980s. Thus, one of the musical leitmotifs of the text is the "Song of the Four Seasons" performed by the famous Shanghai singer and actress Zhou Xuan in the 1937 film "Street Angel". At the beginning of the "Song of Endless Longing" it says: Zhou Xuan "sings about all these seasons, from spring to winter, and each one comes out so beautiful, but she also uses her brains, because she sings only about good things" ^{[4, p. 40]}. But when Wang Qiyao finds herself outside of Shanghai, it seems to her that Zhou Xuan's voice is calling her back ^{[4, p. 225]}, and she cannot resist it. This song (as well as some others, like "Shanghai Nights"), the film image and the real fate of Zhou Xuan create in the novel an illusory image of romantic life in a big old city, which the writer both sympathizes with and sneers at. "The Song of the Four Seasons" is a song, although it seems to be about a happy, but at the same time passing life. Wang Qiyao also lives his life in the novel. ‒ from spring to winter. The schoolgirl Wang Qiyao, who found herself at the film studio and saw the murder scene, became old at the end of the book and, being killed, sees through the thickness of forty years that that dead woman is herself. The final phrase of "Songs of endless Longing" speaks about the changing seasons and the cyclical nature of life: "... oleanders bloomed in pots: a new season of their lives came, they were destined to bloom and wither again" ^{[4, p. 554]}.

The inner world of Lao Color, who became Wang Qiyao's lover, is expressed by "jazz music of the twenties" ^{[4, p. 477]}, which became fashionable again in the 1980s. Jazz is another musical leitmotif of the "Song of Endless Longing". Jazz is music that manifests itself in "a winding melody that sounds in complete silence" ^{[4, p. 477]}, which draws Lao Color to the old elite and aesthetically rich Shanghai ^[16]. Jazz cleanses and solidifies time, crystallizes a bygone era: time in "old jazz melodies <...> it is polished so thoroughly that it becomes dense and tangible from light and superficial" ^{[4, p. 485]}. At the same time, jazz is an "empty shell of a cocoon" that Strauss's music "threw off" ^{[4, p. 442]}. In the 1980s, it was only a faint memory of the past for those who can remember it. Jazz is also, like Wang Qiyao's, a romantic (and partly sexualized) illusion of Lao Color, who is nostalgic for the unknown, which returned at the next round of fashion and which in fact was different.

The music in Wang Anya's novel is also the music of everyday life and being, closely related to each other (Wang Anya's novels are characterized by the "duality" of the artistic space, due to which the image of the city ceases to be homogeneous, realistic and documentary, the plan of the "reality" of the city and the plan of the "illusion" are formed and coexist equally in it ^{[12, p. 18-19]}; in Wang Anyi's image of the city, "the leading role is played by contrasting the aesthetics of everyday life of the townspeople and the magical myth of the "old Shanghai"" ^{[13, p. 13]}). The sounds of Shanghai are the sounds of a large Chinese city, like a living being, they are "chants mixed with groans" ^{[4, p. 382]}, rustling and barely audible, but all together creating a "sound of silence" that "dominates the urban noise" ^{[4, p. 382]}. The echoes of the past turn into a new melody, which is carried by the wind along the Shanghai longtang ^{[4, p. 517]}. The dice of the game of majiang "were tapping melodiously, and Madame Yan was ready to cry, enjoying this music" ^{[4, p. 261]}, in which she heard her past. During the celebration of the new year, 1987, the sounds of exploding firecrackers create a polyphony and form a counterpoint and canon, the urban "melody flows, never ending" ^{[4, p. 531]}. The music of Wuqiao village is "wonderful music" ^{[4, p. 198]} of silence and Buddhist‒Taoist peace, which Wang Qiyao does not perceive.

The sounds of Shanghai are the sounds of a special metaphysical space that add up to complex pieces of music in which events, phenomena, and people act as separate notes or melodies. Wang Qiyao as a "Shanghai beauty" "was one of the cheerful melodies, the song of ordinary girls of the City" ^{[4, p. 74]}. After winning the competition, Wang Qiyao became the foundation of Shanghai's beauty and romance, and thanks to her and them, the City found the gift of speech, and "this speech sounded sweeter than any music" ^{[4, p. 86]}. Chairman Li, looking at Wang Qiyao, thinks that a woman is "the only gentle note in the noise of this human world" ^{[4, p. 153]}. An older Wang Qiyao listens to new and old songs that children sing on the street, and it seems to her that the latter sound not outside, but inside her. And it's not just that she remembers them well, she just became a part of the music of the old Shanghai. Lao Color realizes that jazz on records is "just an accompaniment" of the past, "its voiceover, and the main musical theme and main plot" ^{[4, p. 489]} are connected with the living Wang Qiyao. And this lively Wang Qiyao has her own inner rhythm, which allows her to naturally dance a foxtrot in the midst of dancing disco.

The music of "Songs of Endless Longing" sounds like a requiem for a passing human life: the lyrics appear to be Wang Qiyao's last song, heading either to the Azure Distance or to the Yellow Keys (heaven and hell in the Chinese tradition). According to A. I. Kobzev and N. A. Orlova, the Russian translation of the title of the last chapter ("From the Azure Distance to the Yellow Keys") is not entirely successful. In the original, the final chapter is called "Azure Palaces and Yellow Springs". If we proceed from the multiplicity of coincidences between Wang Anya's novel and Bo Juyi's poem, then it would be more correct to leave the conjunction "and", since in Bo Juyi's poem "the Taoist, having ascended to the heavenly Azure palaces and descended to the underground Yellow springs, does not find Yang Guifei anywhere," which means "and Wang Qi-Yao posthumously does not live there, but on the same mountain in the middle of the sea where the celestials live" ^{[7, pp. 756-757]}, and not in heaven or hell. At the very end, above the dying (flying away) Pigeons circle Wang Qiyao as inhabitants of the heavenly world and mourn her death and the death of the old City (Wang Qiyao as the "personified anima soul of Shanghai" ^{[7, p. 754]}): "The sounds of their whistles seem to be crying" and "they reach us no longer shrill, but melodious" ^{[4, p. 754]}. 554]. And these melodious sounds are the heavenly sad musical harmony found by Wang Qiyao, who went beyond Shanghai, the time of her earthly life and the empty, illusory urban romance.

Mikhail Bulgakov's novels "The Master and Margarita", F. S. Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" and Wang Anyi's "Song of Endless Longing" are filled with musical images. These books mention real and fictional musical works, performers, genres, instruments, etc. Music influences the themes and issues, the images of the main characters, the character system, plot, composition, motif structure, stylistic features of these novels. Literally and figuratively, we can say that each of these books turns out to be associated with the "jazz age" in the broad sense of Fitzgerald. It's not just that jazz in "The Master and Margarita", "The Great Gatsby" and "Song of Endless Longing" sounds and acts as one of the key motifs, it's because of the similar atmosphere of the eras ‒ in New York (on Long Island), Moscow, Shanghai. Despite the difference in cultural traditions and socio-political situation, in the USA, the USSR, and the Republic of China, the "jazz age" is a time of cheerful "nervous excitement" against the background of past and approaching dramatic changes. On the other hand, in each of the novels, jazz is music, symbolizing an illusory romanticization of earthly life, which is actually full of disappointments and sufferings. In the finale, the characters of Bulgakov, Fitzgerald, and Wang Anyi pass into otherness through violent death, leaving behind the suffering bustle of the rough world and earthly noise and hearing music of a different harmony associated with natural sounds or emanating from metaphysical soundlessness.