Musical Poliphony of Modernist Writing: British / Ukrainian Women’s Perspective

Abstract

The subject of scientific research is a comparative analysis of the British and Ukrainian women writers short stories from the perspective of the interaction of literature and music in the period of modernism. This approach involves considering music as an expression of the specific modernist worldview of writers, passed through the prism of the inner “Self” of the female personality. It is based on the literary analysis of the works of V. Woolf “String Quartet”, K. Mansfield “The Singing Lesson”, “Weak Heart” and “Spring Pictures”, D. Vikonska “Polonaise D-moll Chopin (op. 71, No. 1)”, “Prelude of fis-dur No. 2, Vasil Barvinsky”, “Music” and I. Vilde “Pianist”, “Oriental Melody” and “Bizarre Heart”. The study of the phenomenon of musicalization of prose, based on the concept of the famous intermedialist W. Wolf, allows us to identify various forms of its presentation. In the content aspect, we can talk about the presence of two varieties of thematization of music in mentioned literary texts: intra- and paratextual thematization. In the structural aspect, all three forms of imitation are represented: verbal music; imaginary content analogy, expressed mainly in the associative imagery of water (love); a formal and structural analogy, presented as an imitation of musical macroforms (quartet and fuget) and microforms (compositional technique of polyphony). A notable feature of this study is the discovery of original creative parallels in the poetics of modernist women writers – simultaneously at the intersection and within the national literatures. Imaginary content analogies are related to the writing style of Ukrainian and British women writers – D. Vikonska and V. Woolf, as well as I. Vilde and K. Mansfield; the imitation form of musical microforms reveals the internal stylistic similarity of both British and Ukrainian literatures: amplification constructions in V. Woolf and K. Mansfield writings, on the one side and syntactic modifications of key reference lexemes in D. Vikonska and I. Vilde, on the other side.