The Musical-Artistic Story: Hoffmann, Odoevsky and Pasternak

Abstract

The artistic story is an acknowledged sub-genre of Romantic fiction. The ‘artist’ – usually a poet or writer, sometimes a painter, or occasionally a representative of another art form – is a common enough figure in Romantic literature, with extensions into the Gothic-fantastic, through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. One has only to think of Bulgakov's ‘Master’ (in his celebrated The Master and Margarita). In other, on the whole more mainstream – though often at least equally complex – areas of, for instance, Russian fiction, another obvious figure of some prominence would be Doctor Iurii Zhivago. American campus fiction (without my wishing, by any means, to reduce Pale Fire to that rather bland category) offers Vladimir Nabokov's rival figure of the poet, John Shade.