Charles Gounod’s Faust and Dostoevsky Artistic Principles

Abstract

The article considers the “Faustian” scene in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Adolescent as the musical embodiment of Dostoevsky’s central poetic device: statements with maximum formal similarity and maximum semantic divergence. This device is contextualized within Mikhail Bakhtin’s polyphonic novel concept and within the context of the history of polyphony as a musical phenomenon starting with its origins in the Western European music. We follow Larisa Gogotishvili’s suggestion that Mikhail Bakhtin’s polyphony is not the polyphony of the 18th-19th century (Johann Sebastian Bach, for instance) but the 20th-century polyphony (Arnold Schoenberg) and propose that Bakhtin’s and Dostoevsky’s concepts of polyphony have different origins (relativist in Bakhtin and epistemological in Dostoevsky) and consequently serve different purposes: Bakhtin affirms a multiplicity of voices as a matter of principle, while Dostoevsky strives to ultimately overcome this multiplicity by covering as many concepts of reality as possible. The breadth of Dostoevsky’s conceptual range is intended to overcome humans’ epistemological limitations and avoid dangerous cognitive traps that lie in statements that are formally close, but semantically different.

Keywords

• the adolescent
• hector berlioz
• symphonie fantastique
• polyphony
• mikhail bakhtin
• arnold schoenberg