“Again, as before, alone…” On the signs of self-intertextuality in the late works of P.I. Tchaikovsky

Abstract

The article considers the problem of textual borrowings from his own compositions as a way of author’s self-understanding and self-interpreting, in the style formation of the latest period of Tchaikovsky’s work (1890-1893). The research is based on the last vocal cycle of the composer - Six Romances, op. 73 (1893). The problem field of the research also covers a range of compositions related to the last four years of the composer’s life: “The Queen of Spades” opera, Sixth Symphony, “The Nutcracker” ballet, and an opera “Iolanta”. Special attention is given to the integral stylistic substantiation of such specific techniques of “self-hermeneutics” as anagrammatizing, self-citing, tonal reminiscences, and composition-drama correlations. The author considers the declared problem in the intertextual context, classifying it as “self-intertextuality”, and uses the intertext methodology of the French structuralist school (F. Saussure, Ju. Kristeva), and the Russian researchers of the phenomenon of self-intertextuality (V. Toporov, T. Fateeva). An additional methodological direction is a mythopoetic substantiation of anagrammatizing (the detection of an author’s monogram), for which the author uses the instruments of onomastic concepts of myth (A. Losev, Yu. Lotman). As a result of such an integrative (intertextual and mythopoetic) approach, very “unexpected” (at least at first sight) manifestations of self-intertextuality (the presence of a monogram “SNA”, citations from various compositions, non-conventional tone plan and “anti-final” cyclic composition in the music cycle) are comprehensively semantically substantiated by the author’s myth about “Name acquisition”. Thus, the discovered methodological strategy can be used for studying particular opuses and corpus-based text forms.