The purpose of the article is to study the role of the musical imperative in the modernization, transformation of the spiritual autobiography genre in the novel by B.L Pasternak Doctor Zhivago. To achieve this goal, the following tasks are required: a brief overview of biographical facts of the writer’s life, illustrating the path of his aesthetic philosophy and worldview, artistic formation, in which music played a dominant role; to study the musical imperative at the ideological-philosophical, system-structural, and aesthetic-artistic levels. While researching, biographical, systemic, structural, and hermeneutic methods were used. One of the culminating pages in the biography of Pasternak, the content of which had influenced Pasternak’s creative world, would be the day when he heard the sounds of musical improvisation on the piano by Skryabin, who was creating Divine poem. The sounds of music had merged with reality, the voice of nature, becoming a single whole with it. With a transforming and creative effort of memory, impressions coming from childhood would be built into the figurative-conceptual chain of his worldview “Life − music − creativity – poetry”, in which “music and poetry speak the same language of art”. All the creative heritage of B.L. Pasternak, including the final work − the novel Doctor Zhivago, which is represented as a kind of spiritual autobiography, both personal and the entire generation, respectively, serves as a generalization of the historical, philosophical, aesthetic and artistic paths of the Silver Age, a part of which was the author himself. Merging with its voice, and at the same time absorbing it into himself, he became a generalized representation of his generation portrait. In Doctor Zhivago, music appears at the level of mentions, quotations, and various sound images throughout the text. Their main ideological and semantic content is summed up by the words of Vedenyapin, in which Music is the equivalent of Truth, a “divine voice”, “raising above the animal and carrying it upward”, giving an inner impetus to the personality to move along the path of history to eternity. Research results. The ideological and philosophical setting of the musical novel organization is the idea of Music as a metaphor of the Artist-Christ, the embodiment of eternity, the path and a new history established by the sacrifice of Christ, leading to the human spirit. Accordingly, the theme of the path in spiritual autobiography as an ascent from the carnal to the spiritual level of consciousness, the attainment of eternity is reflected in the musical key as a progress of progress towards music and “melodization” of the spiritual path. At the systemic and structural level, the musical imperative is built in the form of a counterpoint principle substantiated by B.M. Gasparov, and the complex tiered hierarchical organization of the novel, in which all levels (individual, socio-historical, eternal) gravitate towards a single value center − the Artist-Christ − and merge in symphonic polyphony in unison. At the aesthetic and artistic level, this is achieved through the lyricization of the narrative, rhythmic insertions that “illuminate” the prose part, like the “voice of eternity”, repetitions, dividing the narrative into prose and lyrics as a form of music (the earthly path and eternity as its finale and the achievement of completeness existence) and, most importantly, building an acoustic space, contributing to the creation of a suggestive effect of “audibility” of the text. The acoustic space is built thanks to the presence of numerous sound images, the melodiousness and rhythm of the prose part, inserts from sacred texts and church chants, the attraction of Chopin`s techniques and motives, as well as the motive of distant sound as a timeless messenger of apocalyptic “future”.
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Aug 30, 2024
James W Watts 
Open Access