Film Music by A. Schnittke: The Range of Literary Images

Abstract

The paper is devoted to the characterisation of the range of artistic images from classical and modern literature of the XX century in Alfred Schnittke’s musical score for feature films. His work in cinema led the composer to a dialogue with such major poets and writers as A. Pushkin, A. Chekhov, L. Tolstoy, M. Bulgakov and contemporaries V. Rasputin, O. Bergholz, V. Astafyev, V. Panova, Yu. Bondarev, V. Grossman. The novelty of the research lies in determining the peculiarities of A. Schnittke’s interpretation of literary works in connection with their film adaptations. As a result, the main themes of Schnittke’s film music creative work, concordant with his views on the themes of “the artist and the world”, “life and death”, “man and his choice”, “Epoch – time – Man”, have been presented.