Abstract
This dissertation explores the parallels between the musical language of Dmitri Shostakovich’s quartets and a literary canon known as the “Petersburg text” that features works by Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Andrei Bely, and Alexander Blok. Combining insights from Russian (Dolzhansky, Mazel, Kholopov) and anglophone (Brown, Segall) theorists, I present an analytical framework that explores and interprets his harmonic-contrapuntal idiom in connection with a ubiquitous literary-cultural context. Joining an established tradition of musicologists with similar goals (Kuhn, Reichardt, Sheinberg), I examine the realm of harmony and melody and establish simple mimetic harmonic and melodic structures—in the manner of “topics” (Ratner) when they govern small structures, “expressive genres” (Hatten) when they infuse whole works, and “narrative archetypes” (Almén) when they change from one thing to another—that reflect omnipresent themes, or “mythologemes,” of the Petersburg text, a constellation of linguistic, thematic, aesthetic, and historical themes and meta-themes most extensively theorized by the philologist Vladimir Toporov. Two previously established (Hakobian) themes in Shostakovich’s music connect book to score. On the one hand there is ambivalence, ambiguity, multivalence, paradox, profundity, and obscurity—rendered in texts with images of mist, fog, phantoms, doubles, dreams, illusions, and lamps. On the other hand, there is disintegration, decline, and decay—engaging with time, mortality, apocalyptic visions, illness, suicide, death, and always water: rivers, canals, storms, and floods. Chapter 1 situates the analytical framework within historical and contemporary Russian and anglophone theoretical and musicological perspectives. Chapter 2 addresses ambivalence and positions the approach within Russian and anglophone theoretical traditions. Chapter 3 explores a smaller sub-theme particularly present in Dostoevsky’s work—fixity, inertia, rumination and idée fixe. Chapter 4 explores the other major aesthetic pillar—disintegration and decline—incorporating a brief discussion of Bely’s Petersburg, and setting up an analysis of the composer’s Seventh String Quartet exemplary of the approach in Chapter 5.