Literary and musical synthesis in modern foreign literature: Works of Johann Sebastian Bach as urtext

The article presents the results of the analytical work with the verbal texts of modern foreign prosaists, poets and Johann Sebastian Bach’s music texts. Inn the opinion of the authors of the research, through centuries, works by Bach inspire representatives of different branches of art to look for new instruments for achieving intermediavity of art works and a high level of its synesthesia. One of the basic categories in the context of synthesis of arts is “musicality” as a reflection of the processes of using traditional music instruments and techniques while creating literary texts. Bach’s works themselves turn out to be a very important step in the development of the tradition of literary-music synthesis - Bach used the means, firstly, of musical rhetoric baroque to gain such synthesis. An even more interesting fact is that the very heritage of Bach appeared to be one of the most popular “objects” of musical-ization of the literary text. In the analyzed works of William Coales, Gabriel Josipovici, Richard Powers, Thomas Bernhard, George Tabori, Dieter Thomas Kuhn, Nancy Huston, Anna Enquist, the authors of the article discover Bach’s forebasis, a kind of an urtext, that allows considering the mentioned literary texts to be a highly representative material for solving the problems of the synthetic character of the art culture of the 21st century that indeed requires a deep reflection. Among the results of today’s exponential development of electronic technologies, there exists one important factor in the realization of art peoples’ centuries-old expectations - the forming of the possibility for the emergence (rather massive already) ofworks of art whose creation would involve different types and art forms. On the one hand, this factor makes it necessary to analyze the historical perspective, the evolution of the methods and models of synthesis of arts some authors create; on the other, however paradoxical it may seem, it seems to give a new impulse to experiments of writers, musicians, artists, who try, even remaining in general within the “traditional” boundaries of the types of their art (literature, music, art consequently), to actively use artistic means traditional for these types of art for achieving the effect of crossing the boundaries of “only” literature, music or art. This trend seems to be particularly noticeable in modern European literature. The aim of the given article is to identify the specific instruments of modern foreign prosaists who choose Bach’s music texts as the urtexts of their literary works. The authors declare no conflicts of interests.