The article aims at showing that Debussy’s creativity, establishing a fundamentally new system of musical expressivity, bears much in common with Mallarmé’s revolutionary poetic work. The stylistic and poetological features shared by Debussy and Mallarmé are considered in the larger framework of French Symbolism and its aesthetics. The author focuses attention on such immanent artistic metaphors and concepts of Symbolism as Inexpressibility, Mystery, the unfathomable Idea. According to the Symbolist notion of creation, spiritual «truths» and the «ideas» of the existence are concealed by the sheer visibility of concrete facts, but they can be expressed by the use of Suggestion and Hint, as well as by means of abstract Arabesques, the Symbolists’ allegory of pure art. The comparative analysis brings out an analogy between Debussy’s Piano Preludes, Mallarmé’s late poetry, and their theoretical works and letters. This article’s main assumptions are based both on current research and on the conceptions and metaphorical parallels drawn by other artists of the same epoch (among them P. Verlaine, M. Maeterlinck, O. Redon, J. M. Whistler). Many of the sources are quoted in Russian for the first time.
Abstract