The Symbolism of Evgeny Vodolazkin’s novel "Brisbane"

Resumen

This article is devoted to the novel “Brisbane” (2019) by the famous Russian writer Evgeny Vodolazkin and analyzes the symbolism of his literary text. As in his previous novels — “Laurus” (2012) and “Aviator” (2018), embodying the idea of a spiritual path, in “Brisbane” the author shows the life story of guitar virtuoso Gleb Yanovsky, whose future, if not crossed out, is questioned by an inexorably harsh diagnosis, creating a fundamentally different dimension of the path of the main a hero. It seems to us that, creating a novel about a musician, Evgeny Vodolazkin also created a special musical canvas, in the space of which, as in a musical sonata form, several themes interact: the main one is the theme of Gleb and the secondary one is the theme of the father in the past and the theme of the writer in the present. Examining the literary text of the novel, we come to the conclusion that the symbolism of the novel “Brisbane” is connected not only with the name of the city, which has become for the heroes a symbol of dreams and the personification of a wonderful future, as well as the talking names of the heroes, but also with the musical principle of the organization of the narrative.