INTERCONTEXTUAL READING OF ROBERT MUSIL’S “MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES”

The analysis of the active reception process, the interaction of “its own” and “alien” seems very fruitful in the study of the epoch-making Robert Musil’s novel “Man without qualities” (1930–1942). The analytical evaluation of the Austrian author’s contact with the “alienness” (in this case, with Russian literary classics) in the form of the discovery of “his own essence” is carried out at the micro-level of individual concepts, expressions, descriptions of characters, and explicit or implicit quotations. The intertextual level of reading the novel expands at the expense of the intercontextual level. Thus, the literary text is read from the foreign (Russian) reader’s cultural referential framework. This means an attempt to recognize the reader’s “own essence” in the “alienness” text, to reinterpret a foreign text, when, on the one hand, the “own essence”, i.e. in this case the work of the 19th century Russian novelists, is subjected to scrutiny in relation to its reception of the Austrian writer as “alien”. On the other hand, Musil’s novel is read through the lens of Russian cultural awareness, and included in the contextual framework of Russian reception, formed by Goncharov’s, Dostoevsky’s, and Leo Tolstoy’s works.