“Concordia discors” and other musical images in A.K. Tolstoy's dramatic poem “Don Juan”

The article examines one of the important components of the creative evolution of Alexei Konstantinovich Tolstoy, who paid great attention to understanding music as an extraterrestrial principle and as a form of art. The article attempts to show that Tolstoy’s idea of the ontological worldview and the musical nature of the universe goes back not only to romantic aesthetics and philosophy, as is commonly believed in research, but also to medieval Christian concepts that are consistent with the time of the poet’s utopian historiosophy. The poem contains the combination “disagreeable according to” which is a Russian translation of the slightly modified formula “concordia discors” (dissenting consent). The formula goes back to antiquity and means the harmonization of incompatible (contradictory) objects, phenomena, concepts, images. So, in Tolstoy, Satan claims total domination over the universe (“the Lord” “only for beauty”), and the heavenly angels believe that the inconsistency of phenomena is included in the original and totally incomprehensible divine plan. In his “Letter to the Publisher” in 1862, Tolstoy explained the general meaning of his work as follows: “It was an accidental and involuntary protest against the practical direction of our fiction”. It seems that in the image of Satan one can see a slight hint of nihilists - modern “new people”. In Tolstoy, Satan imitates oblivion of his origins, but the heavenly spirits restore the truth. Another concept that goes back to early Christian literature and is relevant for the poet is the concept of “love” as a single divine principle that brings order to the structure of the musical universe. As L. Spitzer showed, in the early Christian Middle Ages, in particular, in the theological works of Augustine the Blessed (undoubtedly known to Tolstoy), the concept of Pythagorean-Platonic musical harmony was rethought. According to the scholar, the Pythagoreans identified music with the cosmic order, whereas Christian philosophers identify love with music.