Julian Barnes' Novel “The Man in the Red Coat” in the Context of Intermediation

: In the proposed article


Introduction
Literature and music are the spheres of artistic thinking that have been intersecting since the beginning of art.The history of intersections and intertwining between them can serve as an endless material not only for direct research with a significant set of interrelated issues, but also for epistemological studies, as it reflects changes in the methodology to their solutions.The relevant body of work characterizing the state of the present stage is concentrated in the proceedings of International Association for Word and Music Studies (WMA), in the bibliography accompanying the works of A. Hansen [9], A. Makhov [12], S. Sher [16], W. G. Schmidt [17], R. Walsh [19] etc., which give an idea of the intensity of inquiries and approaches to this topic.In fact, the appearance of intermediality in the context of intertextuality as one of the most significant lines in the humanities in recent decades occurred precisely because of the realization of the presence of general ontological foundations in the manifestations of artistic thinking.Thus, significant prospects in terms of spreading the achieved knowledge to the "adjacent territoriesˮ of art history are quite expected and fruitful.Hansen's most profound and influential works, which pioneered the theory of intermediality [9], are based on studies of the Russian avant-garde, that is, they are stylistically and contextually limited to the art of the first decades of the last century.Continuing such research on other material is an extremely urgent task, since a general theory should be congruent with various historical stylistic parameters.Perhaps the emergence of such a theory will be the achievement of the efforts of many researchers in the future.
In the extrapolation of formal literary structures and semantic constructions to musical material and the corresponding movement in the opposite direction, the most traditional and developed is the body of work based on the adaptation of historically developed models of structuring a literary text in one art form to the material of another [2,4,6].This approach's achievements include not only a colossal range of subtle and profound observations, but also an awareness of its limitations [20].It is difficult to abandon the developed methods of comparison, since they remain the most accessible and visual tools for conveying much deeper and more speculative patterns.The notion of metaphor comes to the rescue, which gives a certain "legitimacyˮ to traditional areas of research while realizing their methodological limitations.We can distinguish a certain thematic direction, in which this problem is developed [14,15,20].It would be appropriate to refer to the statement belonging to Donald Francis Tovey, which was cited as an epigraph in the work of I. Delazare: "But I shall not deal with metaphors until the difficulty of the subject compels meˮ [7].
In this sense, the proposed work is, first of all, a continuation of the developed direction, since the focus is on a novel with a rather extraordinary idea and structure, in which it is difficult for a musician not to notice signs of polyphony and sonatality.And, secondly, Julian Barnes's novel in its conceptual multidimensionality and deep load of contextual meanings cannot but initiate the search for an answer to the question of how else one can realize the existing structural analogies between literary and musical texts in the conditions of contemporary creativity.
The work of Julian Barnes today does not need lengthy annotations.The list of his works is made up of acclaimed works that are as appealing as they are unique and enigmatic.One of his latest works, "The Man in the Red Coat" (2020) [3], poses a number of questions to both the reader and the researcher.The first thing that strikes in this text is the unusually generous abundance of dates, names, and ordinary details that accompany the life of the characters.The kaleidoscopic multitude of incredibly convex characteristics, unknown and unexpected facts to some extent push into the background the systematical novelistic development of the plot, directly related to the personality of the central character -Doctor Pozzi (hereinafter the Doctor).The experience of an outstanding essayist, which Barnes certainly is, could not but be embodied in many brilliant portraits of his contemporaries, details and descriptions of the circumstances of their lives.As the plot unfolds, it turns out that the essayistic "accompanying" material of the text is as significant as the biographical novel outline.The writer scrupulously recreates various aspects of the life of the central character -his professional and scientific activities, social circle, tastes and interests.He treats the personality of the Doctor with genuine admiration and, quite in accordance with the essayist component of the work, does not hide his author's position.The essayistic side of the novel makes itself felt in numerous everyday details, which actualizes the side of the book, based on the laws of scientific documentary.It becomes apparent in the factual saturation of the author's text, a consequence of the colossal work done by the writer to verify the data involved.Barnes brilliantly uses the tools of both genres -biographical novel and essay, synthesizing the richness of plot twists and turns and documented line of events.
One of the main and obvious goals of a novel-essay, or a novel and bunches of essays strung on a storyline of a consistent novel presentation with a historically real protagonist, is to recreate the outline of the life of an outstanding personality, in the words of the author, her "tangible, everyday concreteness".As in "The Noise of Time", dedicated to the creation of a biographical image of Dmitri Shostakovich, the main character in "The Man" is the center of attraction, around which all storylines are concentrated.Many of the attendant participants are in some way in contact with the Doctor's personality, influence him or are influenced by him.The answer to the question -what is this novel about -is formed by the reader as he reads it.And, probably, a branched and multi-layered informative base is involved because the novel reflects the manifestations of one of the most difficult and critical periods in European culture, the Art Deco style, gathered into a knot and inextricably interconnected, and the protagonist of the "The Man in the Red Coat" becomes a tool for identifying features of the Belle Epoque and the reconstruction of its image.
Dr. Pozzi is an iconic character of his time.It is significant that Barnes chose as a semantic focus for recreating the image of the Belle Epoque not a worker of art or literature, which would be absolutely natural, given the art-centricity of that time, but a doctor.A doctor who not only managed to say his progressive word in medicine, but, more importantly within the framework of the novel, a person who is fully immersed in the interweaving of events and problems of his time.Dandyism, refined aestheticism, the tradition of duels, friendly and not only relations with outstanding writers and actors … Even the tragic death of the Doctor symbolically resonates with the tragic end of his time.The multi-layered text made it possible to recreate the catastrophic complexity of the era in which its heroes happened to live.To a large extent, Barnes's novel is a historical reconstruction, although this concept is usually given a different meaning.But a comprehensive and close to documentary method of factual saturation of the text, which does not cease to be a novel, allows us to understand it as a model that is as close as possible to the original.The synthesis of scientific documentaries and novel plot modulations is intended to confirm the "material" objectivity of the text."…Roman, in welchem sich das Individuelle zum Universum erweitert" [5] through the person of the central character, a man in a red garb, acquires many "tangible" symptoms of his time and becomes its personification.In the work of Barnes, we have before us an artistic and documentary epic of the research sample of the era, in all the splendor of its most striking manifestations."Als Geschichte und Erzahlung, ... muss der Roman die Form des rein Historiscen und Objektiven annehhmen, also in Prosa erzehlen, aber die absolute Freiheit... offenbart sich in der phantastichen Erfundung und Construction des Geschtichen, so wiedi Eigenheit des Individuums im phantastischen und musikaliscen geiste des Ganzen "wiederstraft" [1].As we can see, the objectivity in the development of the plot and the fantastic" nature of the subjectivity of novel prose evoked in the author's work of 1805 a direct parallel with the understanding "musicality" of the whole.
The novel-essay enriches the range of possibilities for recreating the stylistic phenomenon of art at the turn of the century with its borderline connections.In the process of comprehending this amazing work, the question naturally arises: how correct in terms of scientific issues (an essay is largely a scientific text, since it is associated with documentary) can be the reconstruction of any historical phenomenon.The author foresees and answers: he softens the graphic accuracy of many plot moves with an unexpected "we don't know", persistently and repeatedly repeated in the "code" of the novel.The final association of the author's assumptions and the readers' possible doubts ("we don't know") becomes the key to his understanding.Of course, we do not know and will never know how close the story of the life of the Doctor and his contemporaries is to their real existence.We have before us one of the options for a possible sequence of events.The "Law of Unintended Consequences", which Barnes does not forget to mention, raises a big question mark regarding the trustworthiness of the "The Man in the Red Coat", and the author reserves the right to place the novel in the sphere of the laws of the artistic text.The documentary research attracted by the writer, the factual equipment of the plot twists and turns are unexpectedly leveled by the final "we don't know".The writer recalls the labyrinths of possible meanings outside the chosen scenario of events, not forgetting to remind the reader that yes, the facts are reliable, but the circumstances in which they are written could be different.And, accordingly, plot twists could have other meanings.A chain of events read differently could form a different system of interconnections, and "we do not know" how correct the path chosen by the author was.The genre synthesis of historical documentaries and novel texture makes it possible to present a textual fabric rich in probabilistic assumptions.The author has created a hermeneutic situation of possible multi-variant readings of the lives of the inhabitants of the modern world, and readers, together with the author, can potentially become active interpreters of the book's peripeteias.The historical horizontal variability of situations and actions is multiplied and varied by a vertical of chronologically distant resonances.Barnes's history is the history of the individual, growing into the history-time, into the universal.

Contextuality as a Condition for Artistic Modeling
The recreation of historical events or style in a fiction text is directly linked to the recreation of the contexts in which the events or style were immersed.This is what happens in Barnes' book.It becomes inevitable that some specification of the very notion of context and its meaning separated from mundanity.
One of the main obstacles to its study is its self-evidentness, which entails a blurring of configurations in myriad applications.Meanwhile, the development of contextuality constitutes a distinct field of humanities, encompasses a wide range of individual-societal relationships in their infinite variety, and lies at the intersection of philosophy, epistemology, history, psychology, linguistics, etc.As a result, probabilistic models of style, art, social and many other systems emerge.And no matter how complete the recognition of any modality is "in-der-Welt-Sein" (M.Heidegger), it always bears the imprint of a certain aspectation caused by the author's purpose and his belonging to his time.The horizon of events available to the writerresearcher is shaped by his personal aspirations, factual equipment, and goal-setting.On the other hand, the apparent materiality of the context is ambiguous even for his contemporaries, the direct participants in the events, and is erased over time.The variability of its "surroundings" [5], the dynamics of movements of semantic meanings, the situationality of interpretations, the hermeneutic position of the author-researcher -all this makes the creation of historical texts-reconstructions a task that is more artistic than scientific.In this sense Barnes absolutely rightly repeats "we will never know", that is, "we will not know" an unambiguous and authentic truth which was hardly available to the direct participants in the events either.In this respect, "the balance between science and art remains a strategy which is unavoidable in contextual reconstruction.Its methodology is far from being algorithmic, it is rather situational" and we are forced to adhere to it [10].Thus, not only the poly-genre conjugations inherent in the novel, but also the principal poly-contextuality of its possible interpretations place this work in the field of numerous interspecific crosses.
Another problem that inevitably arises when approaching a novel is the need to make sense of the multiple connections between the characters' personalities, their multiple occupations -literary, theatrical, medical, industrial (Winnarette Singers' image, for example, is notable), inimitable manifestations of fashion, everyday life, textures, colours, smells, etc.That is, all those elements that weave together the fabric of life.The art-centrism peculiar to belepoch inevitably moulded itself in the in the dramaturgy of the book.Theatre and actors, literature, writers and books as material evidence of material perfection, the notorious tortoise, which has not escaped the fate of becoming an object of art, the multitude of characters and circumstances constitute the novel's overcrowded world.Although the title refers to the Doctor and his achievements in medicine have a prominent place in the book (the circumstances of his professional life have led to Pozzi's tragic death), the personalities that make up the protagonist's glittering entourage are also active participants in the novel, and the flamboyant bearers of the signs of his time.Many planesgenre, style, structural -in which the semantic concepts of "The Man in the Red Coat" are situated, interact with each other, creating an artistic integrity.If we understand the book as a complex genre symbiosis and the result of an artistic reading of documentary circumstances, the aim of which is to create a model of the historical situation of the belle-epoch as close to reality as possible, then we inevitably need to answer the question: how is this text organized, how does its structure function, capable of embodying multilevel semantic links?The poly-genre, dialogicality (the author and the time he reflects), mazes of horizontal and chronological layers of content, modality of semantic readings and informative stress of the text make the identification of structural regularities in its organisation topical.The form becomes the content, the tortuosity of the manifold plot twists, strung along the chronological axis of Dr Pozzi's biography, symbolically reflects the complexity of the decorative patterns characteristic of bel-epoch, and in this way the refinement and sophistication of modernity are directly reflected in the structure of Barnes's text.The isomorphism of the object of artistic investigation and its textual organisation becomes one of the ways form creation and manifests itself primarily in the multilayered interweaving of thematic and semantic concepts, similar to the decorative and unexpected interweaving of lines in art deco, and in the constant change of the topos of events.The novel is similarly multicomponent in time, which in its condensations and rarefactions forms a complex algorithm of nonlinear plot formation.Time pulsates in its multidirectional movement.The frequent changes of shots and mise-en-scenes, the shifting of scale from private detailed circumstances to generalised panoramas of a bygone time in its, as the author puts it, "historical illogic of the political life of the belleepoch", as well as the emphasised contextuality of all elements of the novel, become effective modelling techniques.The artistic nature of the book, erected on a documentary basis, acquires the properties of a spatiotemporal object with different configurations of different perspectives -direct, inverse, the play of different plans.The author's hint to the isomorphism of the text in "The Man in the Red Coat" and the aesthetic panorama of the turn of the century is also apparent in the attention paid to the poetry of Mallarmé, a precursor of many revolutionary processes in the artistic thinking of the coming century, and a favourite poet of Huysmans, the main character in the novel "À rebours" ["Backwards"].The significance of this work in Barnes' text is special.It forms a plot parallel to the main line, the Doctor's biography, and "gathers" many events of different scales into a semantic knot.Thus, polygenre, contextuality, isomorphism, probability and conceptuality in the structural organization of complex artistic matter, which reflect the aesthetics of art nouveau, are linked to the laws of text organization that are most relevant for modern art.In this aspect, intermediality as a complex, insufficiently matured and therefore plastic concept, derived from intertextuality, can serve as a tool for understanding the patterns of its functioning.

Intermediality: Aspects, Methodology, Perspectives
The notion emerged on a common platform of searching for general patterns in the artistic reflection of the world around the same time as the notion of intertextuality ("intertext" was proposed by Julia Kristeva in her work of 1967-th.The initial foundations of intermediality were laid in S. P. Sher's 1968 monograph on the study of the rich history of musical and literary interactions within German romanticism, to find theoretical grounding in O. Hansen-Lоve's seminal work in 1983).A certain chronological "parallelism" in the emergence of related but different definitions is a symptom of the overdue need for their emergence.The study of the patterns of artistic codes and sign transpositions within intertextuality allowed us to consider artistic culture as a holistic phenomenon.Intermediality's purpose in its conception was narrower and more pragmatic: although its origins lie in the context of literary and cultural studies, the rich historical tradition of the relationship between literature and music provided the impetus for its extrapolation into more current forms of communicating artistic information in a more contemporary artistic reality.The "inter" and the equally polysemous and therefore indefinite "media" have given rise to the application of "intermediality" in a variety of conceptual forms.The multiplicity of nuances in the interpretation of intermediality, as exemplified in McLuhan's book [13], is a direct indication of the incomplete development of its general theory.However, a constant in the wide spectrum of acceptable meanings remains the understanding of translation from one semiotic linguistic code to the code of another art form as a basic indicator of the essence of intermediality.Of course, intermedial manifestations are due to a variety of synthesis processes within contemporary art, although not exhausted by them.In this sense intermediality goes beyond intertextuality and takes on the meaning of an independent branch from the generally accepted mainstream definitions of art history.
When addressing intermediality, the following points should be taken into account: firstly, the fact that the concept is still under development and that its theory is far from being unified and clear.This is the reason why the criteria of intermedial poetics are in the process of being understood.Secondly, because of this, or perhaps because of the "resistance" of the object of research itself -the artistic material -the introduction of intermediality into an active analytical toolkit bears the imprint of metaphor and conventionality, which is itself a factor confirming the creative ambiguity of cognitive processes in contemporary methodology."Vague metaphors", consonant with the general metaphoricity of knowledge, can create analogies, "surpasssing both music and literature in the search for more general mediating principles" beyond iconic similarities and unambiguous correspondences [7].
A мassive volume of research that reflects the outcome of reflection on the nature of the relationship between literary and musical texts has formed an independent field of humanitarian studies.Literature in music, music in literature, and finally literature and music represent its main headings.The formula "music and literature" becomes most relevant, although numerous in-depth studies of various aspects of the translation of the musical into poetry and the influences of literature on music have expanded knowledge of the nature of both the musical and the literary.The conclusion we can draw as to what has been the most significant trend in recent decades in the various approaches to the relationship between literature and music is the recognition of a move away from superficial and straightforward attempts to transfer the regularities of one art form to another.According to W. Weisstein, "one of the most frequent methodological errors in interacts comparisons has been the failure to recognise that a feature literary present in one art is only figuratevaly present in another.This caveat regarding the literal and metaphorical use of terms in comparisons of the various arts should always be heeded" [20].And the proposal to "read a work of fiction as music" [21] can only be perceived as an intention to "rehabilitate" the metaphorical nature of the analysis of artistic material in the context of the tendency to derationalise knowledge.
Hansen-Lev's original classic definition of intermediality put forward two aspects: 1) translation from one language of art into another within the same culture; 2) combining different elements of the arts in a mono-media (literature, painting, etc.) or multimedia (theatre, cinema, etc.) text.More popular in the contemporary development of intermediality is, of course, the second aspect, the multimedia aspect, which has enormous digital, cultural and social potential.For obvious reasons, in the near future this direction will become even more important and active, corresponding to its socio-cultural value.As for the first of the approaches named by O. Hansen-Leve, "translation" (or "transposition", "transcoding") from one language of art to another can be understood in a variety of ways of their interaction, which is reflected in numerous developments.And although the theme of intermediality in terms of the relationship between literature and music is dealt with mainly by philosophers and philologists (as evidenced by the extensive and extensive literature cited, for example, in the study of A. Makhov [12], however, in musicology and beyond the terminology of intermediality a significant amount of knowledge and observations on the nature of poetry and literature incarnations in music and on the manifestations of musicality in the word art has been accumulated.The approach involving the direct extrapolation of formal schemes of musical form organization to literature and poetry, largely popular among literary scholars, has deservedly become a thing of the past with its superficial clarity and persuasiveness.But its long history and deep tradition of application are evidence of objective grounds for such comparisons.And in this respect, the development and extension of the internal parameters of intermediality and the extension of its influence to adjacent thematic areas put forward by Hansen-Lоve become evidence of both the fruitfulness of the idea of the semantic and structural conjugation of different media in intermedial vocabulary and the "genetic" relatedness of the nature of literature and music. The problem of "translation" of the sign system of one artistic text into the sign system of another art form is the main problem of intermediality.Its general idea is based on the notions of a single source of any artistic text, nourished by the laws of the cognitive and social nature of man.Indeed, "there is no work of art which has no continuation or origin in other art forms" [8].The flowering of digital technology and the advances in this field, which are both justified and to be expected in the near future, have not so much prompted a further search for common ground between the different art forms, as made more evident the indissolubility of "source" and "continuation".In this aspect, the juxtaposition between literary studies and musicology through the tools developed by semiotics has resulted in the understanding that, firstly, direct interpolations of musical semantics into the verbal text are unjustified (as in the opposite direction).And secondly, there is almost unanimous agreement on the structural coincidences possible in the organisation of verbal and musical texts."The temptation to compare", as one of the most profound researchers of "musical keys" in poetry has put it [11] is most directly reflected in the transfer of musical forms ("forms" in their most straightforward sense) to literary and poetic texts.The intention to express the structure of a literary work, the peculiarities of its dramaturgy by means of musicological apparatus is based on the general ontological foundations of temporal arts and the communicative nature of the organization of their unfolding.These provisions constitute the classics of modern musicology.But for all the rich tradition of research on the relationship between verbal and musical remains an open question: how to segment the musical material, which lexical elements of musical form can be taken as meaningful units to understand its structure?Answers to these questions suggest the creation of a methodology that would possess the necessary plasticity and universality, since the procedure of "commensuration" of the verbal and the musical is extended to works of different historical styles.Leaving aside attempts at semantic parallels, which in the role of metaphors are being "rehabilitated" in numerous studies, and accepting the generally accepted notions of syntax as the basis of semiotic constructions for comparisons between the verbal and the musical, the need to find a semantic structural unit that allows us to go beyond speculation and extend theoretical justifications to practical textual analysis would be inevitably fruitful.In this aspect, the emergence and emergence of intermediality as a separate branch in contemporary humanities research serves as indisputable confirmation of the ongoing progressive development of artistic creativity in its irreversible movement towards the discovery of new semantic horizons and models of compositional design of artistic text, and equally active is the desire to explore new configurations of infinite in its diversity musical material.

Intermediality and the Barnes Novel
The extension of the understanding of the intermedial as an overarching phenomenon that encompasses all relationships, themes and issues has traditionally been considered within the problem of art interaction [6].The classical notion of transcoding in M. Bakhtin's system or media exchange in I. Rajewski's more modern formulationall these terminological variants make it possible to realize intermediality as a concept which aims at exploring general regularities in the working out of meanings in an artistic text.The ontological foundations of artistic thinking manifest themselves in the desire to create heterogeneous artistic forms in the process of synthesizing elements of different art forms.Intermedial poetics, which, in the words of V. G. Schmidt, is still "terra incognita", is able to reflect in various projections the general form-forming principles inherent in artistic thinking as such.Although the development of the theory of intermediality is mainly in the direction of its cultural and social potentials, the particularities of Barnes' novel, which is created as an artistic-documentary model of the style of the Belle Epoque, actualise its structural component.
In the structure of "The Man in the Red Coat", one of the main peculiaritys of organisation is the fragmented flow of the plot.Although the novel is far from the non-linear constructions of many contemporary literary texts, the complex, sometimes paradoxical mosaic with equally complex cross-links and a through novel plot reinforced by documentary background makes the question of what patterns serve as a unifying factor relevant.It is difficult to answer this question without entering into metaphorical and comparative comparisons, which, as already noted, risks, in the words of C. Brown, falling into "pretentious nonsense".In relation to the structure of the novel, we may use the concept of "development" or, more precisely, "sprawl", which can have connotations not only of metaphor but also of a way of constructing a whole in which disparate content elements that are not directly connected "sprout" connective meanings in the course of the narrative [4].Each of the characters, introduced at the beginning, acquire their own novel significance.The brief notation that Oscar Wilde, on his honeymoon in Paris, was reading a novel by Joris-Karl Huysmans has spilled over into the story of the writer's later creative and personal fate, and indirectly touches on the subtle theme of gender relations.The remark about the bullet that allegedly killed Pushkin was not lost, nor was the information about the history of medical manipulation at the very beginning of the nineteenth century, for which the Doctor became famous at the end of that century and, most importantly, the description of the red coat in which John Singer Sargent depicted the main character, Dr Pozzi, which defined the title of the book.And the first summation of the rich plot "branching" was the characterisation of the Belle Epoque with its political paradoxes.Paradox in its immediate, everyday meaning as "unexpected" or "strange" takes on the significance of a methodological tool in the construction of the book.The final counter-action of this "branching out" is the unexpected and already mentioned "we don't know".The structure of the text becomes a kind of imitation of an open form, that is, a form whose continuation may lie outside the novel.This way of "going through" the novel's plot forms a structure somewhat correlated with organic constructions.The fragmentary elements of the text find their culmination in the overall final constructions, the unobvious logic of the author's will connecting the disparate segments into a living whole, endowed with fullness of meaning.Here it would be appropriate to recall the method of serial composition developed by the New Viennese school.Structurally equivalent elements of a series (series), stated at the beginning of a musical work, can receive different realisations; in the process of "growing" of the whole their concentration in significant moments of the structure occurs in the intangible intonational commonality of different realisations of the series.Transformations of the initial series into "crystalline" knots in Webern's works become form-forming factors.At a time closer to us, K. Stockhausen refers to "structural composition and listening" as "assembling" from clearly discernible elements of a sound whole [18].The musical form, just as the form of a literary work, is increasingly moving away from the unambiguous determinism of cause and effect.Two unequal but structurally equivalent storylines, in the form of the Doctor's biography and Huysmans' novel, in Barnes' novel create a bipolar structure which, of course, complicates the overall architectonics of the novel in terms of its hyperpolyphonicity, another interdisciplinary phenomenon.We are far from proposing to develop a line of research aimed at developing notions of the musicalisation of fiction that find their proponents.But Julian Barnes' novel "The Man in the Red Coat", in the aspect of not only the semantic but also the structural peculiarity of its organization, forces us to pay attention to the search for fundamental patterns in the artistic thinking of our time.The field for this search can be found in the poetics of intermediality, which is waiting to be developed.

Conclusions
Barnes' novel "The Man in the Red Coat", one of the most striking contemporary works in prose, exhibits in full measure the most characteristic patterns in the organisation of the artistic text.The polygenre symbiosis of the novel and the essay is both the cause and the consequence of a new artistic reality, for which the objective circumstances of the Belle Epoque historical period and the "living breath" of the time in its sensual, unique personal manifestations are equally important.The conceptualization of the historical reconstruction of modernity as its spatio-temporal model in Barnes' novel is manifested in the isomorphism of text and object of reflection.The multiplicity of plot lines and the diversity in their deployment, the principal variant of possible readings, taken into account by the author-researcher -these indicators, as well as many others, give grounds to consider its form and structure in the context of not only intertextuality, but also intermediality.Intermediality as a concept has considerable potential and is in the process of forming a theory and methodology.A huge array of research in the field of comparisons between literature and music has created a platform for the development of the poetics of intermediality.In addition to the accumulated facts and observations that can serve as material for the development of theory, a unifying factor is the understanding of common ontological foundations in the creation of heterogeneous artistic forms based on the synthesis of elements from different art forms.Although the application of intermediality in art history practice remains largely metaphorical, the development of its theory will enable the expansion and unification of the analytical apparatus in the study of different kinds of artistic manifestations.