Musical Outlook in Alexey Losev’s Novel The Woman-Thinker

This article discusses the role of music in the context of A.F. Losev’s philosophical prose of the 1930’s and 1940’s. Describing the key ideas of Losev’s philosophy of music, the essay presents Losev as both the writer and the philosopher and analyzes the relationship between these two facets of his work. It pays particular attention to the way philosophical ideas are conveyed in the novel The Woman-Thinker where the opposition of rational thought and antinomical knowledge emerges in the form of a binary of the “musical” and the “non-musical,” as two modes of attitude to the being. In the novel, the specificity of the musical worldview is embodied in the tragic fate of the pianist Radina whose character reveals a deep reflection on the meaning of life and the spiritual state of contemporaneity