This article focuses on the Slavic studies in the USA, examining the intermedial connections of the nineteenth-century Russian literature and music. American Slavists assess the importance of music in the life and work of Russian writers; trace the role and functions of musical themes, motifs, images, and material objects (musical instruments), sound, rhyme, and meter. Particular attention is paid to the creative “dialogues” of writers (N.M. Karamzin, A.S. Pushkin, N.V. Gogol) and composers (P.I. Tchaikovsky, M.P. Mussorgsky, S.S. Prokofiev, D.D Shostakovich), as well as to the history of translation of a literary text into the language of opera art (Eugene Onegin, Boris Godunov, Nose). The article shows that the analysis of the musicality of Russian literature in the works of American Slavists, as a rule, is complicated by various methodological approaches: structuralist, semiotic, linguo-statistical, “new historical”, comparative, biographical, and feminist.
Slavic researchеs in the USA; nineteenth-century Russian literature; musicality of literature; intermediality; poetics; motif; image; singing; opera.