ABSTRACT
Many critics have alluded to the musical properties of Dostoevsky's prose. Despite the apparent superficiality of Dostoevsky's musical appreciation, there are nevertheless serious grounds for drawing parallels between the world of music and his methods of literary construction. Counterpoint denotes the 'combination of simultaneously sounding musical lines according to a system of rules', and has been in use since the fourteenth century. If key contrasts (in the form of alternation of subject in the tonic key and the 'answer' in the dominant) constitute an important element of a musical fugue, thematic contrasts, developed through consistent mirroring and doubling, are fundamental to Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky seems also to echo Bach's compositional method in creating in The Brothers Karamazov almost the prose equivalent of a fugue, In a fugue the main theme will be played 'in different voices and different keys, and occasionally at different speeds or upside down or backwards', as Douglas R.
