AUTOTEXTUAL LEITMOTIFS: THOMAS MANN

Abstract

In the article, Radosvet Kolarov's notion of autotextuality and the notion of leitmotif, shared between music and literature, meet in a peculiar creative mechanism, called autotextual leitmotif technique. At the same time, Radosvet Kolarov and Thomas Mann are ideologically aligned in a particular way on the question of the unity that the individual works of an author achieve in his oeuvre. The main aim of the paper is to provide various examples of the motivic nucleus that “Death in Venice”, “The Magic Mountain” and “Doctor Faustus” share among each other.