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Abstract. The paper opens with the first attempt to outline the history of portraying Napoleon in English fiction from the translations of the XIX century to present day, in which “Napoleon Symphony” (1974) by Burgess was a turning point. The novel offers the vision of Napoleon as multifaceted, contradictory, heroic-comic character. The standard critical approach to the novel is from the point of view of intermediality, as a unique experiment of translating Beethoven’s Heroic Symphony into prose medium; with that in mind, the paper aims at understanding the content and meaning of Napoleon character and Burgess’ concept of heroic and heroism, through analysis of literary means used to create the main character in the novel. Traditional methods of literary studies are applied to reveal the evolution of the character’s nominations in the progress of the plot, of the two “choruses” that accompany him throughout the novel – those of generals and soldiers, – the portraiture of his body and mental states. The three symbolic leitmotifs are revealed to be the inner joints of the fragmented character full of antinomies. Derrida’s, Agamben’s, Cohen’s theories of monsters, of the interface between the human and inhuman, serve to reveal the novel’s build up of Napoleon as a monster. The author mounts the under-human and super-human traits in his character, insinuating and giving straight parallels between Napoleon and Hitler, between Napoleon and Prometheus, Napoleon and Jesus. Napoleon’s being simultaneously more and less than human leads to the author’s attempt to take the concept of heroic action out of the realm of reality to the realm of creative imagination, which makes for one of the most striking features of the novel and contributes to its understanding as a daring postmodernist experiment, strategically evading any single whole interpretation.
Keywords: Napoleon, Anthony Burgess, postmodernism, metafiction, symbolic leitmotif, monster, the animal, hero, the heroic.