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For Alfred Schnittke (1934–1998), a representative of the Soviet musical avant-garde, the story of Faust was a life-defining text. A particularly important role in his biography was played by the novel Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann, which became a kind of encyclopedia of the composer's life and works. Mann's novel reflects his philosophy of music, which was greatly influenced by Theodor Adorno's reflections on modern music. Schnittke considered Mann's main char­acter Leverkuhn to be his musical alter ego and throughout his life followed the musical pursuits of this fictional composer. This article describes in parallel the musical evolution of Leverkuhn and Schnittke. The Soviet composer has re­alized in his life Leverkuhn's musical pursuits: the important elements in the de­velopment of Schnittke's music, such as serialism, monogram and polystylism, were a reflection of Leverkuhn's musical experiments in the novel. The author of this article, analyzing the peculiarity of genre and musical, as well as meta-musical structure of Schnittke's Faust Cantata, explains the composer's polystylism as a polyphony and also investigates his philosophy of music. For Schnittke, mu­sic was not so much an imitation of natural sounds, an expression of human feel­ings and emotions, or a representation of absolute harmony, as a kind of semiotic system within which there happens a free dialogue between musical forms, meta-musical reflections on musical languages, intellectual plays with abundant musical material. The pinnacle of Schnittke's musical evolution Faust Cantata was a realization of his philosophy of music as a polyphony not only in art, but also in life.

The article examines the religious and philosophical components of K. Male­vich's Suprematist paintings and the origin of their revolutionariness in the wide context of theoretical works: N. Lobachevsky's "pangeometry", El Lissitsky's axonometry, P. Ouspensky's fourth dimension, P. Florensky's reverse perspec­tive, Z. Freud's attraction to death, J. Lacan's the symbolic and the real, the ab­solute presence of God through invisibility in the religious philosophy of J.-L. Marion. The author traces the stages of conceptualization of K. Malevich's Suprematism: from the sketch of stage sets in opera «Victory over the Sun» (1913), where the predecessor of "Black square" (1915) first appeared, to the Suprematist abstract paintings with three-dimensional axonometric views of geo­metric figures and, finally, to their complete destruction. The phenomenon of to­tal invisibility, being a method of negative theology, becomes a condition for the birth of the Suprematist icons "Black square" and "White on white" (1917‒1918), which should be taken not as a regression to the two-dimensionality of paintings, but as an absolute form of the axonometric projection, the invisibility as a total seeing. The complete negation of geometric forms – a dead end, «an ut­terly dark spot» – can be understood as a space for transition toward the sacred transcendental Being, the presence of an absolute artistic form, which is en­dowed with the highest sacred meaning. The revolutionariness of Suprematism in this sense does not lie in its utopian contents. On the contrary, it is present in the "zero degree of forms" that denies even itself and in the contemplation per se on this emptiness as fullness.