Music and Time Annotation << Back Opus posth. To the 85th anniversary of Alfred Schnittke A.I. Demchenko The article deals with the final stage of Alfred Schnittke’s work, in connection with which some life circumstances that influenced the artistic world of the composer are noted. Severe disease could not impose a certain seal on his work. With all that, at this stage, he clearly entered a new round of artistic search and developed a musical language that is radically different from the previous one. An important feature of the updated artistic thinking was to refer to the «metaphysics» of abstract constructions, in parallel to which the line of autobiography actively developed. In contact with the autobiographical motifs of the late Schnittke remarkably affected the type of musical works that are called «Swan songs», so in his individual works dominates the emotion of enlightened sadness of the sunset of life. The final section of the essay discusses the extremely important for the composer's work question of his national «enzymes», which is most often denoted by the formula Russian German, and the remarkable regularity of the chronology of his life. Keywords: the final stage of Schnittke’s work, a new round of artistic search, «Swan songs» of the composer. Pp. 43-47.