ABOUT THE BOUNDARY MARKERS OF THE TRANSITION PERIODS: LYRICAL DIGRESSIONS IN THE FICTION BY ANTON CHEKHOV

Abstract

Anton Chekhov is generally acknowledged as a writer who symbolizes a transition period, marks the end of the Classical Russian literature of the 19th century and establishes the basics of the poetics of the 20th century. Scholars are traditionally focused on Chekhov’s innovations but not on the connections with the previous tradition. This contribution makes an attempt to reassess the aspect of Chekhov’s poetics which could be called historical “form’s thinking” (in Alexander Mikhailov’s terminology). I mean the features of tradition which result from historical dynamics of culture and are beyond individual principles of artistic consciousness. In the culture prior to the New Age, topos was a form which included both principles and ways of thinking. In this research I analyze lyrical digressions in the Russian fiction of the 19th century which correlate with topoi on the basis of their constitution. The strategy of lyrical digressions rests on the movement between two poles of the being: historical and eternal, individual and universal, etc. Before Chekhov, this movement was strictly hierarchical. In Chekhov’s lyrical digressions one can easily notice a shift of semantic coordinates when the concrete and the situational becomes valuable. However, the poles themselves (individual and universal) and the movement between them remain invariable. It is possible to claim that Chekhov’s poetics although discovers the boundaries of semantic dynamics of the lyrical digressions (as a constant form) is not aware of any other principle of thinking. This fact distinguishes Chekhov from his younger contemporaries and makes him the writer of the classical 19th century. Refs 20.