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“Hungarian Subject Matter” in Chekhov (The Short Story The Unnecessary Victory)
Views:248The paper considers “The unnecessary victory” as one of the notable works of the earliest stage of Chekhov’s creativity. The Hungarian theme of the story, inspired by the novels of Mór Jókai translated into Russian, and its plot, related to the traditions of the European career novel, address a wide audience. The young writer plays along with this reader with exotic narrative elements and delineates the difference between serious and marginal literature. This hoax, together with other skits of those years, reveals the young writer’s view of literary pursuits as an exciting game in which the main expectation is to be truthful and graceful. The same goals, according to Chekhov, characterize literature in general, regardless of the field of its competence and of the readership coverage.
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In search of winners: On the 100th anniversary of Yuri Trifonov's birth
Views:139Trifonov’s short stories are characterised by a direct tackling of moral issues. Tthe story The Winner contrasts social activity and biological longevity. Trifonov does not choose between the two but reflects on both. The conflict between biology and history is one of the main conflicts depicted in his remarkable prose.
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The relationship between Excellent People by Chekhov and the ideological position and artistic attitude in the late short stories of Leo Tolstoy
Views:293In Chekhov and His Prose (first published in 1965), the author, Thomas G. Winner contends that the subject matters of a few of Chekhov’s short stories written in the 1880s (such as «Хорошие люди» [Excellent People]) were created in the spirit of Leo Tolstoy, yet the one called «Несчастье» [Misfortune], written also in 1886, already marked the beginning of a series of texts that can be interpreted directly as “a light parody” of Anna Karenina (1873–1877) as well. The basic question posed here concerns whether there is really a significant difference that can be observed between the above two works and whether they reveal this sharp difference in the reception of Tolstoyan ideas that Winner's monograph suggests. The paper seeks to answer this query on the basis of the interpretation of Excellent People and the textual representation of the issue of goodness. In this analysis, particular attention is given to the way in which Tolstoy's ideas are represented and to the author's poetic choices that bring the text close to Tolstoy's late short stories.
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A Story by A. P. Chekhov “The Wolf”: Historical-medical and Archetypal Aspects
Views:570The plot of A. P. Chekhov's story "The Wolf" (in the first edition the story was called "Hydrophobia (A true story)") is associated with the frequent facts of wolves attacking people in the 1880s in the central part of the country (called an epidemic at the time).The time of writing the story between March and December 1886 is a year after the discovery of the rabies vaccine in the laboratory of Louis Pasteur and its successful testing in 1885; and in the year the story was created, the first Pasteur stations in Russia were opened. The paramount aspect of a plot of the work by A. P. Chekhov is connected with the field of psychology. Fear, which takes possession over the character, the landowner Nilov, is a psychological phenomenon in the medical sense and leads to an understanding of the fact why Chekhov needs an emphasis on the wolf in the title of the second edition of the story. The image of a wolf with its archetypal component plays a fundamental role in recreating a clinically accurate picture of fear. The real clash with a real wolf becomes a reflection of the fight with the "mental wolf," with its own fears. The writer is interested not so much in the existential side of the phenomenon of fear, as in the psychological one. And the image of a wolf with its archetypal component plays a fundamental role in recreating a clinically accurate picture of fear.