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• Chekhov in New York: the Functions of Frame in Louis Malle's "Vanya on 42nd Street" (1994)

  10 p.

  Olga Dzhumailo

  Views:

  193

  This paper focuses on Luis Malle’s creative adaptation of Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya”. The frame location of "Vanya on 42nd street" is not only documentary evidence and a sign of admiration for the actors' ensemble, creating the spirit of live improvisation in the unfinished theatrical production by Andre Gregory. It is argued that the film is far from being another spectacular 're-citing' of Chekhov's ‘transcultural capital’. A set of framing elements foregrounds Chekhov's art in general and the way he represents Vanya’s stoic endurance in particular as resonating with the living experience of a person of any culture in whatever language (Russian, English, Bengali, theatrical, cinematic, etc.) holds general validity. Among leitmotifs which interconnect the frame and the drama performance within the film there are also those of kinship, unselfish  friendship and true involvement in life as an ongoing rehearsal and improvisation on an inescapable life project that is never successful.

• Historia Morbi of the Hero of A.P. Chekhov's Short Story The Black Monk: Textual and Intertextual Forms of its Presentation

  Aleksandr Kubasov

  Views:

  81

  The ambiguity of the presentation of the illness of the protagonist of Chekhov’s short story The Black Monk and the author's attitude to it is discussed in this paper. The essential role of irony in the story is noted, due to the historical and literary context and the intertext that arises on its basis. The ironic modality is induced, on the one hand, due to the connection of the story with the early work of the writer, and on the other hand, with the works of other authors. The role of Griboyedov's comedy Woe from Wit as a catalyst for irony is also discussed. The ironic modality does not exclude the formulation of a serious problem of the inauthentic existence of humans but gives it an ambivalent character. The interweaving of the conditional beginning and the unconditional in the depiction of the hero and his illness allows Chekhov to pose the ontological problem of the inadequacy of the self-esteem of the individual.

• “Hungarian Subject Matter” in Chekhov (The Short Story The Unnecessary Victory)

  Tatyana Ilyuhina

  Views:

  186

  The 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.

• A Story by A. P. Chekhov “The Wolf”: Historical-medical and Archetypal Aspects

  Viktoriya Kondratyeva

  Views:

  422

  The 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.

• The Heritage of Tolstoy’s Artistic Detail in the Poetics of Chekhov (Defamiliarization and „Randomness”)

  Dominika Zoltán

  Views:

  176

  One type of the “random Chekhovian detail ”can be referred to as a special cognitive phenomenon arising during the perception of the background and foreground within the depicted perception of the hero. In this paper, I suggest that this technique works if we perceive Chekhov’s laconicity against the detailed descriptions of the inner world of Tolstoy’s characters in the process of their estrangement. In the first part using the example of “War and Peace” I examine the “random” details concerning various features of Tolstoy's defamiliarization and show their transformation in Chekhov’s poetics. The examples from Chekhov’s early short stories “Grisha” and “Polinka” demonstrate an intermediate level of this transformation. In the second part I turn to the story “The Lady with the Dog” and consider the transformation of Tolstoy's technique through parallels with the novels “War and Peace” and “Anna Karenina”. The situation of Gurov and Tolstoy’s characters (Natasha, Prince Andrei, Levin) is similar with regard to the fact that they retain true love in their hearts and get  into an everyday social situation, where they are exposed to the the automatism and lies of everyday life with special intensity.

• «Chekhov’s Stage Set»: «The Cherry Orchard» in the Russian Poetry of the 20th – Early 21st Century

  8 p.

  Marina Larionova

  Nadezhda Tropkina

  Views:

  232

  Chekhov’s text is one of the most significant constituents of the Russian poetry of the 20th – early 21st centuries. The one most frequently alluded to is the play by Chekhov – «The Cherry Orchard». The play written at the break of historical epochs turns out to be in tunes with the times of another turning-point. This fact conditions the allusion to the Chekhov’s text in a poem «The Young Poetry» by V. Kornilov. The main feature of the crucial time period in the poem is the category of freedom, unexpectedly granted during the historical turn and change. The key theme, which determines the historiosophical sense of the text, is a quotation from «The Cherry Orchard», a dialogue between Gaev and Fiers. I. Kabysh perceives the Chekhov’s play both mythopoetically and symbolically in such poems as «How Niveous-White Everything Is in Russia Today! » and «The Snow Started to Fall Without Delays». She introduces a different time into the text, models the reality after the events described in «The Cherry Orchard» and interpreted by the author of the poem in the lower clef (as in «crumbled estate»). The loss of the Garden, its disintegration, the loss of entity, is a gradual, step by step, process – into dachas, then into dust; that is the way the motif of vanishing space and culture appears.

• The relationship between Excellent People by Chekhov and the ideological position and artistic attitude in the late short stories of Leo Tolstoy

  Ildikó Regéczi

  Views:

  90

  In 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.