“A Misfortune” by A. P. Chekhov: rethinking the literary tradition

The subject of research in this article is the motive, figurative, ideological intersections of the trajectories of A. P Chekhov's story “A Misfortune” and the novel by L. N. Tolstoy “Anna Karenina”. The comparison of these works is extremely relevant, since its results can correct the idea of the hero of the love collision. In addition to “Anna Karenina”, in “A Misfortune” one can find references to “Eugene Onegin” by A. S. Pushkin and “Rudin” by I. S. Turgenev. The purpose of this article is to determine the trajectory of the development of images and motifs of Pushkin's, Turgenev's and Tolstoy's prose, inscribed in the “dacha topos” of A. P. Chekhov's story “A Misfortune”. The objectives of our research include determining the specifics of the writer's attitude to literary tradition, analyzing its use and interpretation in Chekhov's story, which becomes possible with methods of comparative and motivic analysis involving elements of structural analysis. The images and motives unfolded in the plots of Chekhov's pretexts are deformed and inverted in “A Misfortune”. Chekhov's semantics of boredom and monotony are connected with the topos of the railway, where the heroes of “A Misfortune” meet, depriving this meeting of a fateful potency. The dacha topos constantly mentioned in the text of the story, in the entourage of which the characters' relationships develop in accordance with the dacha chronotope, introduces an additional depoetizing meaning. The description of the characters of “A Misfortune” also contains an obvious reductive irony, emphasizing their spiritual inadequacy. The focus is also on questions about the author's attitude to the characters of “A Misfortune” and the ambiguous semantics of the title of Chekhov's story. It seems relevant and promising to further study the creative dialogue between Chekhov and his predecessor writers, which allows us to take a fresh look at the features of the literary anthropology of Chekhov's work.

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