UDC

821.161.1

Authors

Sergey P. Stepanov
Saint-Petersburg State Economic University;
ul. Sadovaya 21, St. Petersburg, 191023, Russian Federation;
e-mail: stepanov.s@unecon.ru

Abstract

This article deals with a number of issues related to the organization of narration in Anton Chekhov’s prosaic works, and, above all, the phenomenon of subjective narrative. This phenomenon is brought to life by a significant number of lexical and grammatical means and, in the functional aspect, allows the author (the creator of the text) to reveal the layers of the characters’ consciousness hidden from external observation. This, in the end, shows in a different light the hierarchy of characters and their role in the formation of the aesthetic whole. The following prose works by Anton Chekhov are analysed here: short stories “Vanka” (1886) and “Gusev” (1890) and novella “Duel” (1891). The author of this article quotes a long extract from the “Duel” and shows that its function within the framework of the whole literary text is very difficult to explain both from the point of view of A.P. Chudakov’s concept of randomness, unselected nature of the depicted material, and from the point of view of V.B. Katayev’s epistemological concept. Therefore, the study suggests an alternative explanation of what such detailed descriptions can mean in the artistic system of Chekhov’s works. According to the author, they prove that a character (though not each of them) is able to understand reality perceptually, that his/her consciousness is open and interacts with the reality. This ability, in its turn, has a significant impact on the overall aesthetic interpretation of the work. The analysis of the two-subject narrative in the stories “Vanka” and “Gusev” also throws new light on the epistemological concept of V.B. Katayev’s Chekhov prose.

Keywords

A.P. Chekhov, V.B. Katayev, epistemological concept of the Chekhov prose, subjectivized narrative, two-subject narrative

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