ОБРАЗ ЧЕХОВА ПОД МАСКОЙ ГЕРОЯ В РОМАНЕ А. С. СУВОРИНА «В КОНЦЕ ВЕКА. ЛЮБОВЬ»

Abstract

The article is devoted to the phenomenon of creative controversy, realized in a fictional form. One of the most active interlocutors of Chekhov was the publisher, journalist and writer Alexei Sergeevich Suvorin. He knew his younger colleague well and left few but valuable testimonies about him. The loss of Suvorin’s letters to Chekhov causes serious semantic gaps. They can be filled by the analysis of other sources, with a lower level of verification. These include Suvorin’s novel “At the end of the century. Love “(1893), in which the author created the image of Chekhov, hiding him under the mask of one of the main characters. The novelist, like a painter, used Chekhov as a sitter for his work. Some details of the literary image of Vidalin, which is “written off” from Anton Pavlovich. They find confirmation in documentary evidence. The novel image of the hero and the real person cannot be identical to each other. The character functions within the framework of the created artistic world, in interconnection with other characters, so he obeys the author’s intentions. The significance of the reflection of Chekhov’s personality in a literary text is due to the fact that it provided Suvorin with a large degree of freedom to express his opinion about a colleague. The results of the study can be used in the analysis of Chekhov’s interaction with an influential contemporary, as well as in biographical works.