Импрессионизм в творчестве А. П. Чехова: история термина

Abstract

The article explores the history of the term “impressionism” in reviews of Chekhov’s prose and drama, which were written by his contemporaries, and in modern research of Chekhov’s creativity (the meaning of this word in historical context). Nowadays the term “impressionism” is popular with researchers of Chekhov’s prose and drama, but there is no strict and generally accepted meaning of it. Researchers suppose various features of impressionism in literature: the impressionistic writer depicts moments of a usual daily life, uses bright and light “paints” in descriptions of nature, prefers short stories and “sketches” instead of voluminous novels and the works of such a writer resemble the “unfinished” and “slipshod” pictures of impressionists created by inconsistent brush strokes, etc. The author of the article does not deny these conceptions of impressionism but believes that the understandings of impressionism should be studied firstly in the historical way. This article studies the uses of the term “impressionism” for more than 150 years: from first readers of Chekhov’s prose and viewers of his dramas to latest researchers. The analysis of the critical articles and research papers about Chekhov created in 1890–2020 showed that the definition “an impressionist” for Chekhov’s contemporaries meant “the author who wants to impress the reader/viewer of the work by creating a certain atmosphere and does not wish to examine ethical and social issues like previous writers/artists did”; and for researches of the 20th century this word meant “the author who belongs to impressionism as a style in art”. Nowadays the term “impressionism” is ambiguous: modern researchers often use this term unsystematically in both its meanings, so it is necessary to specify what a researcher means in a particular paper.