«Поэтика медицины» в творчестве А. П. Чехова

Abstract

«Poetics of medicine» is a term that might still need justifi cation. The extent to which the use of medicine-related images in fi ction runs its own course, and to which it follows the rules of standard poetics is still an open question. The article provides a preliminary answer to these questions, using the works of A. P. Chekhov as a case study. Chekhov was the first Russian writer who gave us a strong reason to discuss the «poetics of medicine». The following aspects of this poetics were fully and widely represented in Chekhov’s work: medical prescriptions as a microtext of a literary text, outlining the symbolic meaning of the socalled «pharmacological subtext», autobiographical and biographical subtexts of the doctors as literary personae and, finally, various types of intertextuality associated with their image.