Криптограф. Заметки для ненаписанных биографий Чехова

Abstract

The article is based on the analysis of A.P. Chekhov’s play The Three Sisters. It is executed according to “newly discovered circumstances”, in other words, based on the facts that were not taken into account before: from the subtleties of the passage of time in the play to the legal features of status rights in Russia in the late 19th — early 20th century. The undertaken analysis allows us to assert that the conventional view on the play can be corrected, since it generates an inadequate perception and interpretation of The Three Sisters. This is the main conflict of the first part of the article. The second part presents the thesis that the new data in The Three Sisters allow us to go beyond the text itself and look at the life circumstances of the author and, perhaps, his entire work from a different, somewhat unexpected angle. Chekhov’s stories and plays were traditionally regarded as casts of the socio-political realities of Russia in the 1880s-1890s, practically devoid of such a feature as literary play. To show and prove the unsoundness of such a view, some “newly discovered circumstances” from The Three Sisters are extrapolated to the biography of the author of the play. This allows us to ask legitimate questions concerning not only the life but also the modus operandi of the author of The Three Sisters and to conclude that the conventional narrative of Chekhov’s life, where he is traditionally defined as “a self-made intellectual”, is falling apart and requires rethinking.