«Dragonfly and Ant» as interpreted by A.P. Chekhov

Abstract

The article justifies the use of the bask code for the interpretation of a number of Chekhovian texts. The story of «Hopper» (directly referring to the bass of Krylov «Dragonfly and Ant») is considered in the conditional first part of the article from the point of view of the poetic «reshaping» and the motif structure. Unlike the Krylov ant, the Chekhov ant not only put the dragonfly under its roof, but also did everything in order to fully provide it. There is another important difference. If in the fabulous version the ant dooms the dragonfly to death, in the Chekhovian version, death befalls the ant itself. As for the thematic configuration of the story, it is determined by two dominant motives - «substitution» and «wasted efforts». The article shows how these motifs are real on the discursive, narrative and compositional levels of the text. In the second part of the article, the characters that somehow correspond to the actant roles of «dragonflies» and «ants» in other texts of the writer are in sight. However, this correspondence has a relative character. In the characters «dragonflies» something from the «ant» can be found, and in the «ants» – from the «dragonfly». In this case, the dominant character still stands out. In the third conditional part of the article the subject of attention is the Chekhov 's interpretation of the basal motif «roof». In the Chekhov distillery, when there is no union between a dragonfly and an ant, not only can the dragonfly and the ant lose its shelter, but also the ant itself.