Журнал «Филоlogos»

CULTURAL ALLUSIONS IN A.P. CHEKHOV'S "MINOR" DRAMA: BASED ON THE EXAMPLE OF THE PLAY "SWAN-SONG (KALKHAS)"

Author: Morozova E.N.

The article deals with the analysis of cultural allusions in one-act plays by A.P. Chekhov. Special attention is given to the images of Shut Ivanych, Kalkhas, the candle and the swan-song. The analysis is made of the embodied in the play the writer's ideas of life and death, fortunes of the theatre and the true actor's talent, of a person's destiny and place in the world, of the sense of existence and the necessity of choice between true values and their outward appearance. The article particularly singles out the image of the candle, which symbolizes man's eternal search for his own way and unites two planes - the mundane one (the world where man lives) and the sacred one (the world where man starts to realize himself). A private situation in the provincial comic actor Vasiliy Vasilyevich Svetlovidov's life loses personal character, getting extremely wide expression, appealing to the collective experience of the reader/spectator. The originality of Shut Ivanych's image is emphasized, it has no analogues in European culture. Considered in the context of two traditions (the classical and the operetta ones) the allusive figure of Kalkhas lets the author interpret the main hero's image in the unity of the tragic and the comic. The stable reminiscence "swan-song" bears the general character and gives reason for making the conclusion that the play leaves the frames of a comic sketch and is filled with tragic content. Having analyzed the techniques and the ways of including allusions into the text of the Chekhov's play, the author came to the conclusion that a "strange" word does not only include the writer's "minor" drama in the world cultural context, but determines its unique character, which is connected with combining in the frame of an externally comic sketch text the aesthetic categories of the tragic and the comic, the high and the low. The author proves that allusions, bearing a large sense loading, create the artistic polysemanticity of the work, represent one of the sources of concealed meaning in the play and help to form the poly-genre nature of A.P.Chekhov's one-act plays, which is conditioned by co-existence in the frames of one text the signs of different genres: the tragedy, the everyday life drama, the lyrical and psychological drama, the satiric comedy, the comic sketch, the farce.