Chekhov’s Discourse of World Culture (To the 160th Anniversary of A.P. Chekhov’s Birth)

The purpose of this article is to prove that world culture, whether it is a picture of the world in its generalized quality or specific artistic practices in different types of art, still remains under the unabated influence of A.P. Chekhov’s personality and creativity. This applies not only to his characters, life conflicts, or individual artistic and aesthetic techniques, but also to the meaning-setting, qualitatively changed by A.P. Chekhov, which we define as “Chekhov’s discourse”. It is understood as a frame of reference in which intercultural communication takes place, and designated by a cultural matrix with its inherent codes and sometimes unexpected meanings, born of decades of Chekhov’s attention and understanding.

The author believes that the main features of Chekhov’s discourse of world culture are: the creator’s penetration, unique by its depth and paradoxical nature, into the social and moral world of man (a kind of “diagnosis”); the conceptual integration of the intertext and context of individual creativity and world cultural experience; and the formation of aesthetic foundations for the art of absurdity as a characteristic cultural phenomenon of the Chekhov and post-Chekhov eras.

The “diagnosis” was a product of Chekhov’s unique intellectual insight and intuitive talent. The property of Chekhov’s diagnosis, and the explanation that there were no recipes, is the presence of Chekhov’s figure and his picture of the world in the cultural continuum. The continuation of Chekhov’s thoughts and imaginative systems, with all their details and models, are several layers of creative “products” created in different types of art and in different periods that have passed in the life of mankind after Chekhov.

Chekhov’s intertext is a dialogue between a Russian person and other epochs and authors; this dialogue is not without irony in relation to the “interlocutors”, to the subject of discussion, to life itself, a source of unexpected associations and ideas about the paradoxical connections of life and being. The author believes that Chekhov’s context as a semantic facet of Chekhov’s discourse has been manifested primarily in those connections and influences that were and continue to be of a personalistic nature: researchers from different countries, followers in his creativity.

In the space of eternity, against the background of paradoxical cultural trends, a phenomenon has been formed that we previously designated as the concept of “Russian absurdity” first introduced into scientific circulation. On the one hand, Chekhov’s discourse of world culture, had unobtrusively introduced into artistic practice the principles of alogism, mutual misunderstanding, alienation, ironic discrepancies of everyday manifestations and details, on the other hand, it had marked the existence of ordinary people in the space of eternity, in an empty and dangerous, alien and incomprehensible world.

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