O. M. Kolesnikov
Omsk State Pedagogical University, Omsk, Russian Federation
Stylization and Skaz in Chekhov’s Easter Stories (“The Student”, “On Holy Week”, “Murder”)
Abstract: The article is devoted to the problem of the polyphonic organization of A. Chekhov’s Easter stories, to the conjugation of the Christian view of the world and its anthropocentric alternatives in them. The ideological world alien to Christianity enters into the story “Student” through imitation of the Renan narrative style. Stylization has an ”reinforcement”. The hero of the story, Ivan Velikopolsky, bears a resemblance to E. Renan, who, being a twenty-two-year-old seminarian, decided to break with Christianity and write a critical biography of Jesus. The hero’s thinking is not theocentric: the Gospel is one of the many narratives about the past; not God is above everything, but “truth and beauty”. The phrase “truth and beauty” as a synonym for the word “God” (with blurred semantics) is found in the writings of Renan. Renan’s intertext is also found in Chekhov’s non-fiction statements about religion. With the help of a skaz, an christian point of view is explicitly introduced into the Easter story, and implicitly an unorthodox one: the narrator’s naive outlook and speech partially problematize his unconditional faith in God. Skaz is an appropriate artistic form for a deep study of religious psychology and the “masking” of the author’s attitude to the biblical picture of the world. In the story “On Holy Week”, the flaws of the religious upbringing of children are revealed. “Murder” explores the phenomenon of sectarian thinking. Denouncing deviations from moral and psychological norms, Chekhov does not reserve the last word in questions about the meaning of life, the source and purpose of the existence of the world.
Keywords: Chekhov, stylization, skaz, polyphonism, Easter story, Bible, Christ.
Paper submitted: July 14, 2021.
For citation: Kolesnikov O. M. (2022). Stylization and Skaz in Chekhov’s Easter Stories (“The Student”, “On Holy Week”, “Murder”). Russian Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities, vol. 16, no. 1, pp. 56–66. DOI: 10.17238/issn1998- 5320.2022.16.1.7.
