Biblical quotation as an attribute in Chekhov’s prose

O. M. Kolesnikov
Omsk State Pedagogical University, Omsk, Russian Federation

Biblical quotation as an attribute in Chekhov’s prose

Abstract. The article is devoted to the problem of “non-poetic” way of handling a quote and depiction of oral
quotation discourse in prose. A quotation as an attribute is an artistic depiction of the citing manner in oral speech when
a citing person, for any reason, associates the speech situation with the precedent situation; one of its variant is the
biblical quotation-attribute. The abundance of such quotations in Chekhov’s prose testifies to the excellent knowledge
of the Holy Scriptures by his contemporaries and to their special view of the world when they discover signs of sacred
history in everyday events. The prevalence of this kind of quotation is illustrated by examples from the works of Tolstoy
and Dostoevsky. The phenomenon is described from the standpoint of a systematic approach, i.e. quotation is viewed as
an element of a complex system that has connections with other complex systems. A quotation-attribute is a quote that
interacts with its context in such a way that it causes a dialogical increment: the intertextual connection is intertwined
with the interdiscursive one. A distinction between the quotation-attribute and the allusion is made basing on the
difference in the methods of a borrowed words introduction into the text of a literary work.

Keywords: A. P. Chekhov, M. M. Bakhtin, Bible, prose, quotation, intertextual analysis, systematic approach.

Paper submitted: March 9, 2021.

For citation: Kolesnikov O. M. (2021) Biblical quotation as an attribute in Chekhov’s prose. The Science of Person:
Humanitarian Researches, vol. 15, no. 3, pp. 15–19. DOI: 10.17238/issn1998-5320.2021.15.3.2.

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