Revisiting Interpretations of Anton Chekhov’s Artistic Philosophy in Modern Humanitarian Research

This article explores some literary criticism and theory works as well as philosophical and psychological academic texts by both Russian and foreign researchers revisiting various trends in studying Anton Chekhov’s artistic philosophy. Four areas of the research, aimed at analysing humans and their existence in Chekhov’s literary works, are identified, namely: examining the writer’s philosophical views and characters and defining him as a thinker addressing in his literature the human existence and its associated plight (works by O.I. Rodionova, A.G. Myslivchenko, et al.); reflecting on the moral and religious seeking in Chekhov’s artistic philosophy (monographs and articles by A.S. Sobennikov, N.V. Kapustin, G. Shefski, through comparison of his oeuvre with the most considerable Western European philosophies, e.g. existentialism (works by P.N. Dolzhenkov, I.I. Mikhaylov, T.B. Zaytseva, R.S. Spivak, et al.); thoroughly analysing poetic devices and attempting to experience existential situations in which the author immerses the reader (works by A.P. Chudakov, V.B. Kataev, S.A. Kibalnik, I.I. Plekhanova, N.E. Razumova, S. Lipke, et al.). Comparing these humanitarian research works has led to the rising interest of many scholars in the concept ‘existentiality’ in Chekhov’s prose and plays, which is interpreted differently depending on the researcher’s perspective. This interpretation process is inextricably linked with the inconsistent use of the concept ‘existentiality’ in modern humanities. This article offers an alternative take on the terms ‘existential’, ‘existential consciousness’, and ‘existentialism’, and re-positions Chekhov as an existential writer. This work concludes that ‘existentiality’ lies in spreading the idea of ‘being’ throughout the literary text, but not in some text fragments, irrespective of their significance. The concept also entails a basic connection of multi-scale and dissenting dualities, such as daily routine and existence, chaos and harmony, the carnal and the spiritual, the tragic and the comic, the lofty and the vile, happiness and suffering, freedom and need, etc. There has been considerable attention to the debates on the comparative approach and the existential and phenomenological approach to interpreting Chekhov’s works. This article demonstrates the benefits of the latter since it allows understanding the phenomenon of Chekhov’s oeuvre on a deeper scale and to study the mechanisms constituting meanings in his literary texts as well as the ways of conducting a dialogue between the reader and the work itself. Chekhov’s artistic philosophy with a focus on the concept ‘existential consciousness’ should be used as grounds in future studies. This offers a vivid image of not only Chekhov’s literary features but also the specifics of the literary process, given that ‘existential consciousness’ is actualized during transitional eras, one of which featured Chekhov as a thinker and a literary artist.

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