А. Chekhov in the creative reflection of F. Gorenstein: the author as the reader in the essay "My Chekhov of the Autumn and Winter of 1968"

The article is devoted to the creative reflection of Chekhov's art by F. Gorenstein in the essay "My Chekhov of the Autumn and Winter of 1968".The purpose of this article is to explore the strategies and tactics of F. Gorenstein's interpretation of A. Chekhov's prose. Social and historical reasons for F. Gorenstein's interest in Chekhov's prose, the main contexts and ideas of the essay "My Chekhov in the Autumn and Winter of 1968" are determined. In the preamble to the essay, F. Gorenstein gives a most generalized ethical description of the time, characterising it as an epoch of a moral crisis, the time of the overall advent of evil and violence that roots back to the 19th century. The fundamental civilisational, social and ideological changes of the 19th century are the industrial revolution, the formation of a civilisation of consumption and a person of the masses, the crisis of religion and its degeneracy, the dominance of atheism as a scientific world outlook and the total unbelief as a special kind of consciousness. A person of "unbelief", a person of the masses exists in the pre-moral stage of development and is confined to physiological needs; a special social class - lackeys - is taking shape and being segregated within the masses. It is a social group where the notion of the person's worth and the human dignity has been lost. The lackeys become leaders of the masses, of the crowd. An analytical sketch of the 19th-century events is necessary for F. Gorenstein in order to provide the supporting rationale for the aspects of his interpretation of Chekhov's prose: the analysis of the nature of the depressed mind in the situation of outward social freedom, the correlation of the biological and the morals in person. In the exegesis of the short stories "A New Dacha" (1899) and "In the Ravine" (1890) the writer employs the tactics of reduction: all the multifaceted range of problems is reduced and regarded either through the two main conflicts ("A New Dacha"), or through the two central characters ("In the Ravine"). The key of the conflicts lies in the psychology, in the insight of the inner nature of a person oppressed for a long while, of which the first reaction to freedom is grievance and malice accumulated from years of humiliation and fear. In "In the Ravine", both female characters are representative of the pre-moral existence. The cruelty of Aksinia can be subdued during the history of human evolution, but the submission of Lipa, who is able to live after the terrible death of her child, is related to the total ontological vitality, rooted in the human nature, a vitality that demonstrates the human ability to survive against all odds, to live after all and despite of everything. It is in this that the danger for her spiritual inner life lies. Chekhov's prose becomes a problem field for F. Gorenstein. It allows him to unfold his own thinking over the human genesis and their biosocial duality, to connect evolution and the problem of the self-preservation of humankind with the formation of ideals which exclude violence. A feature of Chekhov's world perception is reflected in the fact that it was deprived of the idealization of life, deprived of the dependence on ideas, and appealed to the reality of life. The "confirmation" strategy and the "reduction" tactics F. Gorenstein used are to detect the confirmation of the reader's position in the narrative material. The additional historical, cultural and literary contexts are created and used for strengthening the argumentation; these contexts are easily switched according to the principle of musical registers, depending upon the objectives in one selection of text or another, creating both the necessary associative and intertextual "density" of his prose and the additional informative and notional content.

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