Anton Chekhov's Ionych and George Eliot's Middlemarch: The fate of man in a soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances

The paper attempts to give a new view of the conception of the story “Ionych” by a comparative analysis of Chekhov's work with George Eliot's Middlemarch. Eliot's novel was written in 1871-72 and immediately published in Russian magazines. Did Chekhov read it? There is no sure evidence of it. But Eliot's name regularly appeared in Russian periodicals. A.S. Suvorin published an essay about her life, too. One more connecting link is G.H. Lewes, Eliot's common-law husband. His book Physiology of Common Life was very popular in Russia. Attention to common life and its methodical, even scientific study is the “node”, in which the interests of Chekhov, Lewes and Eliot converge. Eliot was also known by her propensity to natural sciences. Many researchers noted the importance of Chekhov's main profession for his creative method. The key feature of Chekhov's poetics, maximally objective representation of the facts of life, is similar to Eliot's analytical psychological analysis. For a reason, the novel Middlemarch has the subtitle A Study of Provincial Life. The type of character, which Eliot and Chekhov put in the centre of their works, is significant. This is a natural scientist and a practicing doctor at the same time. In Middlemarch, this type of character obeyed the Victorian idea about the heroism of common life and the tribulations of man in struggle for freedom to be true to his own moral position, which was close to Chekhov. In the author's view, the parallels between the fates of the two doctors bear evidence of the fundamental closeness of the Victorian philosophy of personality to Chekhov, of the affinity of the creative method and the moral-philosophical views of Eliot and the Russian writer rather than a random typological resemblance. The most salient parallel between the two works is the image of two provincial towns. Middlemarch, like the “town S.”, is not simply a “milieu”, but a representation of all that man has to contend with: pettiness, platitude, narrow-mindedness. The plot of the story “Ionych” has an evident typological resemblance with one of the two lines of the novel Middlemarch. The young Doctor Lydgate comes to a provincial town, intending to achieve a breakthrough in science, but is soon defeated in his ambitious plans. The Turkin family also has an analogue in Eliot's novel. Love affairs of the two main characters are similar: both doctors are victimized by their own delusions. Disregard to other people's feelings, self-confidence, pride, desire to stand the pace eventually ruin Lydgate. Nevertheless, the character develops morally. Startsev loses more than the purpose of life: he loses his living soul, the ability to sympathize and empathize. Eliot's study of the fate of a young intellectual in a provincial milieu continued in Chekhov's story. His character still notices the imperfection of the ambient “bog”, but he is already indifferent to himself and to the true mission of man; therefore, he swiftly loses human features. The closeness of the moral pathos and of the specific nature of objectivity in Eliot's and Chekhov's works indicates the fact of a particular dialogue of the two European writers.