Chekhov’s Sakhalin Island in the Context of the 19th Century Russian Classical Prose

The article analyzes Chekhov’s Sakhalin Island (1893) in the context of the Russian classical prose of the second half of the 19th century as belonging to the supragenre of “books about people”. Sakhalin Island is compared with Turgenev’s Notes of a Hunter (1852) and Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Dead House (1863), which preceded Chekhov’s story, and with Tolstoy’s Resurrection (1899), which was written later. The author uses methods of intertextology. The latter is a trend in the development of the theory of intertextuality, which, breaking with the poststructuralist literary-theoretical concepts of the death of the author and intertextuality as interdiscursiveness, interprets it as a dialogue of a writer with his predecessors and contemporaries. The starting point of the work is the idea the author of the article grounded in his previous works that Dostoevsky wrote his Notes as a hidden polemic interpretation of Turgenev’s Notes of a Hunter. The author shows for the first time that, in a similar way, Chekhov, for whom the trip to Sakhalin was a deliberate attempt to acquire a similar human and literary experience, refers directly or indirectly to Turgenev’s Notes of a Hunter, and especially to Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Dead House in part of his Sakhalin Island. In other cases, his book contains no references to the Notes, but internally correlates with them. Moreover, in this latter case, this correlation sometimes has a unison, but mostly dissonant character. That is, Chekhov’s “travel notes” are often polemical in relation to Dostoevsky’s Notes. The author also notes that in Sakhalin Island has numerous cases of anticipation of plots and images of Chekhov’s subsequent works - a phenomenon that is also widely represented in Dostoevsky’s Notes. When Tolstoy wrote the Siberian chapters of his novel Resurrection, he in turn created it as internally opposed to Chekhov’s Sakhalin Island. Thus, a detailed intertextological analysis of these four texts reveals a deep interconnection -sometimes evident, but most often hidden in “books about people” written by the greatest Russian writers of the second half of the 19th century. It becomes clear that they were created in an intense creative dialogue, and often in dispute among themselves.

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