“Three years” by A. P. Chekhov: a story as a novel

Considering the creative evolution of Chekhov, an undoubted consequence of his almost a year-long journey in Siberia, the genre structure of the story “Three Years” is regarded as the result of the intention to “write a novel from Moscow life”. Although retaining the definition of the story, in fact, “Three Years” appeared as a work saturated and permeated with the genre intentions of the novel, with the epic breath of a large genre revealed in the issues, the image structure, and the characteristic features of the poetic text. Chekhov conducted his work not towards releasing the story from its inherent functions, but, on the contrary, towards loading the story with the genre features of the novel, i.e., not “from a novel to a story,” but “from a story to a novel.” This study examines and analyzes the contribution of Chekhov to the formation of the Moscow text of Russian literature, manifesting the author’s original intention. The narrative space of the story “Three Years” as the work with clearly expressed novelistic intentions turned out to be so generously saturated with the living feature of the passing time, its social, cultural, everyday atmosphere, that many of its motive-plot concepts would find artistic embodiment in subsequent works, enriched with new ideologically aesthetic meanings and accents. In particular, the paper discusses the impact of the story “Three Years” on the play “Three Sisters” and the story “The Bride.”

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