“Murder” as a Chekhov Story

Abstract

The focus is on the story Murder which occupies a special place in Chekhov’s work (this manifests itself at the level of the central plot line, in an emotionally expressive style unusual for the writer (murder scene), in the motif of the protagonist gaining true faith, in spatial remoteness of scenes from the “big” world, in the gloomy coloring of the narrative). At the same time, the author of the article shows that thanks to a number of features — the poetics of repetition, the unobvious commonality of the characters conflicting with each other, the difficulty of their communication, the presence of typically Chekhov themes and words, the author’s axiology — Murder organically fits into boundaries of the writer’s artistic world. As a result, dialectics of the familiar and the new arises, when the familiar, typical of other Chekhov’s works, is interwoven into a new problem, theme and plot construction.