Равенство неравных: парадоксы власти в прозе Чехова

Abstract

The article deals with the problem of power in the whole Chekhov’s oeuvre, with a special attention paid to early humorous short stories. The author argues that Chekhov’s approach to the problem was different from his fellow writers’ one, because he had transformed the presuppositions of the order as a speech genre, presented power as weak and growing old, and mixed social relations with anthropological problem of age. All that led Chekhov to a specific kind of estrangement of the very notion of “power”. He constantly chooses paradoxical situations of the simultaneous dominance and inferiority in order to present a human being as an intersection of social rows, which usually are believed to be independent. The article contains a latent polemics with Bakhtin’s thesis of “an excess of humanity” and “uncloseness” of the hero as a guarantee of the prosaic meaningfulness. In Chekhov’s non‐novelistic world a human being is never higher than his/her social role and anthropological characteristics, but nevertheless the effect of deepness is created by presenting a hero as a paradoxical sum of incompatible social positions, to which he or she never fully coincides.