Грани литературной репутации А.П. Чехова: между аксиомой и мифом

Abstract

Knowing the writer’s literary reputation means a constant change of senses, thus, being a variable. Though significant facets of a literary reputation are rigidly determined by their contemporaries' appreciation during their life or shortly after their death, each epoch tends to recreate that image. Thus the image of a writer is a complex literary casus predetermined by a conflict of divergent tendencies: the former being manifested in a sustainable comprehension of an artistic personality, and the latter striving to limit that accumulation, to cast that neverending change into a cliché of perceptions depreciating an ongoing historical movement. Moreover the very bulk of reputation senses maintains limited, so every new generation tends to erase some information about the writer’s personality excessive in a present interpretation. Art and life, mythology and history are typical outlines of reputation analysis. Thus we have to admit that reputation is axiomatic due to the interaction of a number of factors: trends of poetics, needs of biography, laws and traditions of history, but primarily due to contradictions inherent to the language corpus. All above mentioned factors result in various conventions that lead us to the commentary. It doesn’t mean that the commentary stands somewhere aside from the problems outlined above. It closely interacts with history, sociology, and poetics. Alongside the commentary possesses an ideal feature: it levels the contradictions between (or among) different fields of humanities or its methods. When most questions about the text can be regarded as attempts to enter deep the writer’s world, then text comprehension in fact is focused on the writer’s personality. Thus, why not to start from this very point when getting down to the analysis as it is.