Chekhov’s context in Mikhail Zoshchenko’s ‘Sentimental tales’

Mikhail Zoshchenko’s Sentimental Tales are organized as a pyramid where each level is consistent and connected with the previous ones and with Russian classic literature. One of the writers who most influenced Zoshchenko was Anton Chekhov. Their creative similarity is manifold: the poetics of daily life, the image of the little man they wrote about, the lyrical humor, the existential problems they raised. The present study provides a comprehensive analysis and an intertextual comparison of M. Zoshchenko’s and A. Chekhov’s poetics. The paper aims to identify how Zoshchenko employs and transforms Chekhov’s principle of discovery story and to determine the meaning-forming functions performed by intertexts. The analysis revealed that M. Zoshchenko’s Sentimental Tales are to a great degree based on Chekhov’s discovery story genre. The theme of sudden insight, the it seemed versus it turned out compositional principle, existential problems, man-in-a-case complex continue the literary succession and offer new opportunities for the interpretation of Zoshchenko’s prose. Characters created by Zoshchenko represent the average intellectual type of the last century. The tragedy lies in the fact that their world no longer exists, and fate is irreversible, thus the intellectuals become senseless martyrs, victims of the change of epoch. Whether the characters are aware of this problem or not, being the subjects of orientation in reality, they inevitably plunge into a dead end of cognition of being. Consequently, fears, loneliness, lack of understanding, perplexity, disunity, communication failure acquire depth in M. Zoshchenko’s tales. The paper evidently demonstrates the authors sympathy for intellectuals he writes about. Existential pathos, eternal powerlessness of the thought and action, pathos of the impossibility of returning to the past life, and fear of the unknown future, constitute the inner issues of Sentimental Tales and raise the stories to the philosophical level.