The myth of love in Russian literature and its reception by Anton Chekhov

Abstract

The myth about love in Russian literature can be defined according to Ronald Barthes as a meta-language, self-referential fiction, and a connotative system. In nineteenth-century Russia, it was literature, for the most part, that offered information about the psychology of love, gender stereotypes, and relations between men and women. The works of A. S. Pushkin, M. Iu. Lermon-tov, A. I Goncharov, I. S. Turgenev, F. M. Dostoevsky, and N. Tolstoy reflected national assumptions about love, marriage, and family. The texts of those Russian writers share the common field of value meanings: an accent on spiritual rather than physical intimacy, love as a mystery, and the predominance of the motifs of solitude and the “mysterious forces.” Turgenev’s role in the formation of that myth is particularly important. The paper aims to reveal these elements in Turgenev’s texts that shaped the myth about love and then to consider how Chekhov reinterpreted and transformed this myth. The main mythologemes “the tragic meaning of love,” “moral necessity,” “mystery,” and “solitude” as the highest mode of existence are identified. The situations of rendezvous, first love, axiological aspects of the myth, and Turgenev’s intertext in Chekhov’s works are analysed. Notice is taken of two versions of Chekhov’s reception of the myth of love: deconstruction (the ironic mode) and transformation (the lyric-dramatic mode). Both versions are related to Chekhov’s knowledge and intuitive comprehension of the laws of gender psychology.