Forest Topos in Chekhov’s works of the 1890s—1900s.

Abstract

The article is devoted to identifying the specifics of the forest topos in the works by A.P. Chekhov in his last creative decade. The relevance of the study is due to the necessity to revise the boundaries of the beginning of modernism in Russian literature, their transfer from the 1900s to the 1880s. The author of the article demonstrates non-classical changes using spatial material, this determines the novelty of the research. One hundred twelve textual extracts with the topos of the forest were identified and analyzed, the types of modality of this space and the characteristic of classical and non-classical literature were described, and the analysis of the types modality of the topos in the works by A. P. Chekhov was carried out. The topos of the forest in the last creative decade of the writer appears in three types of modality: a living forest, a forest as a symbol of mismanagement, a place of harm, and a forest as a place of obsession. The topos in all cases is complexly constructed and built on a combination of biblical tradition, fairy tale tradition and individual author's myth. The study confirms the results we previously obtained while analyzing other spatial components in Chekhov’s works of that period, which allows us to speak about an earlier beginning of the modernization processes.