Who killed Belikov: about the hunting intrigue of A. P. Chekhov’s little trilogy
This article aims to deautomatize the perception of A. P. Chekhov’s story “The Man in a Case”, correlating the plot of the story (and the entire small trilogy) with Chekhov’s contexts that are close in meaning. Contextual, narrative and intertextual analysis allow the author to assess the quality of Chekhov’s irony, directed towards characters-narrators. The first part of the article considers Chekhov’s works related to the hunting plot. Starting from the genre of the hunting story, which Chekhov discredits (which fits into the anti-hunting trend of literature since the 1880s), the author of the article traces the ambiguity of the semantic field of hunting in the writer’s works (hunting as a theater, quarrel, binge or senselessly ruined life). Hunting is actualized as a typical plot scheme that triggers off the movement of a plot that deceives the reader’s expectations. In particular, such deception is a deliberate narrative strategy of the depicted author in relation to the depicted reader in “Drama During a Hunt”. In the second part of the article, the author looks at the stories that make up a small trilogy, which is also united by the hunting situation. Analyzing the story “The Man in a Case”, the author of the article shifts attention from Belikov to Burkin and, actualizing the method of the “evidence paradigm”, hyperbolizes those contradictions that a gullible reader (who is like Burkin’s listener Chimsha-Gimalayskiy) may not notice in the story. Literary critics also demonstrate similar credulity, which confirms what has been written about “The Man in a Case” for many decades. However, there are exceptions: these are the scholars who expose Burkin as an unreliable narrator and thereby “whitewash” Belikov. The article actualizes the “zoological” subtext of Chekhov’s little trilogy, satirically highlighting all the characters-narrators involved in it, united by a sense of envy against the objects of their narrative hunting as well as literary subtexts, one of which is represented by Pushkin’s Belkin cycle. It is the structure of the “Stories of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin” that problematizes the character’s story as a source of reliable information about the event in which the narrator follows a typical literary plot or is an interested person.