Anna Karenina’s hypertexts in Chekhov’s works

Abstract

The author begins by referencing to his previous demonstration of the hypertextual polemicalness shown by him earlier in relation to Leo Tolstoy’s novel “Anna Karenina”, as well as Chekhov’s stories “The Duel” and the “The Grasshopper”. Similar phenomena is identified in Chekhov’s stories “His Wife”, “Concerning Love” and “The Lady with the Dog”. Additionally, the author perceives a sarcastic crypto-parody of Tolstoy’s novel, in the first of these stories, while in the second and third - Chekhov’s own variations on this plot, played out in the perspective of a lover. Chekhov conducts an artistic experiment in the story “Concerning Love” exploring what would have occurred to the characters in “Anna Karenina” had Alyokhin possessed more similarities to Tolstoy’s Levin than to Vronsky. In the “The Lady with the Dog”, Chekhov outlines the possibility of the lovers overcoming the numerous obstacles that have arisen before them and achieve happiness. It is demonstrated that in writing this story, Chekhov relied heavily on the aesthetics of the “transformation of a person”, present in all Russian classics, from Pushkin to Dostoevsky and Tolstoy (however, the author notes that Chekhov drew from Konstantine Levin’s storyline in Tolstoy’s work, rather than that of Anna Karenina).

Keywords

• leo tolstoy
• short stories
• his wife
• concerning love
• the lady with the dog
• polemic interpretation