Anton Chekhov and Gustave Flaubert: revisiting the issue of “objective” narration

The Comparison of the two superlative achievements of European realism, id est the works by Anton Chekhov and Gustave Flaubert, has so far been limited to local comparisons of individual texts. The author believes that the pressing issue of comparative literary studies is the comparison of the two writers’ narrative systems, and raises the question of the priority of the so-called “third manner” of Chekhov’s narration (1895-1904), first described by A.P. Chudakov in his work “Chekhov’s Poetics” (1971). This manner is considered to be one of the main components of those “completely new” forms of writing that are credited to Chekhov by the historians of literature. Contrary to the opinion of the Chekhovian scholars, the author of the article comes to the conclusion that this form of personal narration goes back to Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary”, despite the fact that there is a lot of doubt whether Chekhov had read the famous novel in question. Nevertheless, the key question is whether the narrator’s transmission of the protagonist’s words can be attributed to the forms of his own speech, or whether it only expresses the general semantic position of the protagonist. In many cases these issues cannot be resolved unconditionally and is determined by the subjective interpretation of the protagonist’s closeness to the author, depending on the degree of the education and “literariness” of their speech. At the same time, Flaubert’s famous absolute objectivity turns out to be close not to the “third”, but to the “second” (1888-1894) manner of Chekhovian narration. The poetics of the two classic works is also brought together by the interest in the “unselected” (aleatory) detail, which stands out against the series of other details by its different scale, but Chekhov’s methods of demonstrating this kind of the world’s diversity seems to be more subtle and complex than those of Flaubert.