Chekhov’s Interpretation of Female Characters in Pushkin’s Novel “Eugene Onegin”

The article examines the specifics of A. P. Chekhov’s artistic understanding of the heroines of Pushkin’s novel “Eugene Onegin.” Chekhov’s special attitude to Pushkin’s novel is expressed in naming the heroines of his works after Pushkin’s characters — Olga and Tatyana, in “quoting” plot situations and motives. Pushkin’s principles of female character modeling are ingeniously transformed by Chekhov. In Chekhov’s early prose (“The Shooting Party”), the complexity of the female image is constructed by the narrator’s point of view, and the plot about the transformation of the “red flower of the green forest” into a “snake” is characterized by a certain straightforwardness. In his later prose, the plots about female metamorphoses, built on the interplay of text and subtext, are more natural. The vegetative and animalistic motifs, which performed a characterological function in Pushkin’s novel, are conceptualized. In theshort story “The Grasshopper,” the floral motif, realized in elegiac imagery (from a white cherry tree to a discarded flower), develops into an associative animalistic metaphor, whose flickering meanings contain both the heroine’s self-presentation and the author’s assessment. In developing female characters, Chekhov relies on Pushkin’s principle of mirroring, revealing the character’s opposite vertex in an associative metaphor based on the indirect correlation of man and fauna. In the short story “Dushechka,” the hidden meanings of the heroine’s “reincarnations” are actualized in an associative metaphor, and the ideal mistress of the pastoral world finds a materialized embodiment in a black cat — a double, a bearer of infernal meanings. Tatyana Pesotskaya’s fidelity to duty (“The Black Monk”) turns into a collapse of her life: having taken on an unbearable burden, she elicits associations with a “driven horse;” flickering meanings of the associative metaphor are scattered throughout the text. In the story “At the Acquaintances’ Place,” two incarnations of Pushkin’s Tatyana (the blooming Tatyana Loseva and the romantic Nadezhda), who are incompatible in Podgorin’s mind, converge through the semantics of corporeality (the flesh-colored stockings are the only thing that remains in the memory of Podgorin, the runaway fiancé) and the meanings of associative metaphors, predetermining the ending. In this play with Pushkin’s literary model, Chekhov’s concept of the female character and the artistic principles of its modeling are formed.