Chekhovian images and themes in the album of the ‘Zveri’ band ‘Everywhere is a desert to the lonely man’

The paper analyzes the album of the music band Zveri ‘Everywhere is a desert to the lonely man’, dedicated to the works of the writer Anton Chekhov. The aim of the study is to find the features of Chekhov’s poetics that are interesting to Russian rock and to show how Chekhovian images are transformed in the album. It is shown that citation of the classics in the rock poetry under study is systemic; it forms the ideological and thematic unity of the album as a lyrical cycle. The perception of Chekhov’s works by the rock poets turns out to be deep and multifaceted. Even some individual techniques are adopted: repetitions reflecting the mechanical reproduction of life, superimposition of a modern plot on fable prototypes. All this occurs despite the fact that Chekhov seems to be one of the least ‘rock’ classics, since his characters have little in common with the romantic heroes on whom rock poets largely focus. The study leads to a conclusion that the texts included in the album also form a complex system and are replete with ‘thematic echoes’. Only together they are able to reflect the most characteristic features of Chekhov’s poetics: a truthful and partly ironic depiction of the ‘vulgarity’ of life, meaningless, but frightening in its hidden subordination to the logic of absurd and forcing a person to hide in his ‘case’. Female images (heroines of the stories The Darling, The Lady with the Dog, The Grasshopper), personifying love as a state, serve as a kind of antidote and affirm the hope that it is possible to endure the weight of the world without losing the ability to love and gaining the courage to leave one’s case, since loneliness is a deviation, not the norm. The fact that Zveri use Chekhov’s ‘text’ as a basis for their album shows that the issues raised by the writer have timeless significance for Russian spiritual culture.