“Drama on the hunt” by Anton Chekhov as Alexander Ostrovsky’s hybrid hypertext

The article is based on the material of the first major prose work of A. P. Chekhov - his “newspaper” detective novel “Drama on the Hunt” (1884-1885). The novel is a parody stylization not only for Western European and Russian detective literature of that time, but also for Russian literary classics. One of the objects of this stylization is the dramaturgic works of A. N. Ostrovsky. The article contains an analysis of specific textual representations of Chekhov’s stylization of Ostrovsky’s most famous plays, such as “Without a Dowry” and partly “The Thunderstorm.” The main character of the “Drama on the Hunt,” Sergei Kamyshev, can be discerned as a hybrid based on the features, on the one hand, of the hero of Dostoevsky’s novel “Demons” by Nikolai Stavrogin (and partly Rodion Raskolnikov from “Crime and Punishment”), and on the other hand, the character of “Without a Dowry” - Sergei Paratov. The main heroine of Chekhov’s novel, Olga, is primarily correlated with the heroine of “Without a Dowry” Larisa. Thus, the article examines the correlation of elements of parody and stylization in these images and in Chekhov’s novel in general, as well as the place held by Ostrovsky’s plays and some other works of Russian classical literature in the intertextual sphere of “Drama on the Hunt.”