Intonation and Subtext in A. P. Chekhov’s Short Story “Fat and Thin”

The article demonstrates how exactly the “funny” is transformed into the “sad” in Chekhov’s prose. The fragmentation of Chekhov’s character is manifested in the story “Fat and Thin.” The intonation, syntactic and semantic textual traces of such division are demonstrated. They foreshadow the transfor mations that occur later in the literature of the Silver Age. The changes in the text from the first edition to the second are traced. The receptive mechanisms of the laughter-related aesthetic effect are studied. The traditional algorithm of sociological reading of the story, which is based on the concept of the “little man” (which brings out the Gogol tradition to the forefront in Chekhov’s work), is revised. This algorithm does not take into account the cardinal shifts in Chekhov’s poetics, which were continued in 20th-centuryliterature. However, along with the transformation, Chekhov still inherits a certain line in the his tory of Russian literature. It is incorrect to call this line “Gogolian,” localizing it exclusively to the 19th century, because in the great period of Russian culture this “line” can be designated as the author’s inheritance of the Christian tra dition in the understanding of man.