Myler Wilkinson - a new name in north American Chekhovian studies

The article presents a Slavist and writer, Professor of Selkirk College from British Columbia (Canada), Myler Wilkinson (1953-2020) to the Russian academic community. The paper starts with a brief overview of Wilkinson’s literary heritage. Particular attention is paid to his book “The Dark Mirror” (1996), which is devoted to the influence of the works of I.S. Turgenev, L.N. Tolstoy, A.P. Chekhov and other Russian thinkers and artists of the word by North American intellectuals. According to the author, the creative dialogue with the culture and literature of Russia in the second half of the XIX - early XX centuries is one of the main components of the spiritual and cultural formation of the writers of the United States, in particular Ernest Hemingway, Henry James, Willa Cather and Sherwood Anderson. Myler Wilkinson received recognition as a writer as well. In 2014, Canada’s oldest literary magazine, The Fiddlehead (published by the University of New Brunswick since 1945 and defines who is who in Canadian literature), awarded the prestigious twenty-third annual award to Wilkinson’s short story “The Blood of Slaves”. The story is dedicated to the last hours of A.P. Chekhov’s life on earth. In a fictionalized form, this topic has already been addressed by Raymond Carver, Henri Troyat, and Donald Rayfield, in our country - by Ruslan Kireev. Nevertheless, the story is unique and original. The story has not been translated into Russian yet and all quotes are given in the translation of the author of the paper. A detailed examination of the peculiarities of the poetic structure of the story “The Blood of Slaves” demonstrates how, with the help of a change of points of view, a postmodern pastiche devoid of the usual irony and sarcasm, the author creates a convincing and memorable artistic image of his beloved writer. The text of the story is literally woven from the creative and biographical heritage of A.P. Chekhov. Literary studies of Russian literature, as well as the fiction story, give the right to speak about the extraordinary place of Myler Wilkinson in North American Russian and Chekhovian studies.