About the Chekhov's background of the “Poems by Yuri Zhivago” by Boris Pasternak

The article is devoted to the reception of Anton Chekhov’s short stories “Holy Night”, “Student” and “Bishop” in Boris Pasternak’s cycle “Poems of Yuri Zhivago”. The testimonies of contemporaries about Pasternak’s attention to them is an important, but not yet sufficient, basis for asserting an interconnection. The article attempts to read Yuri Zhivago’s cycle on the background of three Chekhov’s stories united by the Easter story and the chronotope. In the first part of the article, the concept of the “terrible gap” (Pasternak), the existence of the earth without Christ, is examined in the stories by Chekhov and the poems by Pasternak. Here the similarities of particular moments are noted: the feeling of emptiness experienced by nature, the touch that returns faith in possibility to overcome death. Next, Pasternak’s poem “Holy week” is considered in comparison with Chekhov’s story “Holy Night”. It is shown that their common motifs - night gloom, stars, anxiety, sleep and the awakening of the earth, bell ringing, tears - are caused not so much by the unity of realities as by Pasternak’s deliberate address to Chekhov. The poem “The Garden of Gethsemane” is compared with the story “Student” on the basis of the general subject of the image - Jesus’ last night on earth, and is shown that the impact on Chekhov’s story in Pasternak’s poem turns out to be more significant than the original Gospel. It is possible to speak about the influence of Nicholas image in the “Holy Night”’s characters on Yuri Zhivago and his uncle Nikolai Vedenyapin but with a somewhat lesser degree of confidence. A lot of particular coincidences between the poems in Yuri Zhivago’s cycle and Chekhov’s stories testify to the proximity of Chekhov’s and Pasternak’s worldview, in particular, the system of historiosophical views, in which the Gospel is the starting point of human existence, and immortality is seen as the ultimate goal.