Ethics and anthropology in A. P. Chekhov's short story "Volodya": analogies in personal conception

The article examines correlation between ethics and anthropology in A. P. Chekhov’s poetic structure. A. P. Checkov investigates the teenager’s feelings led him to suicide. Total lies and falsity, on one hand, and ugliness of faces and bodies all around, on another, are strongly tied in Volodya’s inner world. His occasional love adventure, which he tried with plain and stupid Nyuta, makes him hate himself more and more. His self-desrtuction mood spreads on everybody in the summer cottage, especially on his mother and nasty Nyuta. He gets perfect disgust seeing them. Lies and deception of nearly all the personages make him suffer greatly. Volodya exposes his lying mother, which wasted their wealth and plays comic role in the local society. Everybody in Volodya’s opinion seems to be indifferent or even opposite to him. The most hateful persons for him are his mother and, in actual narration, Nyuta. The basic metaphor of the text, “lie is body”, makes ethics equal to anthropology. Volodya’s disappointment grows during twenty four hours from the exposition to the final episode. Emotional complex here is mixed with anthropological origin: the hero can’t stop seeing ugly faces, bodies and flesh in his environment. Negation of wrong behavior of adults and painful experience of dirty love are joint together in Volodya’s existent outlook. But at his last moments, being shot, Volodya «meets» his dead father, whose light and sincere image he always remembered heartily. The hero gets free of anxiety connected with liars (mother and Shumikhins, the summer cottage family). There is surely burst of existentialism in this particular text. Fundamental concepts in it are lie (ethics) and body, or, so to say, «bodyness» (anthropology). A hero in A. P. Chekhov’s poetics reveals himself between bright impression and deep boredom. Boredom and sadness which are associated with life itself, form an atmosphere of A. P. Chekhov’s works. The basic metaphor «lie is body» functions as a constructive centre of the short story. The plot is built on this identity, the characters are determined by it, and the main Volodya’s experience in his last day of living allows us to guess that this is ethic and anthropology formula of A. P. Chekhov Interference of ethic and anthropology modes of positioning of characters, especially the main character, is the constructive principal of the short story, and it is special for A. P. Chekhov’s poetics in general.