“I shall not lie tonight...": Mandelstam and Chekhov

At a first glance, “Chekhov’s” implications in Mandelstam’s lyrics are difficult to trace. Firstly, this is due to the fact that the general outlines of Mandelstam’s reception of Chekhov’s works are vague and give rise to opposite viewpoints, ranging from the idea of unacceptance of Chekov-dramatist’s practice by the poet to careful endeavors to get a much more thorough understanding of innumerous and contradicting comments made by Mandelstam about Chekhov. However, the issue of various forms of creative imbibing of Chekhov’s tradition in the poet’s lyrics - direct, indirect, of similar genesis and typology, or indicating selective and purposeful mastering - has not been seriously studied yet. At the same time, we may assume that together with distinctly pronounced classical implications and subtexts, for example, “Pushkin’s” and “Gogol’s”, there are “Chekhov’s” ones in the lyrics by Mandelstam as well. The authors of the paper, based on the analysis of one of “the strangest” poems by Mandelstam I shall not lie tonight... (1925), try to demonstrate some common features in the styles of the two so much different literary artists. In the poem, the plot and image-motif parallels with the episode of the inn in Chekhov’s novella The Steppe are determined. The authors of the paper suggest a hypothesis that interweaving may be caused by the common genesis of the plot and motif-image elements, rooted in the archetype and folklore-mythological topic of a house by a road and of a witch’s hut. However, thorough comparison indicates that there is interweaving of specific artistic elements in their system relations. What is more, the lines of the polygenetic subtext of the poem, rooted in the novella The Steppe, help trace not too much obvious parallels in the two texts, which go beyond the episode of the inn in Chekhov’s novella and beyond the studied poem created by Mandelstam. The endeavor is made to trace the similar features in the very artistic concept of the Russian life.