Wedding rites in Anton Chekhov’s short story “Before the wedding”: playing with tradition

The paper offers a study of Anton Chekhov’s short story as related to folk wedding rites and specific genres of wedding lyrics. The story’s structure is similar to a structure of a traditional wedding ceremony. Absent elements of characters’ wedding are substituted by references to motifs and signs of wedding in folk tradition style. Apart from it they appear in lower contexts and help to create a general comic effect. A comparative analyses of wedding in Chekhov’s short story and it's folk model, a manifestation of parody of wedding traditions may contribute to a scholar view of poetics of early short stories by the author.