The creative activity of a writer and the intertext of classical literature book review: Sergei A. Kibalnik. Chekhov and Russian classical literature: the issues of intertext. Saint-Petersburg: Petropolis publishing house, 2015. 312 p

In this review the author represents the contents of the book which comprises more than twenty articles distributed in three logical sections. The scope of issues analyzed in the book is determined. A special attention is paid to the articles on methodological issues where the author’s approach to intertextuality has been formulated. The introduction of a new concept “the Pushkin House studies of literature” based on somewhat phenomenological view at phenomena of literature and culture related to the concept of “the subject thinking” (Semion Frank) and based on a special correlation between history and theory. The main merit of the book reviewed is the vast material of Russian literature (Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Goncharov, Gogol, Tolstoy, Nabokov, Gazdanov, Zayaitskiy), the new approach to it that let the author discover new “meanings of intertextuality” in the well-known works of Russian literature.On the one hand, the author shows the versatility of Chekhov’s intertextual poetics, many different forms of intertextual connections of his works with the works of his predecessors and contemporaries. On the other hand, he regards meta- and hyper- texts of Chekhov’s and other classical writers’ works of Russian literature at the turn of the 20th and 21th centuries. Simultaneously, Kibal’nik continues the works of the foreign and Russian philologists who aspire to transform a philosophical theory of intertextuality and intertext into a new philological discipline - intertextology.