The image of the Urals in travel letters of Anton Chekhov: impressions and creative projections

This article is devoted to the dynamics of the Urals themes in works by Chekhov. The main evidence of the writer's Ural experience is letters which he wrote during his three trips along the Urals (in 1890, 1901 and 1902). The first and most detailed cycle of the Ural letters is connected with Chekhov's trip to Sakhalin. Describing Ural space in this cycle of letters, Chekhov often applies a device of the ironic use of literary formulas, established in the previous descriptions of the Urals. In subsequent cycles of the Ural letters the problem of exact description of external impressions comes to the fore. The image of the Urals recreated in Chekhov's letters is curious and significant as a result of direct emotional experience of the travel space. It does not claim to have completeness of description or conceptuality of assessment, though, while fixing some particular features of the seen, the letters give them the quality of expressive details, snatched from the flow of impressions as the most important emotional and cognitive experience. This experience has accumulated the writer's great creative energy: the state of mind he had on the road, reinforced by emotional expressiveness of epistolary words, repeatedly echoes in his literary work. In particular, Chekhov's letters clarify the circumstances of the Perm origin of the three sisters' town, as well as the Urals allusions to the factory image in "Practice Case". Generally, Chekhov's Ural letters are a vivid example of such a variety of travel literature as an epistolary travelogue.