FLAUBERT’S HYPERTEXTS IN CHEKHOV’ WORKS (ON THE CONCEPT OF “CONSTRUCTIVE CRYPTO-PARODY”)

Abstract

The article addresses the hypertexts of Flaubert in Chekhov’s works. The hypertextuality in Chekhov’s story Duel (1891) is connected with Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary (1856), and is hybrid and optional. The story The Jumping Girl (1891) written shortly after, is already a fairly obvious hypertext of Flaubert’s novel: the scheme of the plot and the semantic of the original source is transformed to a much lesser extent. One more explicit hypertext of Flaubert’s A Simple Soul (1877) could be found in Chekhov’s late story Darling (1899). The article both describes and analyzes in all these texts (following R. Nazirov) a kind of “constructive crypto parody” which is not the parody on Flaubert’s works, but the polemical interpretation of them. Flaubert’s hypertexts in Chekhov’s prose bear a distinct imprint of the Russian classics with its “anti-individualistic” endency, on the one hand, and of Chekhov’s own artistic world based on overcoming Flaubert’s keen sense of the tragedy of life with sarcasm and laughter, on the other.