Concerning the Landscape in A. P. Chekhov’s Short Story “Ionych”

Abstract

Purpose. The article discusses the connection between the landscape descriptions in the short story and its content.Results. The landscapes, together with Delvig’s elegy and the reference to Pisemsky’s novel A Thousand Souls, partly anticipate the content of the story and give the reader an opportunity to expect beforehand that Ionych’s love for Kotik will fade, and the protagonist of the story will end on a downward slope. The contraposition of the sublime, the poetic and the prosaic everyday matters is the common theme of the whole short story Ionych. This contraposition is set up in the beginning of the story in the description of the garden. The landscape descriptions also echo the themes of the story and introduce some of them. The inscription over the cemetery gate introduces the theme of moral judgment against the protagonist.Conclusion. The nature in the story turns out to be ambivalent: it promises “a quiet, beautiful, eternal life” and at the same time threatens with the mute desperation of nothingness. This ambivalence can be found in other works by Chekhov, too. Besides this, the cemetery landscape introduces into the story the theme of temporality of everything on earth. The landscape of the cemetery at night also has the combination of sex and death present in it. This Freudist combination can be found in the writer’s other works, too.