Poetics of ethnically colored titles in the stories by Anton Chekhov

Abstract

Research into the poetics of a writer’s titles is highly sought after in Russian literary studies. Anton Chekhov created over five hundred works, allowing for a comprehensive exploration and understanding of the title poetics phenomenon. The novelty of this study is its analysis of the poetics of ethnically charged titles in Anton Chekhov’s short stories (“The Daughter of Albion”, “The Grateful German”, “Russian Coal”, “The Stupid Frenchman”, “The Kind German”, and “The Cossack”). All of them were written in the early period of his creative work (1883–1887), when they were primarily based on comical or semi-comical situations. In accordance with the genre nature of the joke, the national specifics of foreign characters was depicted, as a rule, within the framework of existing ethnic stereotypes. The methodological basis of the study is a synthesis of traditional approaches that have stood the test of time (historical-literary, system-typological, comparative-historical) with the involvement of relatively new research practices (the opposition of “friend or foe” within the framework of mythopoetics, receptive aesthetics, imagology, and intertextuality). The study reveals the unique poetics of ethnically charged titles of Anton Chekhov’s stories. In them, the poetics of titles is associated with genre and plot lines, intertextual references, as well as the idea and creative concept of the work.