The Phenomenon of the Character of Chekhovʼs Fiction

The topic raised in this article reflects the specificity of Chekhovʼs artistic and aesthetic system. The research literature on this topic is extensive; however, its scholarly significance is not fully appreciated due to the insufficient attention of scholars to the methodology of literary studies, which puts stock into addressing a writerʼs work as an artistic and aesthetic system considered in the context of the historical and literary process. For this reason, taking a Chekhov’s character as a single person all by himself (A.P. Chudakov, V.B. Kataev, V.Y. Linkov) has not brought clarity to the problem of the specificity of the Chekhov’s personage, its ontological and aesthetic status. We proceed from the specificity of Chekhovʼs postclassical realism, in which the artistic world is referential to the real world, and the character is a real ‘single person’, which allows us to illuminate, the above mentioned and related problems of Chekhovʼs aesthetic conception of man. In our conclusion, we summarize our observations in the form of a methodological algorithm, which would facilitate approaching and scholarly interpreting of Chekhovʼs literary texts.