V.N. PORUS. Being and Melancholy : A.P. Chekhov and A.P. Platonov

Abstract

The article holds the comparative analysis of the existential “anguish” in Chekhov’s and
Platonov’s creative heritage. As it is shown, the “anguish” is one of the major ontological characteristics
of the cultural crisis.
Chekhovian heroes’ “anguish” is the mental outlook of people, living “at the edge of culture”,
a vague alarm, similar to the one that all living beings feel before the existential cataclysm.
This “anguish” is caused by the senselessness of a culture that lost its vital resource and became
“the world of simulacra”. Hence the eternal readiness of a grieving person for skepticism and
self-destructive irony.
“Tchevengur’s” heroes’ anguish is a reaction to a mechanical suppression of life by the “new
culture”, the universal principles of which claim the absolute power over people. These pretenses
are not to become true; “simulacra” cannot force the human authenticity out of life. Paradoxically,
the wistful desperation of tchevengur’s world holds hope for overcoming the cultural disaster
and for achieving the ideal of the “inner person”.
The article demonstrates that Chekhov and Platonov belong to the same literary and philosophical
tradition, confronting the cultural crisis and searching for ways of getting over it.