LITERARY DIALOGUE OF WRITERS OF THE ERA OF “TIMELESSNESS”: N.P. WAGNER AND A.P. CHEKHOV

Abstract

https://doi.org/10.18522/1995-0640-2025-2-134-147

The study of literary contacts of writers is the key to reading the cultural code of an epoch and a specific historical period. In the interaction of the two worldviews of the authors, new meanings are born and ideas that are already circulating in society are deepened. In this context, the nature of the dialogical relations between the writers of the 1870s and 1880s A.P. Chekhov and N.P. Wagner is considered. They were writers of the same cultural and historical epoch. The first came to literature in the early 1870s, being a famous zoologist and professor at St. Petersburg University, the second began to engage in literary work while studying at the medical faculty at the end of that decade to help a family that had moved to Moscow from Taganrog. The writers are completely different in terms of their talents and the nature of their literary activities, but they nevertheless reflected the common features of their era, willingly or unwittingly entering into a literary dialogue with each other. The cultural-historical and comparative-typological approach to their works allows us to determine the degree of influence on each other's work and identify a range of common themes: wealth and poverty, material and spiritual poverty, faith and science, difficult childhood, spiritualism. Close and individual positions in the worldview and literary style of the writers are revealed.

Key words: N. P. Wagner, A. P. Chekhov, literary dialogue, literature of the era of “timelessness”, literary fairy tale, objective narration