I. YAKOVLEV CHUVASH STATE PEDAGOGICAL UNIVERSITY BULLETIN

A. P. Chekhov, Russian literature of the late 19^th century, dominant concept, fear, paradox, artistic world.

This article is devoted to the story of A. P. Chekhov “Fear” (1892), and the focus is on the problem of studying the features of the artistic world created by the writer through the concept in its literary understanding. The article focuses on the “fear” concept as dominant in the analyzed work. The story “Fear” is not often considered in Chekhov’s studies, meanwhile this work expresses one of the prevailing moods of Chekhov’s time and, accordingly, the socio-psychological type of behavior that became characteristic of the Russian society at the end of the 19^th century. The work presents the history of the issue in connection with the term “concept” and the story “Fear” in modern literary criticism. Special emphasis is placed on the content of the analyzed concept, which is fundamentally important for understanding the view of the world created by the writer in his prose works at the end of the 19^th century. In this regard, the story “Fear” is considered in comparison with those stories of the writer, where the words “fear”, “terrible” are put into the title. In the article particular attention is paid to the nature of fear caused by life, which is reflected in such a semantic component of the concept as paradox, which is also inherent in other Chekhov’s stories.

кандидат филологических наук, доцент кафедры русского языка и литературы Чувашского государственного университета имени И. Н. Ульянова, г. Чебоксары, Россия; e-mail: evdokimova.ok@mail.ru