Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” in Nadya Alekseeva’s Novel “Belgrade”. Dramaturgical in an epic real-fictional world

Abstract

The article considers a fragment from Nadya Alekseeva’s novel “Belgrade” (2024), which is related to A.P. Chekhov’s comedy “The Cherry Orchard”. It is a novel about a novel (meta-novel) and includes elements of an inserted text – a book created by the main character about Chekhov’s life, about his love with Olga Knipper. But references to the classic’s work are intricately woven into the biographical plot, resulting in the formation of a real-fictional world in which Chekhov’s last play occupies a special place. In the novel of a modern author, some possibilities for interaction between classical and modern texts, dramatic and epic, purely artistic and real-fictional worlds are thus realized. Such interaction enriches both the source text and the recipient text in terms of meaning; therefore, a modern artistic approach to a classical text, and through that to the personality of its author, to some extent corrects the established ideas about both Chekhov and his work.