“I want to sleep” by Chekhov. Poetics “justifying” Var’ka

Abstract

The author of the article proves that by means of poetics (at the spatio-temporal, motivic, subject-object, plot-compositional, speech and other levels), the deliberate involvement of physiological (the cry of an infant as a strong stimulus, the lack of description and concretization of the child) and medical data (receptive and cognitive disorders in humans with insufficient sleep) Chekhov “justifies” his heroine. Forcing the severity of the heroine’s emotional state, coupled with a change in the chronotope (night, the owners’ room; day, the owners’ apartment, front door, shop; night, the owners’ room), as a result, demonstrates an affective state (madness) that makes Var’ka insane at the time of the crime. Chronologically, Chekhov pushes the murder event to the very end of the work, gradually arousing in the reader empathy for Var’ka, for example, through a narrator who can see events through her eyes, and the specifics of the speech addressed to the heroine (orders, threats, insults) and of that coming from her (automatic purring lullaby). Within the work, in the course of the plot, the space of the heroine’s dream and reality dwindles the author thickens her emotional state; half-reality stratifies into the reality and dream, takes up more and more space and time and gradually turns into madness. The real, albeit indirect, murderers of the child are his parents.