POETICS OF COSTUME IN THE TEXTS OF A.P. CHEKHOV AND S.D. DOVLATOV

Abstract

The article is based on the material of early prose by A.P. Chekhov (“In the car”, 1881) and S.D. Dovlatov (“Nomenclature half-boots”, 1986). The work examines some aspects of the poetics of writers, in particularly the costume code. The choice of this aspect of poetics is due to the relatively small number of existing works in literary studies on the poetics of costume. The author of the article, analyzing costume details, comes to the conclusion that the basis of the comic in the prose of early Chekhov and in the stories of the collection “Suitcase” by Sergei Dovlatov is a detail of the costume, which becomes the basis of anecdotal plot, and also performs a leitmotif function. Motivational analysis of the text of stories helps to identify similarities in the principles of construction of the prose text of the authors, reflects the aesthetic preferences of each author. The mythopoetic approach reveals similarities in the aesthetic views of the two authors.