EXISTENTIAL MOTIFS IN THE PROSE OF A.P. CHEKHOV: “A BORING STORY” AND “WARD NO. 6”

Abstract

The article treats A.P. Chekhov’s “A Boring Story” (1889) and “Ward No. 6” (1892) as two variants of a boundary situation realized, respectively, through temporal and spatial constraint: an ageing professor confronts the exhaustion of his remaining lifetime, whereas a provincial doctor is subjected to literal spatial confinement. Existentialist readings of Chekhov go back to Lev Shestov’s 1908 essay and continue through A.P. Chudakov, V.B. Kataev and, more recently, A.A. Maslakov’s work on the early stories, yet the two novellas are rarely examined together as variants of one model. The theoretical framework combines Karl Jaspers’s boundary situation and Albert Camus’s absurd, applied with an explicit reservation: Chekhov wrote decades before existentialism took shape, so the parallel is structural rather than genetic. Close reading shows that the boundary situation does not create the protagonist’s alienation but exposes an alienation masked by professional routine, and that each protagonist meets an address from another character he is unable to answer, though this address takes different forms: a direct question from Katya, an ethical challenge from Gromov. Ragin’s resignation is functionally close to what Camus calls philosophical suicide, and Gromov’s protest is typologically comparable to revolt, though neither correspondence is treated as exact; Nikolai Stepanovich’s reflection without action has no direct equivalent in Camus’s scheme, which marks a limit of the model rather than a gap to be closed by analogy. The central result concerns narrative form: the split between an internalised and a literally embodied passage through the boundary situation coincides with the split between first-person diary narration and third-person narration, the latter registering what the hero has not yet admitted. The findings are relevant to university courses in the history of Russian literature and to the teaching of Chekhov, though the two-novella sample remains narrow and the resulting typology a working hypothesis.