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Abstract: The study analyzes genre reduction, which is especially characteristic of the works of A. P. Chekhov. The desire to reduce his own and others’ texts to the utmost was dictated not only by the nature of the writer’s creative principle, but also by the objective processes taking place in Russian literature at the end of the 19th century. The shrewdest writers intuitively sensed that fiction was in a state of crisis, on the threshold of some aesthetic discoveries and transformations. In this situation, there is a need to sum up, to symbolically replace what has already been described many times. Chekhov reduces the lengthy expositions of the well-known that filled contemporary novels, stories, dramas, and comedies to “fragments”. It is no coincidence that the twenty-year-old writer called one of his earliest stories “What is most often found in novels, stories, etc.?” This is a kind of catalogue of common phrases and fictional clichés (banal plots, stereotypical characters, hackneyed conflicts), by which one can predict the development of the plot of a work of fiction. The writer includes them in his texts, but transfers them into an ironic modality. Individual elements of large genre structures begin to perform the function of substitutes for the genre as a whole, becoming its identifying marks and symbols. Genre reduction is realized according to the principle of synecdoche, that is, it represents “a part instead of a whole”, while the part acquires a semiotic character. Reduced genres begin to fulfill the function of introductory ones. One of the most popular genres of the end of the 19th century, reproduced by dozens of authors, was vaudeville. The classic Russian vaudeville was a piece of drama consisting of several acts. Chekhov creates his vaudevilles within the framework of the genre modification of “a joke in one act” (“The Bear”, “The Wedding”, and others). Chekhov includes fragments of vaudeville in both his dramatic works and his short stories. They are implemented in the form of a single word, expression, image or situation. The signs of one genre, representing “fragments of a structure” and included in the context of another, are a specific feature of the literature of the new era, the evidence of the genre heterogeneity of the work.

About the author(s) :

Alexander V. Kubasov

Ural State Pedagogical University (Ekaterinburg, Russia)

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9074-1133

Publication Timeline:

Date of receipt: 05.11.2025; date of publication: 29.12.2025

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