Fidkevich E. . Chekhov's epistolary prose and his ideological and artistic search of the 80s - 90s of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century.

For the first time the all-around investigation of the private correspondence of A.Chekhov is represented both in the literary criticism of Ukraine and in Russian study of literature. The subject of the research is a specific nature of the writer's epistolary prose, the peculiarities of its entry into the literary process at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. In the dissertation the essence of ideological and artistic search of A.Chekhov and the role and the place of the writer's epistolary criticism in the literary process of the 80s-90s of the 19th- the beginning of the 20th centuries are analyzed in the light of the genre and stylistic features of the epistolary prose. First of all the A. Chekhov private correspondence together with letters of his correspondents, the diaries and memoirs of the writer's contemporaries, the archival documents of the Institute of manuscripts of the V.I. Vernadsky Library of the National Academy of Science of Ukraine have become the basis of the investigation. Special attention in the dissertation is devoted to the problem of 'Russia and the West' in Chekhov's epistolary prose. Analyzing A.Chekhov's epistolary texts and comparing them with philosophical essay of A.Camus, A.Malraux and philosophical treaties of N.Berdyaev, the author of the dissertation represents the originality of the writer's spiritual search in the light of existential world perception, that in its turn gave the possibility to consider the writer's ideological and aesthetic place not only in the context with the Russian culture at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries, but in the discourse of cultural and creative process of Western Europe. The genre and stylistic modifications of A. Chekhov's epistolary prose, the specific character of its subtext, which features were considered by literary critics only on the stuff of the writer's works of art, have been researched in the dissertation.