King Solomon's Monologue and Pr&zhachek;eval&soft;skij's Obituary: &Chachek;exov's Unwitting Confession Radislav Lapushin

Among &Chachek;exov's unfinished works is a play about King Solomon, of which remains only one fragmentary monologue of Solomon. Solomon speaks of the meaning of life, or more precisely, the impossibility of affirming any meaningfulness in the face the death facing every human being. His incomprehensible existence (nepostigaemoe bytie) becomes a source of constant terror and feelings of helplessness for the king. This existential terror is central to a number of &Chachek;exov's works in this period, for example: A Dull Story (Sku&chachek;naja istorija), which in &Chachek;exov's time was read (by Suvorin's wife, for one) as something of a confession of &Chachek;exov's own dangerous psychological condition. The topic of &Chachek;exov's existentialism in this story, as well as in Ka&shachek;atanka and The Steppe, has been discussed most prominently by Marena Senderovich. At roughly the same time as &Chachek;exov wrote Solomon's monologue, he published in Novoe vremja an obituary for the famous Russian explorer, Nikolaj Pr&zhachek;eval&soft;skij, the tone of which could not be more opposed to that of Solomon's monologue. If Solomon's monologue never saw print in &Chachek;exov's day, then this piece was published anonymously; thus, both remained unknown to &Chachek;exov's readers for many years, and to this date have received little critical attention (Rossbacher; Sobennikov; Polockaia). It is my contention that the two can be taken together as an unwitting confession of &Chachek;exov—an author who never openly displayed himself to his readers—made during a turning point in his life and career(his brother's death, increasing signs of his own mortal illness; breaking into the thick journals; winning the Pu&shachek;kin Prize). In &Chachek;exov criticism there is a tradition of opposing the Pr&zhachek;eval&soft;skij of &Chachek;exov's obituary to the characters of his poetic world, with the obituary serving as a hymn to people of podvig [heroic sacrifice], faith, and clear goals. I intend to show that these two pieces must be read together, that the idea of the podvig in &Chachek;exov cannot be appreciated outside of its relationship to the existential fear of Solomon. &Chachek;exov affirms podvi&zhachek;ni&chachek;estvo as a solution for Solomon's unresolvable problem; it comprises an attempt to find an exit where none can possibly be. But as always in &Chachek;exov, the answer does not exhaust the question, but causes us to return to the question again and again, if only to discover that the pain of Solomon and the heroism of Pr&zhachek;eval&soft;skij—the one life-negating, the other, life-affirming—rather than excluding, in fact complement and condition one another. At the end of my presentation, I will briefly juxtapose &Chachek;exov's distinctive artistic and philosophical position with those articulated in arguably the most important and closest two texts from nineteenth-century Russian literature dealing with such Ecclesiastical motifs: Enough (Dovol&soft;no) of Turgenev, and Tolstoj's Confession (Ispoved&soft;).