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: 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: