Abstract
The purpose of the article is to identify and analyse the modes of comic effect creations in the early stories by A. P. Chekhov. The research is based on the methods of semantic and stylistic analysis of the literary text. The main modes of comic effect creations in Chekhov's early stories are irony, the clash of heterogeneous lingual means, stylization and the mode of semantic parallelism. Irony is considered not only from the traditional point of view as the use of a word or expression in the sense opposite to the one fixed in the lexical subsystem, – it is proposed to understand it as an emotional and semantic dominant of the text that organizes the General idea of the work, and as a modal type of text that reflects the author's attitude to the characters. The clash of diverse lingual means as a modes of creations the comic finds expression in the combination of semantically, emotionally, stylistically and functionally heterogeneous lingual units in one context; it is often accompanied by such phenomenon as antithesis, combined with the mode of irony. The author reveals such a feature of Chekhov's stylization mode as parodying the "fictional" style, which is created using the thematic relatedness of the stylized text fragment, lexical, syntactic and metalingual means. The use of semantic parallelism as a way to create a comic (and tragicomic) effect is widely understood: as a lexical repetition, contextual convergence of lexical units that are the key to the content of the work, as well as a comparison of concepts in the framework of comparisons and metaphors for the comic image of the character's appearance or inner essence. The observations presented in the article can be used in studying the peculiarities of A. P. Chekhov’s language and style in higher education and school.
Key words
Chekhov, early stories, the comic, the modes of creating the comic, irony, the clash of heterogeneous language means, stylization, semantic parallelism.