The perception of Chekhov's prose and drama largely depends on the spiritual experience of the reader and viewer, on the level of comprehension and comprehension of the artistic quest of the writer's predecessors and contemporaries. Often Chekhov directly refers to images and situations from the works of Russian and foreign classics. But often he fully trusts the reader's ability to catch a special, deep subtext in a seemingly random phrase. So, in the play" The Seagull " Sorin, who is living out his days in seclusion on a provincial estate, isolated from the big human world, complains: Sorin clearly applied to himself the fairy tale of M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin "The Wise Piskar", the hero of which spent the whole century lying alone in a hole and only before his death felt a longing for a real, full-fledged life with its anxieties and joys. But if Shchedrin's character himself built his life according to false ideas about happiness, then Chekhov's hero, who calls himself "the man who wanted", life, contrary to his own desires and aspirations, somehow fatally came down to a "Piscary" result. Perhaps the example of Sorin's fate to some extent influenced Treplev's suicide. It can also be called "the person who wanted". Treplev dreamed of many things, but he felt how difficult it was to fight the unknown, terrible, faceless force of evil that had subjugated the human world and crippled the fate of people. And he didn't want this one to happen. page 20 the force, against his will, turned him into another "wise piskar". And in the first act of the play "The Cherry Orchard" Varya tells Anya: "I go around the house all day, my dear, and I dream about everything. If I could marry you off to a rich man, then I would be more peaceful, go to the desert, then to Kiev... to Moscow, and so I would still go to the holy places... I would have walked and walked. Beauty!.." It is this final word "beauty", later repeated by Petya Trofimov, teasing Varya, that suddenly alarms the viewer ... Read more