Slovo – serie

The book shows Chekhov in a new light, as a writer with a synthetic ethical worldview on which his poetics are based. The book’s key finding is that the temporal experience of modernity lies at the centre of Chekhov’s work. This conclusion is reached by comparing the ways in which modern temporality is represented in the different genres in which Chekhov wrote, from the non-fictional Sakhalin Island to his short fiction and drama. In terms of methodology, the book combines the historiographical and sociological views of modernity as based on a certain understanding of time with Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope.

The book focuses on event boundedness which can be expressed in the aspectual distinction (perfective and imperfective) and on kinesthetic level between gestures that include one or several energy impulses (bounded) and smooth gestures (unbounded). The correlation of verbal and gestural expression of event boundedness is studied on the basis of oral narratives produced by Russian L1, French L1 and (Russians as) French L2 speakers. The results reveal differences in event construal in multimodal terms by speakers of different languages. Overall, the book gives insight into not only the category of aspect, but also the ways in which it is realized in spontaneous oral narratives, and more generally: event construal on the verbal and gestural levels.