Anton Chekhov’s story “The Sinner from Toledo”: Main peculiarities of the genre

<jats:p>Anton Chekhov’s early short story “The Sinner from Toledo” presents an unusual and rare mixture of genre forms for a relatively novice author: the text has got some elements of parable, parody, stylization and anecdote. Many literary experts on Chekhov have compared the genre of this story to the common shallow fiction genres of humorous magazines of “small press” of the 1870s and 1880s, primarily relying on Chekhov’s reference to the “translated” nature of his text. The originality of Chekhov’s short story lies not only in the unexpected usage of a Spanish plot from the “life” of the Middle Ages (with an obvious exception of light-hearted themes, which are prevalent in humorous short stories such as “Artists’ Wives”, “Flying Islands”, “1001 Passions, or a Dreadful Night”, but also in the implicitly unveiled gloomy and somberly dramatic literary form. The author’s attention to such an exceptional genre synthesis within “fragmentary” news-magazine humor based on a “translated” plot is in its own way a unique and unparalleled phenomenon of Antosha Chekhonte. Amid intensified censorship, the young author uses the detached and foreign material to dwell in a roundabout way on the ideas of true faith, consequences of terrible prejudices, senseless human sacrifice in the name of fictitious sin prompted by the hostile Spanish Inquisition. This article examines the overall literary context in which the text was prepared for its publication in the humorous magazine Zritel’ (Spectator), and then additionally edited for being published in the first, unfulfilled collection of stories “Naughty Tricks”. The article also discusses the inclusion of “The Sinner from Toledo” (obviously gloomy in its general atmosphere and different from the other 12 primarily humorous multigenre short stories) into Anton Chekhov’s first book.</jats:p>