Alexander Pavlovich Chudakov (1938–2005) was a well-known literary scholar and writer, the foremost researcher of Anton Chekhov’s work.
In his monographs “The Poetics of Chekhov” (1971) and “The World of Chekhov: Origin and Affirmation” (1986), he treats the writer’s entire output as an integrated system, describing the properties of its different levels—from the concrete/subject matter level to the ideological one—based on statistical material he compiled.
Under the researcher’s attentive eye fall the relationships between characters and the narrator, the selection of plots, and the means used to detail the artistic space.
The book also includes Chudakov’s biography, written by the author’s wife, Marietta Omarovna Chudakova (literary scholar, critic, writer) and by his colleague Irina Gitovich (Chekhov scholar, historian of literature, critic, textologist).