Various methods of indirect representation of events have repeatedly provoked interest in narratologists (M.-L. Ryan, J. Prince, A. Palmer, H. Dannenberg). However, usually implicitness was seen as an optional attribute of narrative discourse. The article proves that the implied, "hidden" narratives have specific functional properties, and can also become an organizing component of the poetics of a literary work. The prose of A.P. Chekhov is a vivid example of this. In a literary text, the implicit narration (IN) is inevitably limited by the point of view of one of the narrative instances: a narrator or a hero. In the latter case, we are talking about so-called "embedded narratives": any representations of a character similar to a story (plans, dreams, intentions, interpretations of the past, etc.). Most often, this type of IN is needed for the reader to correctly reconstruct the plot. The short story "The Mother-in-Law" is built on a system of "untold stories", the account of which is necessary for a proper understanding of what is happening. Also, "embedded narratives" serve to problematize one of the most important properties of human psychology, namely identity. The subject uses the narrative in the process of discovering the self, thinks of oneself as another (P. Ricoeur). The image of the self, created with the help of the story, is conditional and, therefore, extremely fragile ("Softie"). "Embedded narrative" is a kind of a "route map" used by the hero for orienting in the world. It would seem that the narrator does not need such a "map". Of course, he somehow points to unrealized versions of the plot, because the event itself is identified only through its comparison with alternative possibilities. However, the narrator knows the finale of the story and, therefore, unlike the character, he retrospectively, "from afar" considers these possibilities and, in a sense, depreciates them, linking the events that happened to the causal chain. But IN is needed not only to shade the narrative that has taken place. IN enters into a complementary relationship with it. This is what happens in Chekhov's story "The Fear". The narrator doubts that treachery (an event that would be postulated as critical in the classic narrative) has a fatal meaning: first, the narrator does not understand why he entered into an illegal relationship with his friend's wife and, secondly, this act did not affect anything: the couple continued living as usual. IN, imputed to the narrator, generates a special type of fictional reality in which events are not subject to laws of strict determination. At the end of the paper, the author proposes a generalizing scheme for the characteristics of IN with a detailed commentary.
