THE ⟪POETICS OF MEDICINE⟫ IN THE WORKS OF A. P. CHEKHOV

Poetics of medicine >> is a term that might still need justification. The extent to which the use of medicine-related images in fiction runs its own course, and to which it follows the rules of standard poetics is still an open question. The article provides a preliminary answer to these questions, using the works of A. P. Chekhov as a case study. Chekhov was the first Russian writer who gave us a strong reason to discuss the << poetics of medicine >>. The following aspects of this poetics were fully and widely represented in Chekhov's work: medical prescriptions as a microtext of a literary text, outlining the symbolic meaning of the so-called << pharmacological subtext >>, autobiographical and biographical subtexts of the doctors as literary personae and, finally, various types of intertextuality associated with their image.