Existential dimension of fear in Anton Chekhov’s short story “Fear”
- DOI
- 10.5922/2225-5346-2026-1-5
- Pages
- 71-87
Abstract
The article examines the antinomic nature of the existence of fear in Anton Chekhov’s works, with particular attention to the short story “Fear”. The methodological framework combines the principles of New Criticism — treating the literary text as a self-sufficient structure featuring an unreliable narrator — with approaches drawn from cognitive ontology. In addition, the analysis engages philosophical conceptions of fear developed by S?ren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as the Christian understanding of fear articulated in the Patristic tradition. Applying a cognitive approach to existential fear in Chekhov’s narrative raises the problem of the destruction of the ontological foundations underlying the characters’ traditional cognitive architecture. The article argues that this destruction does not result in mere negation but rather in a transformation into a new existential quality. In particular, the collapse of the cognitively maximal concept of marriage is interpreted as a key symptom of ontological disorder: it leads, on the one hand, to an intensification of existential fear in the protagonist, and, on the other, to a growth of entropic indifference in the existence of the other characters. Special emphasis is placed on the antinomies embodied in the character of Gavryusha, nicknamed the Forty Martyrs, who emerges as a crucial entropic factor in the story, counteracting the total immersion of existence in horror. Finally, the article raises the question of how religious and non-religious agents influence the processes of encoding, decoding, and recoding a person’s cognitive structure.