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The subtitle of the present article, ‘Not Written on the Occasion of the Centenary of Chekhov’s Death’, clearly and emphatically indicates the fact that it is not a eulogy. In a distinctly non-celebratory tone the article makes the point that although well known, well respected and well analysed the world over, Chekhov’s work nonetheless remains homeless in the literary world. The peculiarities of his narrative and dramatic modes still puzzle critics and are yet to be comprehended. One approach to them – the more common one – attempts to justify and reconcile those peculiarities with earlier, accepted or even ‘classic’ rules. The opposite approach tends to align him with the modernist rebellion (a quiet rebellion, in Chekhov’s case) in European literature sinse Maeterlinck and Joyce, a rebellion in the face of which the new branch of literary studies, narratology, turned out to be nearly helpless. In semiotic terms, Chekhov’s narration enters into an iconic relationship with his main topics, boredom, and the virtually untranslatable poshlost’ (the closest one can get in trying to render it in English would perhaps be by using the adjectives ‘common’, ‘vulgar’, ‘trivial’). Adopting a contrastive-intertextual approach, the second half of the article shifts the attention from the more general concept of literary space to a specific comparison between Chekhov’s works and those of Nikolay Liskov, whose narrative mode seems to be in a relationshep of direct opposition to Chekhov’s. Intertextual links are suggested between two pairs of works by the two authors, Chekhov’s The Lady with the Lapdog and Leskov’s Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, on the one hand, and The Daughter of Albion (Chekhov) and The Left-handed Craftsman (Leskov), on the other.

The very grounds of this article is the proper actualization and multiple definition of the term Central (Middle) Europe during the 1980s and the 1990s, in terms of its geopolitical and geographical cultural space. As an opposition to Germany’s political project Mitteleuropa, in the 1980s a new mid-European concept was launched, being a historical part of the ethnic and cultural diversity of the Austrian monarchy. The authors are intellectuals from Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary, all of them representing nations whose cultural identity has been manipulated and threatened by the communist totalitarian regime, and to whom the ex-Danube monarchy has been a “hinterland” for a rather long historical period. The main directions of Central Europe’s cultural and geographical definitions have been illustrated in the selected essay-writings of Milan Kundera, György Conrad, Vaclav Havel, Czeslaw Milosz. To all the four authors presented it is a “spiritual, cultural and mental phenomenon”. The motives are also pointed out, being an indispensable part of their central-Europeanism. Milan Kundera historically documented these in terms of the organized political struggle of the Hungarian, Czech, Slovak and Polish peoples against the communist dictatorship (1956, 1968, and 1980). We have also taken into consideration the discussions held in the West, concerning the new Central European project and their argumentative publicity in the 1989 anthology “In Search of Central Europe”. Since the works of the above-mentioned central European intellectuals do not pursue any academic goals, this article does not aim at discussing the proposition of cultural-geographic identification of Central Europe on behalf of the present criteria of objectivity and impartiality. What is more, this issue has been largely discussed by a number of authors in the anthology mentioned. From a comparative point of view, the analysis registers the common places and language-discourse interrelation of the essayistic texts, but pays particular attention to the connotative differences and their hypostases concerning the 207 modeling of the Central European cultural identity. In other words, the term Central Europe is considered in accordance with the various national reflections. On the one hand, the texts share the character of a collective project ebbed by the urge to demonstrate national compactness purified of all inherited national contradictions and cultural conflicts and even glorified as an ideal of the European future. On the other hand, regardless of the common “Central European attitudes” of the authors of the project, the national view point (together with all accompanying mythologemes of identity), generates discrepancies that question the historical reality of the cultural integrity and geographic localization of Central Europe.

The study tries to show in an unusual way that the Slavonic-Italian interliterary fellowship does exist. It is not rooted in historical forms which appeared and spread in Middle Ages in the Dalmatian Croatian and Italian environment but in typological relations of the Italian and Slavonic literatures and cultural mentalities, in the so-called meta-historical form of fellowship. We aim to prove in three contemporary novels that the hero protects and respects his own body. He never becomes an out-of-body ghost, intellect, an ideologist of the interests of some group or an aesthet. He supervises what happens around him according to the fact if the events do not imperil his life and the integrity of his personality (which often becomes an object of godly respect). So that he can further feel good, he gets involved in social matters. Since the power of an individual is limited, it arises out of the involvement – the protection of the hero’s own life, stylistically well exploitable situations: lyrical fragility, pathos, drama, comicality, invention, realistic historicity, dominance of youngish view. But if there is a kind of Slavonic/Italian interliterary fellowship based on corporeality, it exists over styles and over literary periods, because its basis is a common cultural type which could be marked as Mediterranean/ Christian.

The article has two dominants: on the one hand, it is a socio-poetical essay on the biography of literary places; on the other, it explores the role of places in the writer"s biographies. This particular topography in literary works tries to "investigate" the places of literary inspiration and to analyse the mysterious relation between the place of the writing and the place in the text. The humanities today are concerned with the symbolic correspondences between biographic journeys and the unconscious. This gives birth to the hypothesis that the writer"s personal space might serve as a model for his text. We are aware of the complexity of interactions between the virtual world of art and the reference world, whose degree of comparison can vary infinitely. However, we are tempted to visit the places which are dear to the literary memory, without knowing exactly what we expect to find at those places where a writer, a character or a verse were born. In the genre of literary pilgrimage the place is considered a work of art, it comes in ready made, given that the author was already there. Like a poet man lives on this earth, says a famous verse by Holderlin: it incites our curiosity to get closer tohow poets feel in their lives.