The article correlates an episode from the second act of A.P.’s comedy containing a remark indicating the sound of a breaking string. Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” and a fragment from the song by V.S. Vysotsky “The Tale of Unfortunate Fairy-Tale Characters.” The basis for the correlation is the mention of birds: in Chekhov it is a heron and an eagle owl, in Vysotsky it is a bitten and also an eagle owl. In “The Cherry Orchard,” the characters, in the sound of a breaking string precisely indicated in the stage directions, heard completely different sounds, among the sources of which were just a heron and an eagle owl. In Vysotsky’s song, the sounds made either by a bittern or an eagle owl turned out to be either the reason that Ivan the Fool felt sad in his soul, or a sign of this state. The similarity of the two episodes from the two works, therefore, turned out to be due not only to the indication of the same names of birds (a bittern is a type of heron), but also to the similarity of the characters’ states in their reaction to these sounds. Among other things, the main motif of misfortune for Vysotsky’s song is considered in projection on the mention of misfortune by Firs in the episode with the broken string in Chekhov. As a result, it is shown that the correlation of the two episodes contributed to the semantic mutual enrichment of the two texts: in Vysotsky’s parody-ironic song the dramatic mood was actualized, and in Chekhov’s play the comic plan, mysteriously stated by the genre subtitle, was actualized.
For citation: Domanskii Yu.V. Echo of a broken string from Chekhov's “The cherry orchard” in Vladimir Vysotsky's “The tale of the unhappy fairy-tale characters”, Ivanovo State University Bulletin, Series: Humanities, 2024, iss. 2, pp. 5—12.