Anton Chekhov in Juan Eduardo Zúñiga: Aesthetic Affinities

Abstract

Juan Eduardo Zúñiga's work approached Russian literature not only as a source of study but also as a space that gave meaning to his way of understanding the world and of approaching the process of creation and the meaning of artistic work. His link with Ivan Turgenev was particularly close and resulted in a pioneering essay, but the affinity with Anton Chekhov, more subtle and disseminated throughout the whole of his work, allows us to understand fundamental aspects of the Spanish writer's imagination and to review some of the Russian author's works in a new light. This article is an approach to the study of the aesthetic roots from which they both derive. Through the analysis of shared figures in their works (the useless man, the strong woman), common generic frameworks (the provincial novel) and symbols of transformation present in some of their most emblematic stories (‘The Student’, ‘The Message’), it shows this relationship of contiguity by which both authors are inserted in the best tradition of modern symbolism, beyond local labels or journalistic or mechanical readings that separate what in the development of the human imagination appears united.