«Charlatans from medicine» in the «times of great tribulation» in the works of Lu Sin, A. Chekhov, M. Zoshchenko and V. Shalamov»

The article is devoted to the analysis of the specifics of the artistic representation of the image of the doctorcharlatan in the stories of A. Chekhov, M. Zoshchenko, Lu Sin and V. Shalamov. The article demonstrates that in the humorous stories of A. Chekhov and M. Zoshchenko the phenomenon of «charlatans from medicine» is presented in an ironic mode, when writers create many comic, farcical and vaudeville plots, in which illiterate doctors try to treat stupid common patients unsuccessfully; in the works of Lu Sin and V. Shalamov, this topic is presented in a fundamentally different way: they express the tragedy of a person who has become a hostage of political and social upheavals. Theauthors distinguish three main plot invariants in the medical discourse of writers: plots in which the motive of «drug» is realized – a pseudo-drug used by charlatans for treatment (from farcical and comically absurd in the works of Chekhov and Zoshchenko to senselessly inhuman, associated with motives of blood and death in the works of Shalamov and Lu Sin), plots in which the motive of «the executioner and the victim» is presented, accentuating the barbaric and sadistic methods of treatment used by «charlatans from medicine» and plots where the subject of the image becomes the emotional deprivation of a doctor or pseudo-doctor, a kind of «anesthesia of the heart «, presented in a comic version by Zoshchenko and Chekhov and in a tragic version by Shalamov and Lu Sin. The author comes to the conclusion that doctors M. Zoshchenko and A. Chekhov, in their executioner incarnation, are so naively simple-minded that they are not frightening, but comical and perform their «unconscious butchery» without malicious intent, or out of fear to admit their professional incompetence, or being absolutely sure of their own infallibility, and sick victims lose their martyr's halo, they are equated with doctors in terms of the narrowness of their horizons, and therefore their suffering causes not compassion and sympathy, but laughter. The charlatan healers of Lu Sin embody the tragic hypostasis of butchery, perceiving their healing «torture by fire and blood» as loyalty to barbaric ancient traditions and mythological customs, Shalamov's doctors are sophisticated sadists, their deliberate butchery is based on the awareness of the inviolability of their sacred status, the victims are not treated, but exposed, so they perceive their torment and suffering outside the ethical paradigm and feel their butchery as a creative act, receiving aesthetic pleasure from the process of «medical butchering» and from the awareness of their chosenness and the right to decide human destinies.