work
A Boring Story
"A Boring Story"
also: Скучная история, A Dreary Story
Chekhov's novella of 1889, completed that September and sent to the journal Severny Vestnik; referred to obliquely at first, before its title was settled, as a just-finished novella worth 600-700 rubles and as "the life of an old professor, a privy councillor". The full title, "Skuchnaya Istoriya (Iz zapisok starogo cheloveka)" / "A Dreary Story (From an Old Man's Notes)," is given explicitly for the first time in the direct submission letter to the journal's editress, Anna Mikhailovna Yevreinova (24 September 1889), confirming the earlier, more tentative identifications rather than merely inferring them.
Reading notes
- To A. M. Yevreinova, 7 September 1889. Moscow. §6 the life of an old professor, a privy councillor.
Probable, not certain, identification: the unnamed story is almost certainly "Skuchnaya Istoriya" ("A Boring Story" / "A Dreary Story"), the novella Chekhov was drafting and heavily revising through the summer and autumn of 1889 for "Severny Vestnik," whose narrator-protagonist is an aging professor of medicine and privy councillor (\S7 of the story itself opens on his rank and title). The identification rests on the subject-description given here plus the timeline corroborated by the same-week letter to Suvorin (\S9, "a novella... to the clinic for women's ailments, that is, to 'Severny Vestnik'") and by's headnote, which anticipates the same story from Yalta a month earlier. No title is given in this letter itself, so the link is an editorial inference, not a textual fact.
- To A. N. Pleshcheyev, 14 September 1889. Moscow. §4 it is quite possible that you too will call it dung. It is indeed dung.
TRANSLATED AT FULL FORCE, per corpus no-softening policy. The Russian is "дерьмо" (dermo) -- a genuinely coarse, scatological word for excrement, on a register with English "shit"/"crap," not a mild or polite term. Chekhov applies it to his own in-progress novella (later known as "A Boring Story"/"Skuchnaya istoriya,") twice in this paragraph, in characteristic self-lacerating hyperbole about a manuscript he is nonetheless simultaneously defending as having real merits (new characters, new situations). "Dung" is chosen over a softer euphemism (e.g. "trash," "rubbish") to preserve the crude, bodily register of the original rather than politely sanitizing it; a case could be made for the even blunter "shit," but "dung" retains the earthy, excremental core sense without drifting into a different register (vulgar-slang vs. Chekhov's slightly old-fashioned coarseness) that "shit" would introduce. No softening applied.
- To A. P. Lensky, 27 September 1889. Moscow. §7 I've already sent off my novella.
PROBABLE, not certain, identification: the unnamed novella is almost certainly "A Boring Story" (\textit{Скучная история}), which Chekhov sent to A. M. Evreinova at the Severny Vestnik on 24 September 1889 -- just three days before this letter -- and discussed further with A. N. Pleshcheyev the same day and again on 30 September. This letter alone does not name the novella; the identification rests on that tight cluster of dated, corroborating letters from the same week.
- To A. N. Pleshcheyev, 30 September 1889. Moscow. §3 the professor
"Профессор" -- the unnamed first-person narrator of "A Dreary Story" ("Скучная история"), an aging, terminally ill medical professor; Chekhov refers to him throughout this section simply as "the professor" rather than by name, since the character is deliberately unnamed in the novella itself.