The Theatrical Ticket-Touts' Cooperative

"The Theatrical Ticket-Touts’ Cooperative" dates from 1880, the first year of Chekhov’s apprenticeship in the Moscow comic weeklies, when the twenty-year-old medical student was filling the humor magazines under the signature Antosha Chekhonte with whatever the format would carry – captions, mock notices, calendars, faits divers. This piece belongs to that smallest and fastest of his early forms: a single paragraph staged as a found document, a public notice an artel (a Russian cooperative of independent tradesmen, here ticket scalpers) might actually have posted.

The occasion is real. Word had reached Moscow that Sarah Bernhardt, already the most famous actress in Europe after her sensational American tour, would soon bring her company to Russia – a visit that in fact took place the following year, 1881, when she played Moscow and St. Petersburg before enormous and fashionable crowds. Chekhov does not write a word about Bernhardt herself; the joke is entirely procedural. The touts announce themselves in the bloodless language of a business circular – "has the honor of announcing,for the public’s convenience,has entered into an agreement with the proper parties" – as if cornering the market on tickets to a sold-out engagement were a service rendered rather than a racket run. The tavern near the theater, named as the cooperative’s chosen "residence," is the one deflating concrete detail: grand commercial diction housed in a drinking den.

The form is the whole effect, and it is consistent with the method Chekhov would refine for decades after: no narrator steps in to call the touts parasites or the public gullible, no closing line draws the moral. The notice simply runs as a notice would, and the reader is left to supply the contempt. It is a miniature of the satirical column-filler Chekhov turned out by the dozen in these early years – disposable by design, but already drilled in the discipline of saying nothing the form does not require.