Bibliography

A one-page squib from 1883, in the fast, broad gear of the early "Antosha Chekhonte" pieces – a mock notices column announcing seven new books, each title collapsing from official dryness into absurdity or open scandal within its first line. It reworks a device Chekhov had already used in 1880’s "Advertisements and Notices": a Siberian guidebook whose real contents are a directory of restaurants, tailors, and women for hire; a handbook "for quartermasters and cashiers" published, with a straight face, by "Bush and Maksheyev"; a hedgehog- farming treatise pitched at glove manufacturers. Here the joke is sharpened and given fresh, more pointed targets.

Two of the phantom authors are not inventions at all. "Rykov," credited with a pamphlet asking "Is There Money in Russia, and Where Is It?," is Ivan Rykov, the real chairman of the Skopin Mutual Credit Society, whose fabricated accounts and 1875 collapse produced one of the great financial scandals of Alexander II’s reign. "Mr. Yukhantsev," whose portrait illustrates the Siberian guidebook and whose private notebook supplies its concluding chapter, is Konstantin Yukhantsev, the Moscow bank cashier convicted in 1878 of embezzling over two million rubles. Both men recur across Chekhov’s early journalism as instantly recognizable names to the Moscow reading public of the day – shorthand for a fraud so brazen it had become a kind of dark celebrity. Placing them as authorities in a books column, footnoted with prices to the kopeck, is the whole joke: officialdom’s own bibliographic manners turned to promote the very corruption they exist to disguise. Ranks and forms (a retired ensign, a police sergeant, a prince dedicating an ode to himself) round out a gallery of petty venality – graft, vanity, and swindling dressed as respectable print.

It asks nothing of a reader beyond the pleasure of the list building against itself, title by title, price by price – the twenty-three- year-old Chekhov already trusting a reader to supply the outrage the prose withholds.