The Grateful One

1 The Grateful One (Благодарный, subtitled “a psychological study”) appeared in 1883, in the early years of Chekhov’s apprenticeship in the comic weeklies, when he was writing at enormous speed under pseudonyms for a few kopecks a line. It belongs to the fast, broad, single-absurdity sketches of that period: a scene built almost entirely out of dialogue, with the narration kept to a bare minimum of stage directions.

The setup is simple. Ivan Petrovich, a superior of some standing, gives his secretary and distant relative Misha Bobov three hundred rubles – enough, it turns out, for Misha to marry his sweetheart Katya – and tells him to thank his wife, Marya Semyonovna, since it was she who begged the money out of him. Misha does exactly that, and then some: his gratitude, delivered on a couch in her private room, escalates without any of the participants quite noticing where it has gone, from hand-kissing to declarations of love for the husband’s soul to an embrace that Ivan Petrovich walks in on at the worst possible moment.

The comedy turns on a very Chekhovian confusion of registers. Misha’s speech never stops being the vocabulary of gratitude and moral uplift – love him, don’t betray him, thank heaven for such a husband – even as his hands and his body are doing something else entirely, and Marya Semyonovna’s own half-hearted attempts to extricate herself are undercut by the comically unhelpful furniture. Neither character ever says what is actually happening; the narrator doesn’t say it either. The story ends exactly where the joke demands: on Misha’s protest of sincerity to the outraged husband, a plea that is, in its way, entirely true and entirely useless.