Headnote
1
Written in 1880 and published in Strekoza (The Dragonfly) over the signature “Antosha Chekhonte,” this is one of the twenty-year-old Chekhov’s earliest surviving pieces of print — not a story at all but a list, a mock inventory of the furniture that stocked the potboiler fiction of the day: the impoverished nobleman, the rich uncle whose death is more useful than his advice, the doctor with the knobbed cane and the inevitable prescription of the waters, the loyal old servant, the dog and the parrot and the nightingale, the portfolio of Russian leather and the revolver that never misfires.
2
The form is the joke. Seventeen numbered items, most of them not sentences at all – noun phrases stacked without a verb in sight – add up to an anatomy of cliché delivered with the deadpan of a customs manifest. Chekhov does not say the conventions are tired; he simply lists them, in the order a hack would reach for them, and lets the list’s own relentlessness make the case. The one line that breaks into mock-lyrical excess (“Heaven’s heights, an unseeable, immeasurable distance... incomprehensible, in a word: nature!!!”) is there to skewer exactly that kind of writing by performing it.
3
It belongs to a cluster of early squibs and dictionary-parodies – mock advertisements, mock glossaries, mock notices – in which the young Chekhonte earns his bread by outlining the shape of bad journalism and light fiction from the outside. The instinct on display here, that a genre’s dead conventions can be diagnosed by simply cataloguing them, without a word of commentary, is the same instinct that would later let the mature Chekhov trust a detail to carry a whole scene’s feeling. The comic economy of “The end” as its own numbered item – item seventeen, needing nothing else – is the twenty-year-old sketch-writer’s version of the restraint the world would come to know as his.
Translation Original
1 A count, a countess bearing traces of a beauty once hers, a neighboring baron, a liberal man of letters, an impoverished
nobleman, a foreign musician, dim-witted footmen, nurses, governesses, a German
steward, a squire and an heir from
America. Faces plain but sympathetic and appealing. A hero – rescuing the heroine from a maddened horse, strong in spirit and able, at every convenient opportunity, to show the strength of his fists.
Граф, графиня со следами когда-то бывшей красоты, сосед-барон, литератор-либерал, обеднявший дворянин, музыкант-иностранец, тупоумные лакеи, няни, гувернантки, немец-управляющий, эсквайр и наследник из Америки. Лица некрасивые, но симпатичные и привлекательные. Герой – спасающий героиню от взбешенной лошади, сильный духом и могущий при всяком удобном случае показать силу своих кулаков.
2 Heaven’s heights, an unseeable, immeasurable distance... incomprehensible, in a word: nature!!!
Высь поднебесная, даль непроглядная, необъятная... непонятная, одним словом: природа!!!
3 Fair-haired friends and red-haired enemies.
Белокурые друзья и рыжие враги.
4 A rich uncle, liberal or conservative depending on circumstances. His lessons are less useful to the hero than his death.
Богатый дядя, либерал или консерватор, смотря по обстоятельствам. Не так полезны для героя его наставления, как смерть.
6 A doctor with a careworn face, holding out hope for a crisis; often carries a cane with a knob, and a bald patch. And where there is a doctor, there is rheumatism from righteous labors, migraine, inflammation of the brain, tending a man wounded in a duel, and the inevitable advice to go take the waters.
Доктор с озабоченным лицом, подающий надежду на кризис; часто имеет палку с набалдашником и лысину. А где доктор, там ревматизм от трудов праведных, мигрень, воспаление мозга, уход за раненным на дуэли и неизбежный совет ехать на воды.
7 A servant – who served the old masters too, ready to go anywhere for his masters, even into the fire. A remarkable wit.
Слуга – служивший еще старым господам, готовый за господ лезть куда угодно, хоть в огонь. Остряк замечательный.
8 A dog, lacking only speech, a parrot, and a nightingale.
Собака, не умеющая только говорить, попка и соловей.
9 A
dacha outside
Moscow and a mortgaged estate in the south.
Подмосковная дача и заложенное имение на юге.
10 Electricity, dragged in, in most cases, neither to the point nor to the purpose.
Электричество, в большинстве случаев ни к селу ни к городу приплетаемое.
11 A portfolio of Russian leather, Chinese porcelain, an
English saddle, a revolver that never misfires, a decoration in the buttonhole, pineapples, champagne, truffles, and
oysters.
Портфель из русской кожи, китайский фарфор, английское седло, револьвер, не дающий осечки, орден в петличке, ананасы, шампанское, трюфели и устрицы.
12 Accidental eavesdropping as the cause of great discoveries.
Нечаянное подслушиванье как причина великих открытий.
13 A countless multitude of interjections and attempts to drop in a technical word at the right moment.
Бесчисленное множество междометий и попыток употребить кстати техническое словцо.
14 Thin hints at rather thick circumstances.
Тонкие намеки на довольно толстые обстоятельства.
15 Very often, the absence of an ending.
Очень часто отсутствие конца.
16 Seven deadly sins at the start and a wedding at the end.
Семь смертных грехов в начале и свадьба в конце.
