A Dacha Pleasure
Дачное удовольствие
Headnote
"A Dacha Pleasure" (Дачное удовольствие) appeared in 1884, one of the rapid-fire humoresques Chekhov produced under the byline Antosha Chekhonte for the comic weeklies of Moscow and Petersburg. It belongs to the genre he all but perfected in these years: the anecdote built on a single setup, delivered in under a page, with a punchline that arrives in the last line and nowhere before it.
The premise is peeping-Tom farce of a kind the censor tolerated only because the story turns the joke on its own suspense. Two idlers at a dacha bathing establishment spy on the women’s changing house through a crack in the boards, building toward a moment of discovery that the narrator himself interrupts — breaking in, mock-solicitously, "so as not to compound the reader’s disappointment" — to reveal that the object of all this furtive anticipation was never a woman at all, but an unattended bottle of liquor. The joke depends on withholding: Chekhov lets the reader’s own prurience do the work, then deflates it with a domestic non-event and a mock-moral tag.
Stylistically it is early and unguarded — dialogue that trails into dashes and ellipsis, action rendered by suggestion (the printer’s dots standing in for the climbing and its interruption), and a narrator who steps forward to address the reader directly, a device the mature Chekhov would abandon almost entirely. Readers who know only the later, more austere stories will find here the workshop where the timing — though not yet the reticence — was already in place.