The Operator

"The Operator" ("Делец," sometimes rendered "The Businessman" or "The Wheeler-Dealer") is one of Chekhov’s compressed 1885 sketches, built entirely as a character portrait followed by ten verbatim "excerpts" from the subject’s secret memorandum book. The frame (a single opening paragraph) introduces a Petersburg fixer of no fixed trade — broker, wedding guest for hire, professional mourner, political weathervane who is a conservative to one acquaintance and a nihilist to another — and then lets his own ledger entries convict him: petty bribes and graft, an extorted matchmaking fee, blackmail over a society lady’s love letters, procuring an apartment for an engineer’s mistress, and casual violence threatened against an underling. The final section is headed only "Notes" ("Примечания"), evidently the start of an editorial apparatus (footnotes keyed to the memorandum-book excerpts) that is not present in this staging of the source text.

One entry (section 8) has the operator noting a reminder to "give the agent Yankel a smack across the mug, so he doesn’t lie.Yankel" is a Jewish given name, and the line trades on the period-typical caricature of the Jewish agent or middleman as a stock figure of casual contempt and violence in the narrator-operator’s world; it has been translated faithfully and without softening. No other ethnic slurs appear in the source.