The Diplomat

1 The Diplomat (“Diplomat”, subtitled a stsenka – literally a “little scene” or scenette) appeared in 1884, in the comic weekly Oskolki (Fragments), during Chekhov’s most prolific period of miniature writing. He was twenty-four, still finishing his medical degree, and turning out these compressed comic pieces at a pace of several a week under the byline “A. Chekhonte.” The scenette – built almost entirely out of dialogue, with the barest minimum of stage direction – was one of the house forms of the period’s humor magazines, and Chekhov was its most disciplined practitioner.

2 The premise is a single joke, escalated with mechanical precision. A titular councillor’s wife has died, or is dying, or is neither – the relatives, too squeamish to break the news directly to her estranged husband, dispatch a family friend, Colonel Piskarev, to prepare him gently. Piskarev’s idea of tact is to talk around the subject at such length, through so many contradictions and self-corrections, that he manages to convey nothing and everything at once. The word “diplomacy” – Kuvaldin’s own, bitter, at the moment he finally understands what is being kept from him – gives the piece its title and its irony: the colonel’s clumsy evasions are the opposite of diplomatic, and it is precisely this failure of tact that inflicts the cruelty a plainer delivery would have spared.

3 It is pure early Chekhov: fast, broad, built on a single absurd mechanism run to its limit, with no interest in psychology beyond what the dialogue itself performs. The comedy is verbal and structural – Piskarev’s endless qualifications, his slips of the tongue (pokoinitsa, “the departed,” escaping him twice before he can catch it), Kuvaldin’s mounting dread against his friend’s blustering reassurances. There is no narratorial comment on any of it; the reader is left, as so often in Chekhov, to watch the machinery of cruelty operate through nothing but talk.