A Drama

1 "A Drama" (1886) is one of Chekhov’s shortest and most purely comic early sketches, written in the form of a tiny stage script rather than conventional narrative prose. Its entire "cast" is four entries: a father burdened with eleven unmarried daughters, a young suitor, and – in the story’s final punchline – the father’s coattail itself, personified as a speaking character. The "plot" is a single scene: the young man works up his nerve to ask for the hand of the youngest daughter, the father performs a theatrical show of reluctance (tearful protests about losing his "comfort" and the "prop of his old age"), and when the suitor, startled by this performance, tries to beg off and retreat, the desperate father lunges and physically grabs him by the coattail – which is left to voice its own protest as it tears.

2 The piece belongs to Chekhov’s earliest, most rapid-fire comic mode, written for the humor magazines under tight length constraints, and plays on a stock situation of the period: a father anxious to marry off a houseful of daughters versus a suitor easily frightened away by sentimental theatrics. Its formal joke – staging ordinary prose narration as dramatis personae and stage directions, then handing the closing line to an inanimate object – is characteristic of young Chekhov’s appetite for formal parody of theatrical and literary convention.