The Executors of the Merchant Vislyaev

This squib comes from Chekhov’s first year in print, 1880, when the twenty-year-old medical student was filling the back pages of the Moscow humor weeklies with captions, mock notices, and comic miniatures under the signature "Antosha Chekhonte." The title identifies the piece as a notice placed by the executors of one "merchant Vislyaev" – a fictional testator whose will, in the joke, has funded a prize for the writing of "an impossibly stupid comedy." The piece survives only as a fragment of a longer sequence of such mock announcements from the satirical press, which is why the surviving text opens mid-sentence, in the middle of naming the prize’s payout.

The second half of the piece pivots to a different target: a mock obituary for a rival or defunct publication, here called The Russian Gazette (Русская газета), reported dead of "atrophy of the brain and death by starvation" after a long decline, its remains pickled and shelved in a museum’s back room. The device – announcing the death of a periodical in the deadpan register of a family obituary, complete with mourning relatives and an autopsy report – was a stock joke of the humor press, aimed at papers thought to have gone stale or run out of readers; Chekhov’s version pushes the medical detail (his own training shows through) further than most.

Both halves belong to the earliest and broadest gear of Chekhov’s apprentice work: single-absurdity sketches built entirely on the gap between an official or ceremonial form – the testamentary announcement, the newspaper obituary – and the triviality or cruelty of what is actually being announced. There is no character and no scene, only the form doing the joke’s whole work, in the deadpan the mature Chekhov would keep and refine long after he had left these squibs behind.