Two Letters
Два письма
Headnote
1 Two Letters (Два письма) appeared in 1883, in the humor magazine Zritel (The Spectator), one of the many brief comic pieces the twenty-three-year-old Chekhov was turning out at speed for the Moscow weeklies under the “Antosha Chekhonte” byline and its variants. It belongs to the epistolary-sketch form he returned to often in these years: the whole story told through a pair of letters, with no narrator at all – the comedy generated purely by the gap between what each correspondent means and what the other actually says.
The form is announced by its two mock-official headings: “A Serious Question” and “A Detailed Answer.” The nephew Vladimir Grechnev writes to his uncle in a fever of sentimental urgency, unable to get through two sentences without a diminutive or an exclamation point, asking after Mashenka, the girl he loved six years ago and has apparently loved, uninterrupted, ever since. The uncle’s reply is written in the same overheated, half-literate provincial idiom – earnest, digressive, larded with pieties – and takes an extraordinarily long time, through pickled herring, a hand of cards, and a disquisition on German manners, to arrive at the one fact the nephew is waiting for.
The joke, entirely of the deadpan sort, is buried in the final line before the postscript: Mashenka is already married, to a German named Urmakher. The uncle mentions it in passing, in the same breath as her rose-colored gown and her jewelry, apparently unaware – or indifferent to – what it does to the letter he is answering. Neither correspondent registers the catastrophe; the postscript moves cheerfully on to the neighbors’ admiration of Vladimir’s prose style and the quality of Murdashevich’s caviar. The early Chekhov withholding is already at work here: the heartbreak is never named, only handed to the reader sideways, inside someone else’s small talk.