Two Novels

"Two Novels" appeared in 1880, in the first burst of pieces the twenty-year-old medical student Anton Chekhov placed in the Moscow comic weeklies under the signature Antosha Chekhonte. It belongs to his earliest and most mechanical comic form: the parody built entirely on a borrowed professional idiom, run to its logical extreme until the joke exhausts itself. Here the target is the serialized "novel" (roman) of the popular press, refracted twice – once through the vocabulary of clinical medicine, once through the vocabulary of the newspaper trade – by a narrator who cannot describe his own marriage except in the jargon of his profession.

The first novel, "The Doctor’s Novel," is a mock case history. The Latin-larded diction of nineteenth-century Russian medical writing – prescriptions, dosages, anatomical description, citations to (invented) authorities – is applied wholesale to a wife and mother-in-law, who are "diagnosed" with talkativeness as though it were a nervous pathology, and "treated" with a fantastical operation combining tongue amputation with mittens. The joke depends on real figures: Jean-Martin Charcot, the Salpêtrière neurologist already famous across Europe by 1880, and Theodor Billroth, the pioneering Viennese surgeon, are both invoked by name as though they had published on this "disease." Chekhov, already deep in his own medical coursework, is turning the exact register he was being trained to write in against a stock target of the comic press – the shrewish wife – and the humor is inseparable from his professional fluency in the idiom he is mocking.

The second novel, "The Reporter’s Novel," runs the same device through newspaper language instead: a wife is "proofread," found free of "misprints," and married; her infidelities are logged as violations of an exclusive distribution agreement, punished with formal "warnings" in the manner of a censor’s citations to an offending publication, and her child’s paternity is questioned as a matter of literary borrowing – "the plot is borrowed." The joke about "half struck out by the censor" glances at a real and immediate professional hazard: pre-revolutionary Russian journalism operated under formal censorship, in which a publication could be issued official "warnings" (predosterezheniya) and ultimately suspended after a third offense – exactly the escalation the narrator inflicts on his wife.

Neither sketch resolves into anything but its own mechanism running down; this is column-filler, disposable by design, written at speed for a weekly deadline. But the double transposition – marriage described as a medical case, then as a newspaper subscription – already shows the young Chekhonte’s instinct for building a joke out of a rigorously sustained borrowed voice rather than out of commentary, a discipline the mature Chekhov would keep and deepen long after he had stopped writing this kind of piece.