The Christmas Tree

1 The Christmas Tree (“Elka” in the original) is a New Year sketch from 1884, written in the fast, single-conceit manner of the early Antosha Chekhonte years, when Chekhov was turning out short comic pieces for Moscow’s humor weeklies while finishing his medical degree. The occasion is the season – the *yolka*, the decorated fir tree at the center of the Russian New Year, standing in every window and every children’s party of the period – and Chekhov builds the whole piece on a single extended figure: Fate herself as the tree, hung not with toys but with the prizes and booby-prizes life actually distributes, and around her a crowd of "grown-up children" grabbing for them.

The sketch is a satirical parade. A rich merchant’s wife goes to a young doctor; a comfortable sinecure on an absurdly named provincial railway goes to someone called only "Kolya"; a poor but virtuous bride finds no takers until a threadbare old civil servant claims her out of resignation rather than desire; a library of Kant, Schopenhauer, and Goethe is stripped by a secondhand bookseller for its fortune-telling manuals and etiquette guides, the philosophy dumped on the floor. The targets are the stock figures and petty vanities of literary Moscow – collectors, hack journalists, minor celebrities of the day (Zorina, Okreits, the museum-keeper Winkler are period in-jokes, not major reference points) – skewered in a few lines apiece and moved past.

The sketch saves its sharpest turn for last. When the tree is bare and the crowd gone, one figure is left standing by it: "a contributor to the humor magazines" – a writer of exactly the kind of piece being read. He asks Fate what is left for him, and the answer is the thing everyone else has already refused: a "fig with nothing on it" – кукиш с маслом, a Russian idiom for getting precisely nothing, doubled here into a small joke about editorial cash-boxes already stuffed with the stuff. He turns it down and shuffles off with nothing but the hope of next year’s tree. It is Chekhov glancing, very lightly and without a trace of self-pity, at his own trade and its rewards.