Fintiflyushki

1 Fintiflyushki – roughly “Trifles,” or “Bits and Bobs,” the word used for small decorative frippery of no real substance – appeared in 1884, during the years Chekhov was publishing rapid-fire humor pieces in the Petersburg and Moscow comic weeklies to support himself and his family while finishing his medical degree. It is not a story in the ordinary sense but a string of five brief anecdotes, unconnected in plot or character, joined only by a recurring target: the vanity, cruelty, and casual self-interest of the landowning and official classes.

Each anecdote is built the way the early Antosha Chekhonte pieces are built – a single absurd premise driven to its punchline in a few lines, with no narratorial comment before or after. A count fabricates ancestral portraits of “Adam” and “Eve” to manufacture a lineage; another prefers his new carriage’s age to his new title’s; a landowner values his hunting neighbors’ goodwill over his own game; a magistrate lectures a starving thief on the virtue of work; a prosecutor learns from a defendant, his own former schoolmate, that all their other classmates have ended up in penal servitude. The forms vary – riddle, dialogue, courtroom exchange – but the target does not: each sketch catches a figure of authority revealing, in one unguarded remark, exactly how little he understands or cares about the people beneath him.

The pieces are trifles by design, disposable copy for a magazine page, and Chekhov does not ask them to be more. But the method is already the mature one in miniature: no adjective tells the reader what to think of the count, the judge, or the prosecutor. The characters convict themselves in their own words, and the anecdote ends the instant the words have landed.