Cherepov, Maker of Coffins

This is juvenilia in the strictest sense: three sentences from 1880, the year the twenty-year-old medical student began publishing comic filler under the pen-name Antosha Chekhonte to support his family while he studied. Pieces this small appeared as captions, mock notices, and one-line absurdities stuffed between the longer sketches in the humor weeklies – padding for the editor, practice for the writer. The form here is a parody of a tradesman’s shop announcement, the kind a Moscow reader would have seen posted in a window or set as a small advertisement in a newspaper’s back pages.

The joke is entirely in the deadpan. A coffin-maker advertises like any other merchant – stock on hand, a discount for bulk custom, a warning against counterfeit goods – and the absurdity is that none of the phrasing acknowledges what is actually being sold or to whom. "Wholesale discount for the dying" treats death as a bulk transaction; "beware of imitations" treats the certainty of needing a coffin as a consumer choice that might be exploited by a lesser competitor. The surname given in the title, Cherepov, is built on cherep – skull – the kind of broad, legible joke-name typical of the early sketches, where a character’s trade or fate is already announced before he does anything.

There is no narrator, no scene, no character who speaks in his own voice – only the borrowed register of commercial print, which Chekhov would mine again and again in these years (mock advertisements, mock calendars, mock dictionaries) before turning the same gift for appropriated voice toward the subtler ironies of the mature stories. Read in isolation it is a trifle; read against Палата № 6 or Скучная история, it is the first, crudest appearance of an instinct that never left him: that the deadest language – official, commercial, formulaic – is where the most can be said by saying nothing at all.