Surgery

1 Surgery (Хирургия) appeared in 1884 in the humor weekly Oskolki (Splinters), signed “A. Chekhonte.” Chekhov was twenty-four, in his final year of medical school at Moscow University, and already supporting his family on the fees these comic sketches brought in. The setting – a zemstvo hospital, the network of rural clinics established after the 1864 reforms to bring basic medical care to the peasantry – was one he knew from the inside: a doctor himself within months of this story’s publication, he spent much of his career practicing in exactly this kind of underfunded provincial institution.

The comedy turns on a single, precise piece of medical ignorance. A feldsher – a paramedic or medical assistant, trained to handle minor cases but not a qualified doctor – is left in sole charge because the actual doctor has gone off to marry. Kuryatin’s every line is bluster dressed as professional confidence: he lectures his patient on technique while fumbling the instrument, invokes an invented gentleman patient as proof of his competence, and blames the sexton’s involuntary flinching for his own failure. Chekhov, who would go on to write with real clinical authority about doctors and disease, here uses his medical knowledge for something much narrower and funnier: watching a man who has just enough vocabulary to sound like an expert butcher a simple extraction from sheer overconfidence.

The sexton Vonmiglasov is no less a comic type – his speech shifts constantly between church-Slavonic penitential formulas (he quotes the Psalter and recites a fragment of confession) and the plain, furious peasant idiom that breaks through once the pain starts. That collision of registers is the story’s other engine: piety and agony, ceremony and bodily panic, occupying the same mouth within a single sentence. The story ends exactly where Chekhov’s economy demands – no moral, no reconciliation, just the sexton going home with two broken stumps where a tooth had been, and the feldsher already rehearsing his excuse.