The Crafty One

1 Written in 1883, when Chekhov—twenty-three, still signing himself “Antosha Chekhonte,” still supporting a household on space-rates paid by the comic weeklies—was turning out a sketch or two almost every week. “Хитрец” (The Crafty One) belongs to that furious early output: a single scene, a single joke, worked out entirely in dialogue overheard on a Petersburg street.

2 The setup is the stock two-friends-out-walking frame Chekhov used a dozen times in these years: one man expansive and knowing, the other close-mouthed, the whole piece riding on the gap between them. Here the expansive one, Semyon Petrovich, is built out of a very specific comic type—the jealous husband who manages his own jealousy by manufacturing distractions for every man who comes near his wife, peddling girls to his friends as a kind of decoy operation. He confesses the scheme with the same operatic self-pity he brings to everything, weeping over his own vice one moment and resuming the sales pitch the next.

3 The joke turns on the last line. Pavel Ivanych, who has spent the whole walk refusing to be drawn in, delivers the verdict not as commentary but as a non sequitur that lands exactly on target: a good family, a respected mother, a marshal of nobility for a father—and this is what it has come to. It is the closest the piece comes to Chekhov’s mature manner, the moral arriving sideways, through a shrug rather than a speech.

4 The piece moves at the speed of the comic papers it was written for: short exchanges, interruptions, a running joke about volcanoes and ice that never has to explain itself. Nothing here anticipates the patience of the later stories, and nothing needs to—it is doing exactly what a Chekhonte squib was built to do, fast and complete in a page.