Poetry and Prose

"Poetry and Prose" dates from 1880, the first year of Chekhov’s apprenticeship in the Moscow comic weeklies, when the twenty-year-old medical student was filling the humor magazines under the signature Antosha Chekhonte with whatever short comic form the format would carry. This piece belongs to his earliest and most mechanical mode: a string of unrelated miniature scenes, each set up as a stock "poetic" tableau – the lovers on the bench, the devoted son’s letter home, the schoolboy’s tryst in the garden, a scene from "Hamlet," a historical vignette of Napoleon – and each punctured in its last line by a flat, unglamorous "prose" fact. The title names the method outright: verse-mood built up, then dropped.

The five sketches share one joke told five ways. Sentiment is inflated with the era’s stock romantic vocabulary – suns playing in snowflakes, nightingales, cupids on cheeks, declarations of dying for love – and each time the inflation is popped by something physical and undignified: bedbugs racing across a collar, a mother who cares less about her son’s Apollo statue than about having nothing to feed him, a schoolmaster barking a gymnasium student back to his Latin lesson, a detached stage mustache undercutting Hamlet’s grief, Napoleon’s unromantic preference in meat. None of the punctures is explained or moralized; the narrator never states that poetry has given way to prose, only stages it, sketch after sketch.

The gymnasium scene carries a specific period detail: the eighth-form student is at the top of the pre-revolutionary Russian secondary school, old enough to affect a mustache and a pince-nez, still young enough to be sent back to class by the school inspector – a job Chekhov, freshly out of his own gymnasium in Taganrog, knew from the inside. The piece is otherwise disposable by design, one of dozens of column-fillers from these years, but it already shows the young writer’s characteristic instinct: let the concrete, unglamorous detail do the deflating, and never step in to explain the joke.