This and That (Letters and Telegrams)

1 This and That (Letters and Telegrams) (“И то и се (письма и телеграммы)” in the original) is one of Chekhov’s earliest published pieces, appearing in 1880 under the pseudonym “Antosha Chekhonte,” when the future writer was a twenty-year-old first-year medical student in Moscow. It belongs to a small group of comic sketches he built entirely out of found documents – here, a sequence of telegrams and letters strung together with no narration at all, each one a self-contained joke that depends on the gap between what the writer says and what the writer is.

2 The occasion binding nearly all the fragments is a real event: the French actress Sarah Bernhardt’s celebrated tour of Russia, which reached Moscow in the winter of 1881 and set off exactly the kind of citywide mania Chekhov mocks here. A provincial admirer wires ecstatic nonsense about her performance; a fashionable doctor writes a pseudo-clinical case report on her physique, larded with mock-Latin diagnosis; a jealous shopgirl weeps over another woman’s diamonds; a newspaper editor and his underpaid staff writer haggle over a free ticket; the editor’s wife issues an ultimatum of her own. Each voice is a stock type of the day – the sentimental soldier, the pedantic physician, the harried journalist, the status-hungry housewife – and Chekhov needs only a few lines of each to let the type indict itself.

3 The piece is a good specimen of the fast, disposable comic mode of the earliest Chekhonte years: broad, quick, built for a humor magazine’s back pages, with no interest in psychology or resolution, only in timing. The final fragment, a single line about a frog offered with sugar and signed “Sobakevich” (borrowing the name of Gogol’s boorish landowner from Dead Souls), breaks the sequence’s running joke and closes the piece on pure non sequitur – an early sign of the comic instincts, restraint, and appetite for the overheard fragment that the mature Chekhov would later turn toward much darker ends.