From the Diary of a Young Lady

1 Published in 1883, when Chekhov — twenty-three, still signing himself “Antosha Chekhonte,” still selling miniatures by the column-inch to the Moscow comic weeklies — had already turned the diary entry into one of his standard small forms. The device is simple and durable: a first-person narrator who understands less than the reader does, recording her days in the confident, breathless present tense of a girl convinced she is the heroine of a romance.

2 The joke works by withholding. The narrator sees a handsome stranger loitering outside her window for days on end, reads it as courtship, and fills in a plot — rivalry with her sister Varya, secret messages chalked on a gate, a rakish “I’m not opposed, only later.” The reader, given exactly the same facts she is, arrives at the real story first: the man is a plainclothes policeman watching the house because her brother Seryozha, home after a long absence, is wanted for embezzlement. By the time she reports the arrest, in the entry for the 19th, she still cannot see what has actually happened in front of her for six days running.

3 It is an early exercise in the technique the mature Chekhov would refine rather than abandon: the narrator who is not to be trusted, and a truth that arrives through the gaps in what she notices rather than through anything she says. Here the mode is still pure comedy — vain, silly, quick — but the mechanism, a first-person voice too self-absorbed to read its own evidence, is the same one that later carries the interior monologues of “Ionych” and “The Darling.”