From the Diary of an Assistant Bookkeeper
Из дневника помощника бухгалтера
Headnote
"From the Diary of an Assistant Bookkeeper" appeared in 1883, when Chekhov – twenty-three, still five years from finishing his medical degree – was turning out short comic pieces for the Moscow humor weeklies under the signature Antosha Chekhonte at a rate that supported his whole family. The form here is the found-document sketch he favored in these years: a fictional diary, dated entry by entry across more than two decades, kept by a subordinate clerk with exactly one subject.
The joke is structural rather than verbal. Every entry, whatever else it records – a colleague’s court troubles, a home remedy for catarrh, a superstitious cook’s reading of a dog’s howl – returns to the same fixation: the narrator’s decades-long wait for his ailing superior, Glotkin, to die and vacate the bookkeeper’s post. Cholera in Arabia, plague in a Volga village, are each greeted not with horror but with naked professional hope, because either might carry Glotkin off. When the old man finally does die in 1883, the diarist visits him in tears to beg forgiveness for having wished him dead – and the post goes to someone else anyway, by patronage rather than merit. The final entries show him transferring the same hope onto a new object, a colleague’s troubled marriage, with no sign that two decades of disappointment have taught him anything.
The comedy is the twenty-three-year span itself: an entire adult life measured out in relapses of a rich man’s cough and a poor man’s catarrh, with a folk pharmacopoeia of vodka infusions and acorn coffee running underneath both illnesses as its own flat, comic counterpoint. Chekhov supplies no commentary and no judgment – the diary form does that work by omission, letting the narrator’s monomania and the era’s petty office-politics (rank, patronage, a scandal over borrowed galoshes) speak for the smallness of the world he has staked his whole hope on.