Departed from Moscow:
Из москвы выбыли:
Headnote
"Departed from Moscow:" is one of Chekhov’s earliest published pieces, written in 1880 while he was still a medical student and signing his comic work "Antosha Chekhonte." It belongs to a genre the humor magazines of the day printed constantly and readers instantly recognized: the newspaper "departures" column, a real feature that listed which notable persons had left the city and for where. Chekhov takes the form and detonates it – a correspondent bound for the South Pole, a hundred and forty-five lawyers bound for provincial Taganrog (his own birthplace, and already a private joke), and then a mock program for an ostensible charity concert that dissolves into gibberish, garbled proverbs, and names that would have been instantly legible to a Moscow readership in 1880.
The concert program is the piece’s engine. Each "number" pairs a mangled folk saying or half-remembered opera cue with a real or thinly disguised name drawn from the Moscow theatrical and journalistic world – actors, critics, editors of rival humor weeklies – each assigned a verb that mocks their public manner: one will "weep," one will "indignate," one will "hiss." The joke depends on readers knowing exactly who is being skewered and why; much of that specificity is now opaque even to Russian readers, and this translation does not attempt to reconstruct it, since Chekhov’s own text supplies no gloss. What travels intact is the mechanism: the solemn form of a public announcement filled with escalating nonsense, the running gag on Taganrog, and the deadpan closing line about smelling salts for fainting spectators – the whole apparatus of a respectable notice used to stage absurdity without ever breaking its own straight face.
This is Chekhonte at his fastest and most disposable, working for pay by the line in the comic press, years before the mature, withholding manner of the later stories. Read it as a sketch of the machine the great prose stylist would later dismantle and rebuild: the same economy, aimed here at pure nonsense rather than at the unspoken feeling under a scene.