For the Wedding Season

1 For the Wedding Season (“K svadebnomu sezonu,” subtitled “From a Broker’s Notebook”) is a short comic sketch from 1885, written in the persona of a marriage broker’s ledger. Matchmaking brokers were a real fixture of provincial Russian life, and Chekhov mines the genre of the mock personal advertisement – already a familiar comic form in the humor press of the day – to produce six thumbnail portraits of prospective grooms and one prospective bride, each reduced to the handful of facts a broker would actually care about: age, rank, income, vices, and, above all, money. The joke is structural as much as verbal: virtue and defect sit on the same line with the same flat emphasis, so that a client’s drinking, dishonesty, or criminal record is filed alongside his hair color as simply another data point in the transaction.

The satire is aimed squarely at the mercenary logic of arranged marriage among the minor gentry and clerking class, and it does not spare its subjects. Several entries mock physical appearance and infirmity (pockmarks, a nasal voice, a filmed-over eye, a hoarse voice) as comic detail, and the final entry treats a convicted embezzler and forger, exiled for his crimes, as an unremarkable candidate for marriage to an orphaned girl – the joke being precisely that the broker sees nothing disqualifying in this. One character’s patronymic-style name, “Diphtherit,” is itself a piece of dark wordplay (the Russian word for diphtheria), typical of the era’s taste for grotesque comic names. None of this rises to ethnic slur or language targeting a nationality or ethnicity – no ethnic group is named or caricatured anywhere in the source text – but readers should be aware that the humor throughout trades on mockery of disability, physical unattractiveness, poverty, and criminality, presented without editorial comment, in keeping with the broker’s-eye conceit.