The Rigmarole

"The Rigmarole" appeared in 1884, in the thick of Chekhov’s Antosha Chekhonte years, when he was turning out short comic sketches for the weekly humor magazines at a pace that later astonished even him. The Russian title, Канитель, names a kind of tangled gold thread used in embroidery, and by extension any snarled, needlessly protracted business – a rigmarole in the English sense of a tedious, circular muddle.

The scene is a village church, where an old woman has come to have the sexton write out her prayer list: names for the living, on one slip of paper, and names for the dead, on another. The joke turns entirely on the instability of that boundary. A man who has not been heard from since he went off to service years ago – is he alive or dead? A woman newly married, still very much living – how did she end up on the slip for the departed? The sexton, more irritated than competent, keeps crossing names out and moving them from one list to the other, blotting the page, losing his place, until he gives up and starts the whole business again from scratch.

Chekhov’s early stories are full of minor church functionaries drawn with an insider’s precise, unsentimental eye – his own family’s devout habits and his years of enforced choir duty as a boy gave him the material. There is no moral here, no satire of religion as such; the comedy is purely mechanical, built on the sexton’s harried bookkeeping and the old woman’s dogged, garbled recitation of names. It is a small piece, built for a single sitting and a single laugh, but it already shows the ear for real, broken, talking-past-each-other speech that the mature Chekhov would keep and deepen long after he had stopped writing jokes for money.