Comic Advertisements and Notices

Another 1880 squib from the same run of mock classifieds Chekhov placed as "Antosha Chekhonte" – the twenty-year-old medical student’s earliest signature, still a step short of the fuller pen-name he would keep for years. Like the companion advertisement pieces from this run, it apes the back pages of the Moscow humor weeklies, where real dentists, tailors, and tradesmen bought space to announce themselves in stiff, half-literate commercial prose.

The joke here works on two levels at once. The frame is a dentist named Walter publicly warning the public not to confuse him with another, newly arrived dentist – also named Walter – who is stealing his patients: a small, self-defeating absurdity, since the warning identifies nothing that would let a reader tell the two men apart. Underneath that, Chekhov renders the notice in the broken, misspelled Russian of a semi-literate or foreign tradesman fumbling with the alphabet – the kind of Russian a jobbing sign-painter or an immigrant dentist advertising himself in a language not his own might produce. The mangled orthography is the comedy’s real engine: an official-sounding notice, undercut at the level of the letters themselves. A one-line rival notice, for a dentist attached to Winkler’s traveling menagerie, closes the joke by implying the profession was, in this milieu, no more dignified than a sideshow act.

It belongs to the earliest and broadest gear of Chekhov’s comic writing: squibs built for a few lines of a magazine page, sized to the absurdity of the form they parody rather than to character or plot. The device – comic effect produced by orthography and register rather than by event – is a small early instance of the attentiveness to voice that the mature Chekhov would put to very different use.