The Comic Actor

1 The Comic Actor (Комик) appeared in 1883, one of the dozens of short comic sketches Chekhov turned out in his early twenties for the Moscow and Petersburg humor weeklies, writing at speed and by the piece to support his family. Like a number of these early pieces, it draws on the theatrical world Chekhov knew well from the inside as both playgoer and, briefly, contributor to the provincial stage press: the cramped dressing room, the stock company with its fixed types – the comic actor, the ingenue, the raisonneur, the first violin – and the boredom and petty romance that fill the gaps between rehearsals.

The sketch is built on a single comic engine: two interior monologues run in counterpoint against a scene of almost no external action. Ivan Akimovich, the company’s comic actor, works himself up by degrees to say something to the ingenue Marya Andreevna, hedging, retreating, and trying again, while she – certain he is about to propose – talks herself through an entire imagined courtship and marriage in the space of his hesitations, arriving in a few lines at acceptance of a man she was, sentences earlier, certain she could never love. The mechanism is pure early Chekhonte: fast, broad, built on a single absurd premise and wrung for everything it will give before the punchline lands.

That punchline is characteristic of the young Chekhov’s method even here, in miniature: what looks like the shape of a love scene resolves into something entirely physical and unromantic, the reader’s – and the ingenue’s – expectations deflated in a single line. The comedy is broad, but the device of withholding what a scene appears to promise, and letting a concrete object (here, a glass of vodka) carry the real payload, is already recognizably the instinct that the mature stories would refine into something quieter and far more exact.