The Competition
Конкурс
Headnote
1 The Competition (“Konkurs” in the original) appeared in 1885 in Oskolki (Splinters), the St. Petersburg humor weekly that published a large share of Chekhov’s earliest work. It is a miniature in the mock-document vein he returned to often in these years: not a story with characters and a plot so much as a parody of a genre of print – here, the kind of gimmicky competition notice a magazine might run to attract submissions and readers. The joke is entirely in the deadpan bureaucratic voice: a "prize" that amounts to a photograph, a certificate, and a token subscription; a set of pseudo-official "conditions" that walk the aspiring love-letter writer through every stock sentiment and cliché of the genre (jealousy of imaginary rivals, inquiries about the dowry, professions of suffering) as though laying out a form to be filled in; and a mock-Latin legal phrase misspelled for good measure. The final touch – that the judges will be ladies – closes the piece with a wink at its own premise.
The text is brief and self-contained, and no ethnic slurs or other offensive language appear in the source.