Antosha Ch.'s Advertisement Office

This is one of Chekhov’s earliest published lines, a single-sentence mock notice from 1880, when the twenty-year-old medical student was placing squibs, captions, and comic miniatures in the Moscow weeklies under the signature "Antosha Ch." – a shortened first try at the pen-name "Antosha Chekhonte" he would sign for several more years. Зритель (The Spectator) was one of those humor magazines, and this piece apes its own classified pages: a deadpan business announcement, in the form newspapers used for actual advertising offices, claiming that an advertisement bureau has been leased in the magazine’s name for the coming year.

The joke is entirely in the form. There is no character, no scene, no punchline beyond the gap between the self-important officialese of a commercial notice and the fact that it is signed by a comic columnist advertising his own column. It belongs to the earliest and broadest gear of Chekhov’s work – sketches built on a single absurdity, sized to fill a few lines of a magazine page – and it shows him already alert to genre and register as material: the deadpan of an official announcement, deployed for comic effect, is a trick the mature Chekhov would refine but never abandon.