A Contract for the Year 1884, Concluded with Mankind

"A Contract for the Year 1884, Concluded with Mankind" appeared at the turn of that year, one of the found-document squibs Chekhov produced by the dozen for the Moscow comic weeklies under his own established pseudonym "The Man Without a Spleen" (Chelovek bez selezenki), a byline he used through the early 1880s for exactly this register of newspaper parody. The piece takes the form of a notarized legal contract – stamp duty noted at the top, parties, clauses, penalty, signatures, and a closing notarial attestation – and applies that form to the entirely unlegislatable business of a calendar turning over.

The comedy is procedural rather than verbal: Mankind and the New Year 1884 bind themselves to obligations any reader would recognize as the actual, unwritten customs of a Russian New Year – toasts, calls paid and scandals had, hopes raised only to go unmet, a full complement of twelve months guaranteed as though a shorter year were a live commercial risk. The joke about Kasyan – men so named keep their name-day only on the 29th of February, a date that arrives once in four years – is a small piece of real calendar trivia dressed as a contractual concession, typical of how these early pieces assume a shared fund of everyday reference with their first readers.

The closing notarial clause plants the fiction in a specific, dateable Moscow: the New Year is said to reside "in the calendar of the provincial secretary A. Suvorin" – Alexei Suvorin, publisher of Novoye Vremya and soon one of Chekhov’s most important patrons – and the account of civic fees closes with a mock charitable levy "in aid of those wounded in the battle of B. Markevich with the Theatrical-Literary Committee," a glancing jab at a real and recent literary quarrel. None of this requires the reference to land for the piece to work; the form alone – the flat, disinterested language of a notary’s stamp – is doing the comic labor, the same discipline of a straight face that the mature Chekhov would keep and deepen long after he had stopped signing himself "The Man Without a Spleen."