The Cross

1 The Cross (“Krest” in the original) is a two-page humoresque from 1883, the year Chekhov – twenty-three, still signing himself “Antosha Chekhonte,” still turning out these pieces by the dozen for the comic weeklies – was at his most prolific in the scene-and-caption vein. It belongs to a genre he practically invented for the Russian press of the period: the whole story compressed into a single overheard exchange, with no narration beyond the barest stage direction.

The joke turns entirely on the word krest – “cross.” In the Russian honors system a krest was also a decoration, the cross-shaped insignia of an order such as St. Stanislav or St. Anna, and a literary man who has just published something creditable might plausibly be teased about earning one. The hostess’s question about the “fee” primes the audience – and the poet – to expect news of a sale. When the poet says he “got a cross instead,” the room leaps to the wrong conclusion twice over: first that he has been decorated, then, when he corrects them to “a red cross,” that he must have made a charitable gift to the Red Cross Society. Only the manuscript itself, produced at last from his pocket, resolves the pun – and resolves it downward, into an editor’s rejection mark, the red pencil stroke that means a piece has been refused.

Chekhov gives away nothing before the final line. The comedy is entirely in the crowd’s escalating enthusiasm for a triumph that was never happening, and in the poet’s own clipped, wounded economy – he offers just enough words to keep the misunderstanding running, never enough to correct it. It is a small piece, but a clean instance of the method Chekhov would refine for the rest of his career: let the characters talk past the truth, and let the object – here, a single red mark on a page – say what nobody in the room will.