The Sheet
Лист (кое-что пасхальное)
Headnote
1 The Sheet (Лист), subtitled “Something for Easter,” appeared in 1883, one of the many brief comic sketches Chekhov turned out under the name “Antosha Chekhonte” for the humor weeklies of the day. It belongs to a small, sharply topical genre: the Easter feuilleton, timed to run in the week of the holiday and built on a custom every reader of the paper would have recognized at once.
That custom is the visiting sheet. In the Russian civil service, subordinates were expected to call on their superiors at Easter to offer the greeting “Christ is risen!” – in person, ideally, but in practice a great many simply signed a sheet of paper left with the doorman, a gesture that satisfied the form of respect without costing anyone the visit itself. Chekhov stages two variations on the same joke. In the first apartment the sheet fills up briskly, but the signatures all turn out to be in one suspiciously fluent hand – someone has hired a calligrapher to forge an office’s worth of devotion in a single sitting, and the sheet itself is promptly stolen and sold for scrap by an enterprising housekeeper. In the second, an old, retired official waits all day behind a door that keeps opening on the same question – has anyone come? – and closing on the same answer: no one. The two scenes hang side by side without commentary, divided only by the bare asterisks Chekhov uses instead of a transition, and the reader is left to supply the connection: forged devotion on one side, genuine neglect on the other, and a custom that has stopped meaning anything either way.
The story’s closing image – a forgotten old man proposing, so his wife will not have to see the empty sheet, that they sign it themselves – is typical of the early Chekhov’s method even at its broadest and most joke-driven: the comedy does not resolve into a moral, and the loneliness underneath it is never named, only shown.