A Young Man
Молодой человек
Headnote
"A Young Man" appeared in 1883, when Chekhov was twenty-three and signing his humor pieces "Antosha Chekhonte." It belongs to the fast, broad comedy of his earliest period: a single scene, almost pure dialogue, built on one absurd premise and run to its snapping point in a page.
The premise is a mock interrogation. Pravdolyubov — his name means something like "lover of truth" or "truth-lover" — plays the wounded moralist confronting Upryamov, "the stubborn one," a young journalist caught carrying manuscripts to a humor magazine’s editorial office. The piece parodies a stock figure of the era’s press: the tearful guardian of public virtue who claims fatherly feeling and moral injury while paging hungrily through the very material he denounces. Chekhov gives the game away in the stage direction at the word "fat," where Pravdolyubov’s outrage curdles for a moment into something closer to appetite.
Embedded in Upryamov’s description of his own cartoon subjects is a sharp, compressed satire of the day’s economic and bureaucratic life — currency devaluation, the tax on drink, censorship of the press, official corruption dressed in Latinate titles. A young humorist pitching satirical cartoon ideas to a censor of manners is itself the joke: the scene enacts, in miniature, the same collision between wit and authority that supplied Chekhov’s early journalism with its living.
The piece is slight by design — a sketch meant to be read in a minute and to land in one breath — but it already shows the hand that would later write the mature plays: precise stage directions doing as much work as the dialogue, and a final exit that refuses to resolve into a moral.