Thoughts of a Reader of Newspapers and Journals

A five-line squib from 1883, in the fast, aphoristic gear of the early "Antosha Chekhonte" pieces. Its conceit is bibliographic: each fragment takes real Russian periodical titles of the day – names that are also ordinary nouns, mostly words for light, sound, and health – and reads them literally against the state of the press and the country they describe. A newspaper called The Observer observes nothing in particular; a country awash in journals named Light, Dawn, Rainbow, and Daybreak remains, somehow, dark. The device recurs across Chekhov’s 1883 journalism: the mismatch between a publication’s name and its substance was, for the twenty- three-year-old writing at speed for the comic weeklies, an inexhaustible source of one-line jokes.

The named titles are not invented. Svet, Niva, Nablyudatel, Golos, Moskva, and the rest were real Moscow and Petersburg periodicals circulating in 1883, familiar to any reader of the press Chekhov himself wrote for and against. Invalid (in full, Russky Invalid) was the official military gazette; Vrach a respected medical weekly. The final line’s turn – health and medicine in print, and yet so many graves – closes the sequence on the darkest of its puns, the only one that does not resolve into a joke about journalism alone.

The piece asks nothing of the reader but a passing familiarity with the newsstand of the day; a century and a half on, the joke survives mainly as a record of just how much of Chekhov’s early comic energy went into noticing that words printed on a masthead rarely describe what is inside.