He Cheated Them

"He Cheated Them" ("Надул") is one of Chekhov’s briefest published pieces — a single-page anecdote, subtitled by the author himself "a very old anecdote," dating from 1885, his early period of rapid-fire comic sketches written under the pseudonym "A. Chekhonte" for the popular press. Rather than an original narrative, it is Chekhov’s retelling of a stock piece of gallows humor already in circulation: an English convict, exercising the (once real) right of the condemned to sell his own body in advance to a physician for dissection, collects his fee and then reveals, laughing, that he has cheated the buyer — he will be burned rather than hanged, and so his corpse will be worthless to the anatomist. The joke turns on the macabre practicalities of the eighteenth-century English trade in cadavers for medical study, a detail Chekhov’s readers would have found exotic and grimly comic.

The piece is a miniature even by the standards of Chekhov’s juvenilia: four brief sections carrying the whole anecdote, followed by the customary "Notes" placeholder, empty in the source.