Something Serious

1 Something Serious (“Nechto sereznoe” in the original) is a very short comic sketch from 1885, written in the form of a mock legal document: a set of proposed new "articles" for the Penal Code, submitted deadpan as though for an actual legislative revision. It belongs to a genre Chekhov returned to often in his newspaper years – parody of official bureaucratic and legal language – and sits alongside pieces like his faux-encyclopedia entries and mock advertisements as an example of his gift for skewering a form rather than a subject.

Each "article" targets a different social type or petty vice of the day: amateur theatrical societies, untalented drawing-room singers, schoolboys padding love letters with borrowed philosophy, would-be writers, girls practicing scales too loudly, fortune-hunting suitors, venal newspaper reviewers, minor officials puffed up with rank, and so on. The humor works by inflating trivial social annoyances to the register of criminal statute – the absurdity lies entirely in the mismatch between the gravity of the form and the pettiness of the offense. The piece has no narrative and no characters in the ordinary sense; it is closer to a comic list or a piece of occasional journalism than to a story proper, and the final section is a bare "Notes" placeholder in the source text, carried through here as such.