Unpublished. An Unfinished Novel

This fragment dates from 1880, Chekhov’s first year in print, when the twenty-year-old medical student was writing at speed under the byline Antosha Chekhonte for the humor weeklies of Moscow and Petersburg. It survived only among his papers – never submitted, never finished – and is printed here as the scrap it is: two unrelated openings set side by side, both parodies of forms the young Chekhov had already read to death.

The first is a single sentence of overheated melodrama, the kind of "society novel" then filling the thick journals: a heroine named Lyolya, a slammed door, a bitten pillow, and a title – "A NOVEL" – promising grand passion that never arrives. The second, longer piece is a mock letter to the editor, ventriloquizing a fictitious "Editress Boguslavskaya," publisher of a Moscow ladies’ magazine called The Ladies’ Friend, who has taken offense at a review in the real journal Notes of the Fatherland (edited at the time by Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, addressed here directly as "Mr. Shchedrin"). Her letter is a small monument to confused indignation: she denounces "realism" and "materialism" as though they were diseases, admits she has had to look both words up in a dictionary of foreign terms, and signs off mid-thought in French she does not quite have the reach to finish.

Nothing here asks to be read as mature Chekhov. What is already visible is the ear: the collapse of a pompous public register into self-betraying comedy, achieved without a single authorial aside telling the reader it is funny. The piece has no ending because it was never meant to have one – Chekhov set it down, moved on, and left two fragments of the same sensibility that would spend the next twenty-five years learning restraint.