An Unsuccessful Visit
Неудачный визит
Headnote
"An Unsuccessful Visit" ("Неудачный визит") is another of the sixteen-year-old column inches Chekhov was turning out in 1880, in his first year of writing for the Moscow and Petersburg humor weeklies as "Antosha Chekhonte." It runs to sixteen short beats and reads almost as stage direction: a caption sequence rather than a story, meant to be taken in at a glance and land its joke before the reader has quite settled into the page.
The situation is a stock one for the genre – a self-satisfied caller, new to the house, flirting with the maid in the front hall before he has even removed his coat – and Chekhov plays it entirely through gesture and brusque speech, never once telling the reader what to think of the dandy’s behavior. The narration does not editorialize; it reports the slap of a glove against a waist, a blush, a girl fleeing "red as a poppy," with the same flat notation it gives the removal of a hat. The reversal is a single line, withheld to the very end: the girl in the pinafore he has been pawing in the hall turns out to be the daughter of the house he has come to court in. Chekhov does not spell out the caller’s humiliation – he simply closes on "A picture," the deadpan caption that was this genre’s signature exit line, and lets the reader supply the dandy’s face.
It is slight literally by design – one of dozens of such squibs Chekhov filed to support himself and his family while still a medical student – but the method is already the mature one in miniature: no verdict pronounced, the joke assembled entirely out of concrete, reported particulars, and the silence at the end doing the real work.