The Night Before the Trial

1 "The Night Before the Trial" ("Ночь перед судом") is an unfinished Chekhov piece from 1890, labeled in manuscript a "сцена" (a scene) and based on, or overlapping with, an earlier short story of the same premise and title. Chekhov abandoned it partway through – the text breaks off mid-episode, with the narrator merely noting that the prosecutor’s speech is about to begin, and no verdict or resolution is given. It is presented here complete as Chekhov left it: nothing has been trimmed or supplied to give it a false ending.

2 Form note: unlike Chekhov’s fully scripted one-act vaudevilles (e.g. "The Wedding,A Tragedian in Spite of Himself,The Bear"), this piece is written as first-person prose narration with dialogue embedded and quoted within the prose, not as a formatted stage script with a cast list and bracketed stage directions. It reads more like a comic short story that happens to be built almost entirely out of a single overnight scene and its dialogue – consistent with its double life as "story" and "scene" in Chekhov’s own bibliography. This is the source’s own form and has been preserved as such in translation; nothing has been reformatted into a dramatic-script convention it does not use in Russian.

3 an unnamed first-person narrator, traveling to the S– district court where he is to stand trial for bigamy, is forced by a snowstorm to spend the night at a squalid post station. Behind a screen in his shared room he discovers a young woman, Zinochka, and is soon drawn into an absurd overnight acquaintance with her and her husband Fedya, a middle-aged state councillor (a civil rank, not a title of nobility) with graying side-whiskers. To ingratiate himself – and flustered at having been caught hopping half-dressed around the stove – the narrator impulsively lies and claims to be a doctor. Fedya, credulous and anxious about his wife’s health, insists the "doctor" examine Zinochka for a chest complaint; the narrator bumblingly "diagnoses" her, writes out a nonsense Latin prescription (a bilingual pun: "Rp. Sic transit gloria mundi," the Latin tag for "thus passes the glory of the world," dressed up as a pharmaceutical dosage), and is thanked with a ten-ruble note he reluctantly accepts. The next morning he says his farewells forever, he thinks, to his new acquaintances. But at the trial the following day, the prosecutor seated at the bench turns out to be Fedya himself, who recognizes him with visible shock. The fragment breaks off at the start of the court proceedings, before the prosecutor’s speech and before the narrator’s fate (or his method of revenge/self-defense against a prosecutor who has personal cause to want him convicted) is disclosed.