New Year's Great Martyrs

1 New Year’s Great Martyrs (“Novogodnie velikomucheniki” in the original) appeared in 1885 and belongs to Chekhov’s brisk, sketch-length comic journalism of the period – a New Year’s Day feuilleton built almost entirely out of scene and dialogue rather than narration. Its subject is a real St. Petersburg custom: on New Year’s Day, minor officials and clerks were expected to make an exhausting round of formal calls across the city, signing the visitors’ book at the home of every superior, relative, and acquaintance who mattered to their career or their standing. The story opens on a chaos of sledges and running well-wishers, then narrows to a single casualty of the custom – a titular councillor named Sinkleteev, found collapsed and unconscious on the pavement and carried to a receiving ward, where a police surgeon tries to get a diagnosis out of him. What follows is mostly Sinkleteev’s own account, delivered in a fuddled, comma-spliced half-delirium, of an itinerary that runs through tea, valerian drops, rowanberry liqueur, cognac, hot chocolate, cold beer, and name-day pie at what seems like a dozen different addresses, each visit obligatory, each refusal an unthinkable social offense. In the background, the same policeman keeps interrupting to announce that more officials are being carried in – the "great martyrs" of the title, casualties of a holiday whose true content, the story suggests, has become the performance of calling itself.

The humor is procedural and cumulative rather than pointed: Chekhov lets the list of names and drinks pile up until the exhaustion becomes the joke, and lets the doctor’s brisk professional questions collide with Sinkleteev’s compulsive, half-conscious need to keep excusing himself and asking to be let go so he can finish his rounds.