O Women, Women!

"O Women, Women!" ("О женщины, женщины!") appeared in 1883, another piece of fast, disposable comedy from the Antosha Chekhonte years, when Chekhov was filing sketches to the Moscow humor weeklies by the dozen to support his family while still a medical student. The premise turns on the provincial newspaper world Chekhov knew from the inside as a jobbing contributor: an exhausted editor comes home hoping for a sympathetic ear from his wife, and instead relitigates, in front of her, the crisis that has ruined his day - a vain society dandy has submitted atrocious verse for publication, dedicated to an actress the dandy is courting, and the editor cannot print it without disgracing the paper or refuse it without inviting the dandy’s spite.

The joke lands twice. First at the dandy’s expense: the sample stanzas Chekhov supplies are deliberately, painstakingly terrible — inflated diction, a repeated word driven into the ground, rhymes that do not rhyme — a small parody of the era’s worst amateur verse, complete with recognizable Romantic-era props (the sighing cigar, the snow-white angel, love’s mortal wound). Then the joke turns on the editor: his wife reads the same stanzas and finds them genuinely lovely, and flatly tells him he understands nothing. Chekhov does not referee the dispute — he simply lets the gap between the two readers stand, husband and wife each certain and each unmoved by the other.

The story’s final line borrows, in the original, the closing words of Chatsky’s exit speech from Griboyedov’s Woe from Wit — "I go now to seek, throughout the world, some corner where an insulted heart may feel" — a stock line of wounded departure any Russian reader of the day would recognize instantly, punctured here by the bathos of what follows it: not tragic exile, but a walk to a restaurant to drown the irritation in drink. The title, "O Women, Women!," is the editor’s own exasperated verdict on his wife’s taste, not the story’s.