Both Better

"Both Better" ("Оба лучше") dates from 1884, published under the Antosha Chekhonte signature in one of the Moscow comic weeklies during the same busy year Chekhov completed his medical degree and kept up his punishing rate of output for the humor magazines. It belongs to the fast, broad comedy of the early period: a single scene built on one sustained absurdity, told at speed, with no room for the tenderness of the mature manner.

The setup is a newlywed narrator dragged by his mother-in-law’s instructions through a round of post-wedding calls, mortified in advance by the class gap between his wife’s fashionable, aristocratic circle – baronesses, generals’ wives, an institute-educated bride – and his own: a shabby uncle, a prison warden, drunkard colleagues, a cousin in trade. The visit to Uncle Pupkin supplies the piece’s comic centerpiece, a threadbare household of orange peels fished from a vodka decanter, a three-legged table, and rambling talk of hemorrhoids and bathhouses, all narrated with the son-in-law’s cringing, present-tense embarrassment.

The title’s joke is the twist withheld until the final exchange: the narrator assumes his wife’s tearful reaction in the carriage is disgust at his relations, and braces for the visit to the merchant Plevkov as a second humiliation from his side of the ledger. Instead she is ashamed of her own baroness and her own ruined countess, and pleads with him not to judge them either. Both sets of relations, the punchline runs, turn out equally disreputable – hence "Both Better," each spouse’s shabby family redeemed only by the other’s being just as bad. Chekhov keeps the narrator’s self-pity and snobbery entirely unexamined by any authorial comment; the reader supplies the judgment the piece never states outright.