Ober-Verkhi, or, The Height of Credulity
Обер-верхи верх легковерия
Headnote
1 This squib appeared in 1883, in one of the small humor weeklies Chekhov was filling almost weekly at the time under his early pseudonyms. The title is itself a joke before the piece even begins: Обер-верхи (“Ober-Verkhi”) apes the mock-German, faux-official mastheads that Russian comic journalism liked to hang over a column of oddities and news-in-brief, while верх легковерия – “the height of credulity” – names, flatly, what the item is actually about. Chekhov is signaling a genre before the reader has read a word: this is a filler item, the kind of one-paragraph curiosity a newspaper runs among its miscellany, and he is about to show exactly how much mischief that innocuous form can carry.
The item itself is a single invented news report, presented deadpan and without commentary. A prosperous landowner in the provincial town of T. – Chekhov’s stock cipher for anywhere and nowhere – shoots himself over a line in an almanac predicting a bad harvest, and leaves behind a suicide note that treats the almanac’s forecast as settled fact. Chekhov supplies no narrator’s judgment on the story at all; the "height of credulity" of the subtitle is left for the reader to supply, watching a man take his own life on the authority of a popular calendar’s crop prediction.
The piece belongs to a small cluster of early sketches that trade in exactly this kind of dry mock-reportage – the newspaper item as ready-made absurdist form, requiring no invention beyond a straight face and a fatal literalism. It is slight by design: two sentences of setup, one letter, and the joke is already over. What makes it recognizably Chekhov rather than merely a comic filler is the total absence of editorializing – the credulity is never named as folly, only staged, and the reader is left to measure the distance between the almanac’s casual prediction and the man’s response to it.