Subscriptions Now Open for 1882

1 Subscriptions Now Open for 1882 (“Otkryta podpiska na 1882 god” in the original) is one of Chekhov’s earliest published pieces, appearing in 1880 in the humor press over the signature “Antosha Chekhonte.” It belongs to a small genre the twenty-year-old medical student worked more than once in these years: the parody of a newspaper’s own advertising copy, mimicking the breathless, boastful language a provincial or commercial daily used to announce itself to subscribers.

2 The target is the genuine format of a Russian newspaper subscription notice of the period – the roll call of the paper’s capital, its shareholders, its physical assets (presses, buildings, staff), all recited with a straight face as proof of solidity and prestige. Chekhov reproduces that form exactly, right down to the invented joint-stock figures in Finnish marks and roubles, and lets the list itself turn absurd by simple accumulation: one boast piled on another – paper mills, a witty editor, a bookshop – until the list keeps going past the point of any real newspaper’s assets and into a stable for donkeys, a madhouse, and a debtors’ ward, all claimed with the same proud “its own.” The comedy is purely structural: the repeated possessive is the whole joke, and Chekhov never breaks the mock-official tone to comment on it.

3 It is a sketch in the fastest, broadest register of the early Chekhonte manner – a single device run to its logical, ridiculous end, built for a page of a comic weekly and over in a moment. Nothing here anticipates the later restraint; it belongs entirely to the twenty-year-old prankster testing what a newspaper column could be made to do.