Something Lived Through

1 Something Lived Through (Perezhitoe, subtitled “a psychological sketch”) dates from 1880, among the earliest pieces the twenty-year-old medical student Chekhov placed in the Moscow humor press under his “Antosha Chekhonte” signature. It is barely more than a page – a single New Year’s scene in the front hall of some institution, where the staff line up to sign a ceremonial greeting sheet – and it belongs to the sketch-and-caption vein Chekhov was mining hardest in these first years: a found situation, a rush of comic incident, no plot to speak of.

The premise is a small office ritual: everyone signs the New Year’s list, and the narrator, oddly unsettled by seeing familiar names in unfamiliar, suspiciously tidy handwriting, catches himself signing his own name with uncharacteristic care. Into this nervous little vanity steps Pyotr Kuzmich, who murmurs, almost affectionately, that he could ruin the narrator on the spot – a flourish added here, a blot dropped there, and a signature becomes disreputable. The joke escalates by repetition, in the manner of the early sketches, each variation on “want me to ruin you?” landing a beat flatter and more absurd than the last.

What keeps the piece from being pure trifle is the swerve in the narrator’s own reaction: the mounting, wholly disproportionate terror of a man who finds his whole reputation suddenly hostage to another man’s pen, and the servile gratitude – he shakes the tormentor’s hand – once the threat is lifted. Chekhov does not comment on this; he only reports the fear and the thankfulness side by side and lets their absurd proportions speak. The final line, tacked on after the reprieve, quietly reopens the threat and refuses to close the sketch on safety.

The title – literally “that which has been lived through” or “the experienced” – sits somewhat ironically over so slight and passing an incident, itself part of the joke: the grand distance between the word and the New Year’s-office trifle it is attached to.