Letter to a Reporter

1 Letter to a Reporter (Pismo k reporteru) appeared in 1884, a one-paragraph squib in the vein of the comic “letters to the editor” Chekhov turned out by the dozen for the humor weeklies in these years. It is signed, in the text itself, “Communicated by The Man Without a Spleen” – Chelovek bez selezenki, one of Chekhov’s own recurring pseudonyms of the period, here presented as the middleman who merely passes along a letter supposedly written by someone else.

The joke is a single sustained voice: an aggrieved tailor, addressing an unnamed newspaperman, rattles off a week’s worth of the city’s calamities – fires, a suicide, a drowning, a music-hall mishap, a train wreck – in the breathless, comma-spliced rhythm of a man reciting gossip he expects to be paid for. The catalogue of disasters is delivered with the same flat matter-of-factness as the punchline: that the reporter has grown rich printing all this and has not paid his tailor’s bill. It is a miniature of the period’s tabloid appetite for calamity, and of Chekhov’s own trade in it, turned back on itself in a single breath.