The Proposal

1 "The Proposal" ("Предложение"), subtitled "a joke in one act," is one of Chekhov’s most popular and frequently staged short comedies. He wrote it in the spring of 1888 for the actress and playwright Mariya Abramova’s theater, though its first documented public performance was provincial, in Nizhny Novgorod that August; it opened in Moscow that autumn and in St. Petersburg (at the Alexandrinsky Theatre) in April 1889, quickly becoming a staple of amateur and professional stages alike – Chekhov himself later grumbled, half-proud and half-weary, that it was being performed "everywhere," including at the Tsar’s own court. The plot is minimal: the chronically anxious landowner Ivan Vasilyevich Lomov calls on his neighbor Stepan Stepanovich Chubukov to ask for the hand of his twenty-five-year-old daughter, Natalya Stepanovna – and the proposal itself is repeatedly derailed by escalating, farcical quarrels, first over the ownership of a strip of land called the Ox Meadows, then over whose hunting dog is better.

2 The comedy runs on pure momentum: three characters who cannot stop interrupting, contradicting, and topping one another, building each dispute to a pitch of shouted absurdity before collapsing it into the next. Lomov’s hypochondria – his constant heart palpitations, numbed legs, sparks before the eyes, and swings between fainting and dying – turns him into a comic engine that runs almost independently of the plot, undercutting the seriousness of an occasion (a marriage proposal) that ought to call for exactly the composure he cannot muster. The play’s tightly recurring rhythms – object of dispute, rising volume, wounding personal insults, physical collapse, sudden reconciliation, and a fresh dispute erupting from the ashes of the last – give it the shape of a mechanism as much as a story, and its ending (the couple betrothed and immediately squabbling again over the dogs) refuses any sentimental resolution.

3 Contains period-typical language and insults exchanged in anger by the characters, including class-inflected slurs ("gypsies," used dismissively by Natalya Stepanovna to characterize being treated unfairly) and personal/family insults (accusations of drunkenness, insanity, infidelity, and physical mockery, including of a grandmother’s appearance) that are part of the farce’s escalating verbal violence and are not authorial endorsements. Retained as written, consistent with Hermitsh Press’s practice of translating faithfully rather than softening period text.