The Proposal

1 "The Proposal" (1886), subtitled "a story for young ladies," is a brief comic sketch, not to be confused with Chekhov’s later, far more famous one-act farce of the same Russian title (Predlozhenie, 1888-89). This is a different, much shorter piece: a young man of fashionable appearance, Valentin Petrovich Perederkin, calls on the beautiful Princess Vera Zapiskina and, working himself into an agony of nerves, delivers a halting, breathless declaration that reads exactly like a marriage proposal – right up until its punchline, when it turns out he is proposing not marriage but a business partnership: building a tallow-rendering factory on their adjoining estates.

2 The story is a parody of the sentimental romantic fiction popular in the "thick journals" and family magazines of Chekhov’s day – the swooning prose about heavenly-blue eyes and wave-battered cliffs is deliberately overwrought, mimicking (and mocking) the genre it borrows from. The final line, addressed directly to "the reader... expecting a melodramatic ending," makes the joke explicit: commerce, not romance, is the real business of the tale. It is a slight, early piece of Chekhov’s comic journalism, written under the pressure of frequent magazine deadlines, but it displays the same economy and comic timing that mark his mature humorous stories.