Instruction (from Provincial Life)

1 Instruction (from Provincial Life) (“Предписание (из захолустной жизни)” in the original) appeared in 1884, signed with one of Chekhov’s early pseudonyms, as part of the loose, fast comic output of his first Moscow years. It belongs to a small vein of these sketches built not as narrated scenes but as found documents – here, a single bureaucratic memorandum, reproduced whole and unglossed, that the reader is left to supply the frame for.

The joke is entirely one of form. A superior – a “Collegiate Counselor and Chevalier,” one of the minor honorific ranks of the Table of Ranks – issues a formal written order to a subordinate ahead of the Christmas season, regulating in exhaustive official language the conduct of the well-wishers (поздравители) who will crowd his reception room to pay their holiday respects. The absurdity builds through accumulation: the prohibition on smoking and crowding is unremarkable, but it is followed without a break in register by injunctions against scattering groats and flour on the stairs, and finally by the instruction – delivered in the same starched legalese – that any live poultry or piglets the well-wishers have brought as gifts must be made to look dead, so their cries will not disturb the peace. Chekhov never steps outside the document to comment; the comedy is the bureaucratic register itself, applied without flinching to the wholly undignified realities of a provincial Russian Christmas call.

The signature at the foot – countersigned by a secretary with the mocking name Yekhidov (from ехидна, “viper”) and certified true by a copyist calling himself only “A Man Without a Spleen” – keeps the joke going past the order itself: even the machinery that authenticates the document is playing along. The source file’s final section is a bare “Примечания” (Notes) heading with no accompanying text, carried over here as its own numbered section rather than dropped.