The Attorney I. N. Moshennikov
Присяжный поверенный и. н. мошенников
Headnote
1 "The Attorney I. N. Moshennikov" belongs to 1880, the opening year of Chekhov’s apprentice work for the Moscow humor weeklies under the signature Antosha Chekhonte. Like several of his very earliest pieces, it is not a story in the ordinary sense but a found-document joke: a strip of mock classified advertisements, set as if clipped whole from the back pages of a newspaper, with no narrator and no frame to explain the joke. The reader is handed the notices cold and left to assemble the comedy.
The whole effect turns on the name in the title. Moshennikov is built directly on moshennik – "swindler,crook,con man" – so an advertisement for the professional services of a prisyazhnyy poverennyy ("sworn attorney," the formal title for a barrister admitted to practice before the reformed courts of Alexander II) signed by a man literally named Mr. Swindler is the entire gag before a word of the copy is read. That copy plays it perfectly straight: an attorney touting his practice, expressly noting that he can arrange bail should a client be convicted – courtroom competence advertised in the same breezy commercial register a shopkeeper might use for dry goods.
The two notices that follow keep the same found-document form and the same deadpan. A woman "who has lost all hope of marrying" offers her dowry for sale, as though a trousseau were simply inventory to be liquidated once the matrimonial market has failed her. And a "Miss Nevinnova" – a surname built on nevinnyy, "innocent," so the joke again rides on the name – issues a public summons to a suitor, "Yegorushka," compressing an entire courtship plot into four words of a want ad. Chekhov adds no commentary to any of the three; the classifieds column format does the satirical work by itself, turning marriage, guilt, and the law into commodities traded in the same column of small print. It is a miniature specimen of the columnfiller trade the young Chekhonte was mastering: disposable by design, and already precise in saying nothing beyond what the form requires.