A Grateful German
Признательный немец
Headnote
1 A Grateful German (“Priznatel’nyi nemets” in the original) appeared in 1883, one of the brisk single-page sketches Chekhov was turning out by the dozen in these years for the Moscow and Petersburg comic weeklies under the pseudonym “Antosha Chekhonte.” It belongs to a small subgenre of these early pieces built on a single repeated joke told in triplicate – three chance meetings, each escalating the same absurd premise until the punchline lands on the third.
2 The premise: a German drifter, met in three different guises and three different places – a Frankfurt street performer with a dancing monkey, a sausage-seller in another Frankfurt, and finally a jack-of-all-trades tutor angling for a post as a railway director in Russia itself – who each time recognizes the narrator and thanks him extravagantly, “to the grave,” for a single thaler given once, long ago, almost in passing. The joke sharpens with each repetition: the debt of gratitude grows more solemn and more rehearsed even as its object grows more absurd (a dead monkey duly mourned; a straight-faced “all Russians are bad people, but you are the exception”). Chekhov gives the German fragments of his own language, dropped in mid-sentence and glossed in the text – the provincial cosmopolitanism-by-phrasebook that recurs as a stock joke throughout these earliest sketches.
3 It is a slight piece, and knows it – eight brief sections, no plot beyond the repetition, the whole thing over almost before it starts. But the comic engine is already precise: the deadpan narrator who never comments, the punchline placed exactly at the close of each encounter, and a final line – “We never met again” – that closes the joke with the same flat understatement Chekhov would later turn to far darker ends.