Forgiveness
Прощение
Headnote
1 Published in 1883, “Forgiveness” (Прощение) is built on Forgiveness Sunday (Прощёное воскресенье), the last day before Great Lent in the Orthodox calendar, when it is custom to ask forgiveness of everyone around you before the fast begins. Chekhov takes the ritual formula and runs it as a list – a comic monologue in fourteen numbered clauses, each one a fresh person, animal, or grievance absolved with mock solemnity. The form is the joke: piety’s language applied to a swine, a pair of tight boots, and a government official’s taste for a good dinner.
2 Two names in the list belong to Chekhov’s own working world rather than to any universal target. Sergei Okreits edited the small, combative Petersburg paper Луч (“The Ray”), known for a harsh, reactionary editorial line; forgiving it for not being “gentle enough” inverts the paper’s actual reputation. Alexei Suvorin was the powerful publisher of Novoye Vremya and, from 1886, Chekhov’s own editor and correspondent – here, in 1883, still simply a public figure large enough to earn a place beside the planets and the comets in a catalogue of things too big to be angry at.
3 The sketch belongs to the earliest, fastest gear of the young “Antosha Chekhonte”: no plot, no scene, just the accumulating absurdity of the list itself, each item smaller and more particular than the last, until the final clause forgives the full stop for cutting the list off. The self-undermining close – the very punctuation mark blamed for interrupting infinite forgiveness – is the whole method in miniature: withhold the moral, let the mechanism of the joke carry it.