A Story Hard to Give a Title To
Рассказ, которому трудно подобрать название
Headnote
Chekhov published this sketch in 1883, in the thick of his Antosha Chekhonte years, when he was turning out short comic pieces for the Moscow humor weeklies at a punishing rate. The title itself is a joke: a story too slight, too plotless, and too much a single scene to deserve a proper name – so the narrator simply says as much and moves on.
The piece is built as an anecdote of a boozy holiday luncheon. Twenty men, well fed and half drunk, work themselves up into a fit of liberal sentiment – decrying theft, extortion, and oppression in the abstract, weeping theatrically over the sufferings of the people – and then, the instant their supposed benefactor and superior walks through the door, pivot without a flicker of self-awareness into a thunderous toast to his health. The provincial secretary Ottyagaev, styled with mock grandeur as "our Renan and our Spinoza," delivers the set-piece speech of performative conscience that collapses into servility the moment it is tested.
Watch for the narrator’s coy asides to the reader – the repeated "may I count on your discretion?" – which needle at the gap between what is said in company and what everyone actually believes. The Latin and French interjections (*Pereat!*, *fraternité*) are themselves part of the joke: borrowed vocabulary for borrowed convictions. It is an early, broad sketch, but the target is one Chekhov returns to across his career – liberal talk that costs nothing and changes nothing the moment power walks into the room.