A Doormat

"A Doormat" ("Размазня") appeared in 1883, during Chekhov’s most productive years as a contributor to the Moscow and Petersburg comic weeklies, when he was publishing under the signature Antosha Chekhonte at a pace of several pieces a week to support his family while still a medical student. The Russian title is harder than any single English word: a razmaznya is literally a runny, smeared-out gruel, and figuratively a person with no backbone – someone who can be pushed around, walked over, taken advantage of without complaint. "Doormat" carries the figurative sense; no English word carries both at once.

The story is built as a single staged scene: a household employer summons his children’s governess to "settle accounts" and proceeds, with elaborate arithmetic and a straight face, to invent one deduction after another – Sundays not worked, holidays, a broken teacup, a nephew’s torn coat, a housemaid’s theft, a loan she denies ever taking – whittling her modest salary down from eighty rubles to eleven. She never objects. She takes the insulting sum with a whispered "merci." Only then does the narrator reveal that the entire exercise was a test, restores her full pay, and demands to know why she never fought back.

The piece belongs to a small, sharp genre in Chekhov’s early work: the domestic power sketch, told in the first person by a narrator who is not morally superior to what he describes even as he seems to condemn it. His final reflection – that it is easy to be strong in this world – lands as self-implication as much as social diagnosis; he has just demonstrated, at someone else’s expense, exactly how that strength is exercised. The comedy is procedural and exact, in the mode of the early Chekhonte pieces, but the arithmetic that structures the joke is also the story’s argument: underpaid, socially powerless women in service could be, and routinely were, cheated by simple insistence, because insistence was rarely met with resistance. Chekhov states none of this outright. He gives the numbers, the tears, the trembling fingers, the one word of gratitude repeated at the wrong moment – and lets the reader do the arithmetic of feeling that the narrator has just finished doing with rubles.