An Advertisement

1 An Advertisement (“Reklama” in the original) is a very short 1885 squib of a piece, one of the many miniature parodies Chekhov turned out in his twenties for the humor press. It takes the form of a mock advertisement for a fictitious "fire-extinguishing" compound made by two invented manufacturers, "Babayev and Garden" – a send-up of the patent-cure and household-product advertisements that filled the back pages of Russian newspapers and magazines of the period.

The joke runs on a single pun, sustained across the whole piece: things that "burn" only in a figurative sense – a hot temper, a failing theater manager’s finances, a lovestruck heart, a blushing daughter, an ardent young provincial councilman, an overzealous civil servant – are offered up as targets for a fireproofing paste literally meant to stop actual flames. Chekhov builds the list with the rhythm of a real product circular, complete with a spurious testimonial (a match manufacturer whose "Swedish" matches supposedly will not light) and a jab at contemporary types: theater ticket scalpers, pawnbrokers, and the shady lawyers who clustered near Moscow’s Iverskaya Chapel, said here never to "burn with shame."

The piece is a trifle, but a representative one: it shows the young "Antosha Chekhonte" working the same joke-a-week factory line that trained him in economy, in getting a laugh out of a single conceit stretched no further than it can bear, and in observing the commercial ephemera – advertisements, notices, want ads – of the world around him closely enough to parody their exact cadence. Section 8 in the source is a bare "Примечания" (Notes) heading with no content beneath it, carried through here as an empty placeholder.