Advertisements and Notices

One of the earliest squibs of 1880, from the same run of mock classifieds the twenty-year-old medical student placed under his first signature, "Antosha Chekhonte." It apes the back-page advertising columns of the Moscow humor weeklies – announcements for journals, wanted notices, and new-book listings – rendering each in the stiff, self-important prose real advertisers used, then letting the content underneath collapse into nonsense.

The frame is a fictitious ladies’ journal announcing its coming year’s table of contents: essays with titles that get more absurd as they go (a "disquisition" on playing cards as materialist philosophy, a "polemical" swipe at the satirist Saltykov-Shchedrin, misspelled French and all), a broken appeal to a real rival journal, and a closing joke about a dictionary bought to fix the very errors just committed in print. The editress’s byline, the call for "water-carriers," and the run of parody book notices that follow – a pamphlet on Chinese bamboo tariffs, a treatise on farming hedgehogs for glove-makers, a "guide to Siberia" whose table of contents is actually a directory of restaurants, tailors, and women for hire – keep the same device going: officialese undercut by what it is actually advertising.

It belongs to the earliest and broadest gear of Chekhov’s comic writing, built for a few column-inches of a magazine page and timed to the absurdity of the form it parodies. The names invoked – "Otechestvennye Zapiski," the satirist Shchedrin, the humor weekly "Budilnik" ("The Alarm Clock") – place the joke inside the real Moscow press Chekhov was writing for and against, a milieu the mature Chekhov would leave behind but whose command of voice-as-comedy he never did.