The Lawyer's Novel

"The Lawyer’s Novel" ("Роман адвоката") appeared in 1883, among the rapid-fire comic sketches Chekhov turned out in his early twenties for the Moscow humor weeklies under the signature Antosha Chekhonte. The title is the whole joke: a "roman," a novel — the word Russian readers associate with romance, incident, feeling — turns out to be nothing but a "protocol," the dry bureaucratic form of a divorce petition, reproduced verbatim down to the note reserving space for a revenue stamp.

The piece has almost no narrator at all. It is built entirely from the petitioner’s own legal boilerplate: the address of the church, the merchant’s house on Ligovka Street, the bride’s rank and age and literacy, all recited with the same flat thoroughness as the statute numbers that follow. A marriage, a falling out of love, five dissolute years in taverns and pleasure-gardens, the wife’s dowry quietly made over to the husband’s own name — the entire arc of a failed love affair passes by in subordinate clauses, each one yoked to the article of law that makes it actionable. The petitioner even cites precedent, as though his marriage were a matter of case law rather than feeling.

Nothing in the sketch tells the reader to find this funny or sad; the comedy is entirely a matter of form colliding with content, the coldest possible bureaucratic register applied to the warmest possible subject. It belongs to a run of early Chekhov pieces that borrow an official genre — a contract, a ledger, an examination paper — and let its own conventions do the satirical work, with the author’s hand nowhere visible in the text at all.