I Quarreled with My Wife (an incident)

1 S zhenoy possorilsya (sluchay) – “I Quarreled with My Wife (an incident)” – is a one-page comic sketch from 1884, published in one of the humor weeklies Chekhov was still filling on a near-weekly basis at twenty-four. It belongs to the fastest, broadest register of the early Antosha Chekhonte work: a single situation, a single joke, sprung in the last line.

A husband explodes at the dinner table over the food, the household, the whole misfortune of having married, and storms off to sulk on the study sofa. Chekhov gives the entire interior monologue that follows – the rehearsed grievance, the vow never to forgive, the slow, half-willing thaw as a warm body presses close in the dark – without once stepping outside the husband’s own head. The comedy is in the gap between the grandiosity of his internal speechmaking and the triviality of what is actually happening, a gap the reader cannot see until the final word.

The sketch is built almost entirely on unusually short, fragmentary paragraph breaks in the original, several of them splitting a single sentence across two units – a typesetting habit of the period’s satirical weeklies rather than a structural device. The joke itself is Chekhov at his most mechanical and confident: the reversal lands in a single word, and the piece ends there, without commentary.