The Subscribers Have Absconded

"The Subscribers Have Absconded" is another 1880 column-filler from Chekhov’s first apprentice year, written for the Moscow humor weeklies under the signature Antosha Chekhonte. Like the smallest of these pieces, it does not tell a story at all: it stages two found documents back to back, in the flat diction of the classified page, and lets the juxtaposition do the joke.

The title plays on the double life of podpischik – a magazine "subscriber," but also, read as a person who has literally run off, the butt of a stock feuilleton complaint: readers who vanish without paying up. The first "notice" reports them missing like lost property, offers a reward of nothing more than the editor’s handshake, and is signed, in effect, by the magazine Minuta itself (a real St. Petersburg humor weekly of the period, one of several that ran Chekhov’s earliest work). The second document is a mock book advertisement for the collected works of one attorney Smirnov – "Fist Law," ostensibly "translated from the Tatar,To Strike or Not to Strike?,The Physiology of the Fist" – absurd legal-scholarly titles on the single, unstated subject of hitting people, capped by a professional courtesy discount for booksellers and fellow attorneys.

Neither notice explains itself, and neither needs to: the whole effect is the solemn bureaucratic register of the classified page applied to material that does not deserve it. It is a miniature specimen of the discipline Chekhov was already practicing at twenty – construct the found document, get out of its way, and let the form itself carry the entire joke.