The Bill

1 The Bill (Счет, 1884) is one of Chekhov’s smallest jokes – a single restaurant tab, itemized in the deadpan format of an actual bill, that tells an entire night’s story through what it charges for: sterlet soup and fine champagne, then a broken carafe, a cab for the ladies, cabbage soup sent out to a Roma performer, and a waiter’s tailcoat torn in the commotion. The account trails off into ellipsis, then resolves into a fragment of a love note and an address for a rendezvous at a furnished-rooms house – as if the receipt itself had been slipped, by accident or by design, among a stack of love letters. It closes with the notarial flourish “certified a true copy” and the signature Chekhov was still using in 1884, “The Man Without a Spleen” (Человек без селезенки), one of the pseudonyms under which he published his earliest sketches for the comic press.