Another Case
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Headnote
1 Published in 1880, when the twenty-year-old Chekhov was still signing his work “Antosha Chekhonte,” Another Case is the second half of a paired squib – its companion, The First Case, tells of a lyrical June courtship broken by a rival’s proposal; this one tells of a courtship broken by rejection slip. Both are addressed, in the confiding second person, to an unnamed ma chère, a device borrowed from the society letter that lets the narrator perform his self-pity directly at an audience rather than merely report it.
2 The narrator is a self-declared “priest of Apollo,” a provincial scribbler who has divided all humanity into two camps – writers and the envious who conspire to ruin them – well before the story gives him any occasion to test that theory. The occasion duly arrives: a magazine’s letter-box column, the standard place nineteenth-century humor weeklies printed curt public replies to rejected contributors, returns his verdict in a single brutal line, and his fiancée Zhenya, who has staked her regard on his genius exactly as much as he has, watches the verdict undo them both.
3 The joke Chekhov is telling at his narrator’s expense is a young writer’s joke about young writers: the self-important vocabulary of altars and sacred fire, deployed by someone whose actual literary judges – an editor’s form rejection, then a bored fiancée who would rather go fishing – could not be less impressed. Zhenya’s flat, yawning realism (“perhaps you really haven’t any talent”) lands with exactly the withheld verdict that would become Chekhov’s signature, except that here the narrator supplies his own verdict anyway, loudly and wrongly, which is the comedy.