The Third Case

1 Written in 1880, in the twenty-year-old Chekhov’s first full year of publishing as “Antosha Chekhonte” in the Moscow comic weeklies. The title places it inside a series that never quite exists: the narrator refers late on to “the other twelve cases,” as though this were one installment of a running column of misadventures, though no other “case” has survived and none may ever have been written. The joke of the title is itself typical of the young Chekhov’s method — borrowing the shape of a genre (here, the confessional causerie, the letter to a lady friend recounting a personal catastrophe) before he has any intention of honoring its implied scale.

The piece is a monologue: a would-be suitor writes to his “ma chere,” an old female correspondent, recounting how a fit of hiccups during a proposal of marriage — delivered, with unbearable inconvenience, in a theater box during a performance of Gounod’s “Faust” — cost him the girl he loved. It belongs to the fast, broad register of the earliest Chekhonte sketches: a single absurd mechanical premise (the hiccup that will not stop) is run through every variation the scene allows, timed for a magazine reader who wants the joke to land within a page or two. The narrator’s high operatic self-regard — Etna plus Vesuvius, the giants of music, the writer’s love beyond ordinary love — is itself part of the comedy: the gap between how grandly he speaks and how absurdly his body betrays him.

The interleaved French (“ma chere”) marks the narrator, like his addressee, as provincial gentry aping fashionable manners, a stock register of the period’s feuilleton humor. Nothing here yet anticipates the mature Chekhov’s reticence; this is the young comic writer working a single mechanical joke as hard and as fast as it will go.