Advice

"Advice" appeared in 1883, one of the miniature comic sketches Chekhov produced by the dozen in his Antosha Chekhonte years, when he was still a medical student paying his way by turning out copy for the humor weeklies. It is barely two pages and built like a stage direction: a door is described in mock-heroic terms, a curtain is announced at the close, and in between two unnamed men transact almost the entire plot of late-imperial Russia in overheard dialogue.

The premise is a bribe disguised as a gift. A petitioner whose case has dragged through official channels for three years wants to thank the official actually deciding it – not the clerk he is speaking to, but the unseen "Porfiry Semyonych" on the far side of the door – and the clerk, Maxim Ivanych, spends the whole scene refusing the money on his superior’s behalf while coaching the petitioner up to a sum large enough to be accepted. The refusals escalate in the same breath as the offer: two or three hundred roubles is turned away as an insult, is redescribed as gratitude rather than graft, and by the last line has become two thousand, spoken by the very man who was, a moment before, too principled to touch it.

Chekhov gives none of this a verdict. There is no narrator’s judgment on the corruption, no comment on the absurdity of "a lawful taking, so to speak" – the petitioner’s own euphemism for what he is doing. The satire lives entirely in the mechanics of the exchange: the pious vocabulary ("benefactor,purity of the soul,philanthropic... humanitarian") rising in direct proportion to the sum being negotiated, and the studied vagueness of who is asking whom for what. The mock-solemn frame – the door "breathing Olympian majesty," the curtain that falls on cue, the narrator’s coy disclaimer that what happens beyond the door is "none of our business" – turns an ordinary bribe into small theater, and lets the piece close on its own ironic aside: "let no one think ill of this."