Modern Prayers

1 Published in 1883 under the Antosha Chekhonte byline, “Modern Prayers” is a run of eleven mock invocations addressed to Apollo, the nine Muses, and finally Bacchus and Venus together – each spoken by an unnamed petitioner of the Russian theatrical and literary world, and each answered, more often than not, by a heckle from the house. The conceit inverts the classical prayer: instead of asking a god for inspiration, craft, or virtue, each speaker asks the Muse to help him cut corners, raise his rate, silence a rival, or simply be left alone by the god of history.

2 The targets are the working conditions of Chekhov’s own trade – the tapered orchestra pit, the theatrical benefit system, per-line payment, censorship, claques and reviewers, the competition between serious drama and the cheaper draws of operetta, ballet spectacle, and the vaudeville house. Calliope’s petitioner does not ask for genius; he asks for a raise per line and for the censor to be tripled if it must, so long as the rate goes up. Melpomene’s petitioner wants his benefit performance back and a theater full of paying merchants’ wives. The comedy turns on the gap between the grandeur of the address and the smallness, greed, or vanity of the request.

3 A handful of topical names anchor the piece to 1883: the conservatory and Rubinstein (Nikolai Rubinstein, the pianist and Moscow Conservatory founder), the playwright Alexander Ostrovsky held up as the standard the Calliope-petitioner disclaims wanting, and a “Viktor Alexandrov” whose implausible output of comedies is the joke’s real object. The heckled astronomer’s exchange – “And yet it turns!” / “And yet it does not turn!” – plays on the Galileo tag (E pur si muove) for a cheap, timely laugh rather than any real science. None of this needs to be caught to enjoy the sketch; the shape of each miniature – invocation, request, heckle – carries the joke on its own.