The Plain Truth
Сущая правда
Headnote
"The Plain Truth" ("Сущая правда") appeared in 1883, another of the rapid, observational sketches Chekhov was turning out under the Antosha Chekhonte byline while a medical student in Moscow. Its subject is the lower rungs of the civil service – collegiate registrars, the humblest titled rank in the Table of Ranks – gathered in a suburban grove for the ritual farewell drinking-bout of a colleague who has just been dismissed.
The dismissed man, Kanifolev, has been sacked for drunkenness after a string of small disasters: a fall through a glass cabinet, lost paperwork, gunpowder carried into the office. His colleagues toast him with mock funeral rites – "eternal memory,amen" – and he responds with the drink-fuelled vow that runs through the piece and gives it its title: that he will go to his superior and tell him "the whole plain truth," exposing the petty injustices and favoritism of the office. A friend warns him that it is all boasting, that drunken men always talk big and then lose their nerve. Kanifolev, stung, rushes off to make good on the vow.
He does. But when he stands before his superior and delivers his "plain truth," it turns out to consist entirely of trivial grievances – unpainted floors, a bookkeeper who sleeps late, one clerk allowed to take newspapers home when another is not. The superior’s blank incomprehension, which closes the story without comment, is the joke and the point at once: the gap between the vast moral reckoning a drunk man imagines he is capable of and the small, almost comic list of complaints that actually comes out of him. It is an early, compact instance of a device Chekhov would keep refining – withholding the narrator’s judgment entirely and letting the anticlimax do the work.