The Lawyer Mother-in-Law

"The Lawyer Mother-in-Law" ("Теща-адвокат") appeared in 1883, in the same brisk early stretch of Antosha Chekhonte’s output as the other short comic sketches of that year: a single scene, a single reversal, staged and dispatched in a page or two for a humor weekly’s readership.

The setup is a stock one — a mother-in-law descending on her new son-in-law a month after the wedding to plead her daughter’s cause — and Chekhov plays it for the reversal built into the title: she has come to argue Liza’s case against Michel’s supposed neglect, marshaling grievance after grievance (the books, the studying, the absence of balls) with the fluency of an advocate pleading a brief. Michel’s answer, that Liza herself prefers this life to the mother’s idea of one, seems to settle it — until the mother-in-law throws open the door on a Liza who has, in fact, been eavesdropping and crying, and who now sides with her mother in a single breath. The final exchange, in which neither husband nor wife can say which of them was the fool, is left exactly where Chekhov drops it.

The comic engine here is advocacy without conviction: the mother-in-law argues from a brief she may not fully believe, and Liza’s tearful volte-face undercuts the very independence Michel had just been praising in her. Chekhov gives no verdict on who has genuinely lost this argument, or whether Liza’s declared misery is real, staged, or some mixture the story does not pretend to sort out.

Two brief touches of the household’s aspirant, French-and-German-flecked gentility survive from the source and are worth noting for a reader meeting them cold: "Mutterchen" (a fond, mangled form of the German for "little mother," here used ironically of the mother-in-law) and the scattered French endearments and phrases ("mon petit,mon ange,ma chère,jour fixe" — a fixed at-home reception day) that mark the family’s pretensions to fashionable, cosmopolitan polish even as they squabble in a dressing gown over the breakfast cups.