At the Telephone

1 At the Telephone (“U telefona”) is a very short comic sketch Chekhov published in 1885, at the height of his prolific early period of writing quick, disposable pieces for the humor press under pseudonyms such as “Antosha Chekhonte.” It is less a story than a comic set piece: the narrator, trying to place a telephone call to the fashionable Moscow restaurant the Slavic Bazaar, keeps being connected to the wrong number – a lonely, chattering little boy named Seryozha whose parents are out, a hoarse stranger expecting a dinner companion named Fuchs, a textile firm called Timofei Vaksin and Sons, and finally the anonymous “central station” operator herself.

The comedy rests entirely on the new and still-unreliable technology of the telephone, installed in Moscow only a few years before this piece was written, and on the disorientation of a narrator who cannot tell whether the fault lies with the machine, the operator, or himself. Chekhov wrings the premise for pure farce – crossed wires, mishearings, a running gag about private dining rooms – without any of the darker undertow that colors some of his other telephone- and technology-themed sketches from these years. The piece breaks off mid-scene with a mock-scholarly Latin tag, “ad nec plus ultra” (“to the utmost”), a small parody of the pretentious editorial apparatus found in serious literature of the day, followed by a bare “Notes” marker in the source, which is carried through here as an empty placeholder rather than dropped.