Gone

1 Gone (“Ushla” in the original) appeared in 1883, one of the hundreds of brief comic sketches Chekhov produced under the pen name Antosha Chekhonte for the Moscow humor papers during his student years. It belongs to a favorite early form: the marital dialogue built on a single reversal, told almost entirely in speech, with the narrator’s presence kept to a bare minimum until the final line.

A husband and wife, replete and drowsy after dinner, fall into gossip about a woman who has married a scoundrel. The wife is voluble in her contempt – she would never, she insists, tolerate such a man, let alone love one. The husband, needling her, asks what she would do if he himself turned out to be just such a scoundrel. What follows is a small comic indictment: an itemized account of household expenses that quietly outstrips his declared salary, delivered with the mock formality of a courtroom brief. The wife’s righteous certainty, so confidently declared a page earlier, evaporates without a word of argument.

The title’s punchline lands only in the last two lines, where Chekhov breaks the dramatic form to address the reader directly – a device he uses sparingly, and always for a joke that depends on the reader’s own expectations. “She left him,” the narrator seems to promise; she has left only the room. The piece is slight by design, but it already shows the young Chekhov’s instinct for ending on the deflating, literal fact rather than the moral one – a habit that would harden, in the later stories, into something far less comic and far more exact.