At Leukhin's Bookshop

1 "At Leukhin’s Bookshop" dates from 1880, Chekhov’s first year in print, when the twenty-year-old medical student was placing whatever the comic weeklies would take under the signature Antosha Chekhonte. It belongs to the smallest and most disposable of his early forms: the found document, a piece of print culture reproduced deadpan rather than described. Here the found object is a bookseller’s advertisement – a real genre, since provincial and Moscow print shops of the period did in fact circulate cheap catalogues of self-help manuals, letter-writing guides, and "physiology" pamphlets aimed at a barely literate readership hungry for anything touching on love, money, or scandal.

Leukhin was one such real bookseller, and the piece needs no further setup: the notice simply lists his wares, title by title, price by price, in the flat cataloguing voice of an actual trade circular. The joke is entirely in the specimens. Each title piles up more grandiose and more lascivious modifiers than the last – self-instructors, portfolios, dictionaries, handbooks – while the authors’ invented names (Idiotov, from idiot; Merzavtsev, from merzavets, "scoundrel") announce the fraud they are selling before a single page is opened. The final item, the volume discount and the free watch-key thrown in for large purchasers, is the sharpest touch: commerce as brazen as the content, with no pretense that anyone involved believes in what is being sold.

Chekhov supplies no commentary and no closing jab – the list simply ends where the merchandise ends. It is a companion piece to "At the Bookshop of The New Times," published under the same premise soon after, and together the two sketches are a specimen of Chekhov’s earliest method in its barest form: let the object speak, and trust the reader to hear exactly how much contempt is built into its own language.