В книжном магазине "нового времени"

1 Written in 1880, the year the twenty-year-old Chekhov began publishing as “Antosha Chekhonte,” this squib takes the shape of a bookshop’s list of new arrivals – eleven numbered items, no narrator, no comment – set, the title tells us, at the shop of Novoye Vremya (“New Times”), Alexei Suvorin’s Petersburg daily. By 1880 Novoye Vremya had already turned from its earlier liberalism into the loudest and most opportunistic voice of the conservative press, and the young comic weeklies took it as a standing target. Every title on this fake shelf is a small bomb thrown at that world and its neighbors on the political right.

2 The titles do the satire’s work by naming names. “An ode to the Jesuit Tarakanchio and his socius Tsitovich” aims at Pyotr Tsitovich, a real reactionary jurist and publicist of the day known for denouncing the student and nihilist movements in print; “Tarakanchio” – built on tarakan, “cockroach,” dressed up with a mock- Jesuit, mock-Italian ending – is Chekhonte’s invented companion in obscurantism, a Jesuit in name because the word had become, in the liberal and radical press of the time, shorthand for reactionary cunning. “In the Clouds,” offered as a third volume continuing Pavel Melnikov’s real and celebrated novels In the Forests and In the Hills (published as by “Andrei Pechersky”), is a joke of scale: those two novels were already immense, and a publisher padding out a hit into an endless serial was a recognizable vice of the day. “A Slavophile-Russian Dictionary. 40,000 words necessary for reading ‘Rus”’ takes aim at Ivan Aksakov’s Slavophile newspaper Rus’, needling its habit of archaic, home-spun diction so thick that a glossary would be needed to get through an issue.

3 The other entries round out the same catalogue of hack print: a scandalous novel with a leering title and a memorial pamphlet by the same disreputable hand, a treatise on pig-keeping dressed in the grandest rhetorical Latinity, a newspaperman’s confession of graft, and – the list’s last item, breaking the bookshop conceit entirely – a loan offer promising doctors ten percent on their savings if they go into business with the advertiser. That final swerve, from parody title to a bald little swindle addressed straight to the reader, is the same instinct for the deadpan non sequitur that runs through Chekhonte’s other mock-notices of these months: the form promises one kind of list and delivers, item by item, evidence that the whole world of print around it – politics, literature, medicine, commerce – traded in the identical currency of puffery and self-interest.