Arrived in Moscow:

1 Written in 1880, when the twenty-year-old Chekhov, signing himself “Antosha Chekhonte,” was supplying the comic weeklies with whatever miniature the week’s papers suggested. Moscow newspapers of the day ran a standing feature listing the notable arrivals registered at the city’s hotels — name, rank or nationality, point of origin, address. It was read, and it was occasionally invented: a slow week could always be padded with a name nobody could check.

Chekhov’s squib borrows the column’s exact telegraphic grammar — no verb, no comment, just the bare entry — and plants a single absurd detail inside it. A “French subject” named Nana Sukhorovskaya, a name that is Russian on its face, arriving not from France but from Petersburg: the notice answers none of the questions it raises, because the genre it mimics never does either. The joke is entirely in the form; take away the convention of the arrivals column and there is nothing left to laugh at.

It belongs with a run of similar miniatures from the same year — mock advertisements, mock notices, mock answers to correspondents — in which the young Chekhonte tries out journalism’s smallest, most disposable shapes and finds he can make them hold a joke. The discipline those exercises taught him, of saying everything in the fewest words the form allows, never left him.