In Winkler's Museum
В музее винклера,
Headnote
1 In Winkler’s Museum (“V muzee Vinklera” in the original) is one of Chekhov’s earliest published pieces, appearing in 1880 under the pseudonym “Antosha Chekhonte,” when its author was a twenty-year-old medical student supporting his family by turning out squibs for the Moscow humor magazines. It belongs to a small, very of-its-moment genre: the parody advertisement or mock-guidebook entry, built entirely out of the deadpan cataloguing voice of a museum handbill or newspaper notice.
Winkler’s waxworks-and-curiosities museum was a real Moscow attraction on Tsvetnoy Boulevard, the kind of cabinet of oddities – part sideshow, part instructive exhibit – common to nineteenth-century capitals. Chekhov does not describe it; he impersonates its catalogue, item by item, and lets the absurdity accumulate through the exhibit-label’s own solemn diction. A theater carriage six centuries old, ruined by a sparrow; two ancient, threadbare horses said to have unhorsed a French marquis in 1812; a devotional portrait of a contemporary reactionary churchman recast, via a mock-Latin caption, as a conqueror who failed to conquer; the Apollo Belvedere dressed for decency in a tailcoat; the very nets that snared Antony and Cleopatra; a white rat found baked into a bread roll. Each item is presented with the same flat, cataloguing gravity, and the parody lands precisely because the voice never winks.
The Latin tags and their bracketed Russian glosses belong to Chekhov himself – a favorite device of his mock-erudite museum-label and newspaper-notice sketches of these years, imitating the pseudo-scholarly footnoting of the popular press. They are part of the joke, not editorial apparatus, and are preserved here as Chekhov set them.
The piece is slight by design: a single comic idea, extended item by item, in the fast, broad manner of the earliest Chekhonte sketches, with none of the later stories’ interest in interior life. Its interest today is partly historical – a glimpse of the popular entertainments and the throwaway journalism of 1880s Moscow – and partly as an early specimen of a device (the deadpan catalogue, the institutional voice turned to absurdity) that Chekhov would use again, more pointedly, throughout his comic apprenticeship.