In the Railway Carriage

1 In the Railway Carriage: A Conversational Skirmish (“В вагоне”) dates from 1885, five years after Chekhov’s earlier sketch of almost the same title, and returns to the train carriage as a stage for overheard Russian social comedy – though here the method is entirely different. Where the 1880 piece is a crowded panorama of grotesques, this one is built from four brisk, self-contained duets of dialogue, each separated by a bare row of asterisks, unified only by the running joke of its structure.

In each vignette a talkative passenger builds himself up through a cascade of connoisseurship and casual name-dropping – vintage wines by name and number, a jeweled watch-fob, a private stable of troikas, a fortune handled carelessly – until a polite, admiring question from his neighbor ("You must be a banker?A doctor, surely?") punctures the performance with a flatly comic anticlimax: he is a customs warehouse inspector, a post-office clerk, a fire chief, a police superintendent. The pattern repeats and escalates, closing with two variations that push past mere occupation into pure pretension – a self-important journalist who turns out to write about the "Jewish question" for a minor sheet, and a name-dropping wife whose husband, supposedly courted by counts and ministers, turns out to be a barber.

Chekhov offers no narration and no moralizing, only the transcript itself: the comedy of Russian provincial social climbing indicts itself entirely through what these people choose to boast about. The piece is a compact, almost mechanical demonstration of a technique – inflated self-presentation undercut by a single deflating fact – that Chekhov would refine throughout his early comic period.