Visiting Cards

1 Visiting Cards (“Vizitnye kartochki”) appeared in 1885, one of the brisk, feuilleton-length satirical sketches Chekhov produced by the dozen in these years for the comic press. The premise is minimal by design: a narrator has received a stack of New Year’s calling cards and simply reads them out, one by one, letting each name and title speak for itself. There is no plot and almost no narration – the entire piece is built from the mock apparatus of provincial snobbery: invented coronets, invented ranks, invented societies, and above all invented names, each one a small comic explosion.

Chekhov’s target is the Russian obsession with rank and honorific address in the 1880s – the eagerness of minor officials, tradesmen, and self-appointed notables to festoon their cards with titles ("Hereditary Honorary Citizen," "Active State Councillor") borrowed from a bureaucratic hierarchy they only half belong to. The comic names follow the tradition of Gogolian nomenclature-satire: a surname built from a vulgar physical ailment, another from a disease, a mock-French dancing instructor whose "surname" is simply a garbled French phrase, a debt-ridden bruiser going by the vaguely aristocratic "Jean." The final card, a scattershot list of ever more implausible names, includes an editor whose invented surname is built directly from a Russian ethnic slur for Jews – Chekhov’s way of naming, and holding up to open contempt, the real antisemitic journalists and editors of the era’s gutter press (contemporary readers would have recognized the target as a barely veiled caricature of an actual reactionary editor). That line is translated here without softening, in keeping with the story’s own method of using the offensive word as a weapon against the person who earned it, not as incidental color.