Up the Staircase
Вверх по лестнице
Headnote
1 Up the Staircase (“Vverkh po lestnitse” in the original) is a brief comic dialogue-sketch from 1885, belonging to the same vein of newspaper humor as Chekhov’s other very short pieces of the period: a single scene, almost entirely in dialogue, driven by one social mechanism worked out to its punchline.
The mechanism here is deference calibrated in real time to money and connections. The provincial councillor Dolbonosov, finding himself at a grand Petersburg party where he knows no one, condescends out of boredom to a former tutor of his children, a young law-school graduate named Shchepotkin. As Shchepotkin quietly discloses his salary, his second position on a railway board, and finally his marriage into a well-connected family, Dolbonosov’s tone climbs – rung by rung, hence the title – from bored contempt to fawning invitation, without ever registering that his own behavior has changed at all. Chekhov gives Dolbonosov no interiority beyond what escapes in his stammering, broken speech; the comedy is entirely in the mechanical predictability of a status climber recalculating his manners.
The invented surnames are typical of Chekhov’s early comic technique – Dolbonosov suggests something like “blockhead” or “chisel-nose,” Shchepotkin something like “little pinch” or “splinter,” and the fictitious “Ugaro-Debosherskaya Railway” embeds a joke on ugar (carbon-monoxide fumes, or by extension a drunken binge) and debosh (a row, a disorderly scene) – a comic non-existent rail line named, in effect, “Fumes-and-Riot Railway.”