The Sign

Another of the tiny 1884 fillers, a single deadpan sentence submitted – per the "Contributed by An. Ch." tag Chekhov appended to send-ins of this kind – as an overheard curiosity rather than a story proper. The joke is the shop sign itself: a Rostov-on-Don gravestone dealer has dressed his trade in the euphemistic language of a memorial craftsman, "Master of Memorial Works," the same deadpan gap between commercial phrasing and what is actually being sold that runs through the era’s mock-notice sketches (compare "Cherepov, Maker of Coffins").

There is no narrator’s comment, no punchline beyond the sign’s own wording – Chekhov simply holds it up and lets the reader supply the smile. It belongs to the same current of found or invented commercial language – shop signs, advertisements, notices – that the young Chekhonte kept mining for its ready-made irony, years before that same eye for the deadest official language would do subtler work in the mature fiction.