A Poisonous Affair
Ядовитый случай
Headnote
"A Poisonous Affair" ("Ядовитый случай") is a two-page squib from 1883, belonging to the flood of comic newspaper filler Chekhov produced under his early pseudonyms while training as a doctor. It is built on a single absurdity, delivered and closed inside a page: the anecdote-with-a-sting form that made him useful, and famous, in the humor weeklies before anyone was calling him a serious writer.
The premise turns on office boredom. A hack journalist, S. M., killing time in a newspaper’s counting-room while he waits to be paid, idly works his way through the subscription slips – and recognizes an address. Five years earlier a woman named Elena Petrovna Pyavkina had run off with a thousand rubles of his money; now he has found her. His triumph is instant and entirely without complication – he treats the secretary to dinner on the strength of it – and by the next day he is at his lawyer’s office setting the machinery of the law in motion against her.
The title’s sting is in the name. "Pyavkina" derives from *pyavka*, leech – Chekhov plants the joke that the "poisonous case" belongs as much to her as to the venom of exposure that finds her out after five years of hiding. The story offers no verdict on her guilt, her circumstances, or what will happen to her; it ends on the narrator’s one sardonic line – "Poor Elena Petrovna!" – and lets the reader supply everything the young journeyman writer declines to spell out.