The Tongue Will Get You to Kiev

1 The Tongue Will Get You to Kiev (Yazyk do Kieva dovedyot – a Russian proverb, roughly “ask and you shall find your way,” used here with bite) is one of Chekhov’s tiny dramatic sketches from 1884, written almost entirely as stage dialogue with no narrator’s frame at all. It opens on a fragment of folk song, then drops the reader straight into a theater or fairground crowd, where an usher in uniform (“1st”) tries to make a belligerent spectator (“2nd”) remove his hat.

What follows is a small comic escalation built on the well-worn early Chekhonte formula: an insignificant provocation, a loudmouth who will not let it go, and a crowd that first eggs him on and then turns on him. The 2nd’s bravado – his cracked proverbs, his insistence that his money bought him the right to talk, his wife’s futile hushing – runs on exactly the kind of self-satisfied folk speech and broken logic Chekhov liked to catch in these years. The title’s proverb, meant to praise a bold tongue, is turned ironic: this man’s tongue gets him nowhere but hauled off by a squad of ushers, to the crowd’s mocking cheer. The piece ends, per the convention of these early sketches, with a bare Notes heading for editorial apparatus.