The Note

1 "The Note" ("Записка", 1885) is a short comic sketch built entirely around a single running joke: the titles of real, contemporary Russian newspapers and journals — Vrach (The Physician), Russkaya Mysl (Russian Thought), Niva (The Cornfield), Strekoza (The Dragonfly), Oskolki (Splinters, Chekhov’s own venue), and about a dozen others — are treated as literal common nouns or objects that a scatterbrained club librarian has "mislaid" around town, in patrons’ bedrooms, wardrobes, and cupboards. A club chairman returns from a long trip to find the club’s periodicals missing and demands an accounting; the librarian’s note is the entire text of the piece.

2 The device — parodying periodical titles by treating them as literal objects — was a common trick of the humorous "small press" (malaya pressa) Chekhov wrote for in the mid-1880s, and he used it more than once. The joke depends entirely on a contemporary reader recognizing each title; without that context the piece reads as a list of nonsense, which is part of why it is little translated or anthologized today compared with Chekhov’s narrative work of the same years.