The Complaints Book

1 Zhalobnaya kniga (The Complaints Book) appeared in 1883 in Oskolki (Fragments), signed "A. Chekhonte" – the pseudonym under which the twenty-three-year-old Chekhov was turning out a torrent of short comic pieces for the Petersburg humor weeklies. It belongs to the fastest, most purely formal end of that early work: not a story at all in the ordinary sense, but a sequence of found documents, the entries a real Russian provincial railway station kept in a book set aside for passenger complaints.

2 The device is the whole joke, and Chekhov trusts it completely: no narrator intrudes to explain or comment after the opening lines, no entry answers or acknowledges another. What accumulates instead is a small, composite portrait of provincial Russia talking to itself when it thinks no one important is listening – petty grudges against a conductor or a gendarme, a seminarian’s failed attempt at righteous indignation that dissolves into its own crossings-out, a semi-literate love confession sitting beside a semi-literate denunciation, a pun, a doodle, a proverb. The comic illiteracies and misspellings in several entries (a peasant’s "approaching to this here station," a drunk telegraphist’s tirade) are in the original Russian as written; they characterize the writer, not the transcriber, and the translation preserves the same broken, self-important, or barely-schooled voices without smoothing them into correctness.

3 Nothing here is explained because nothing needs to be: the reader supplies the station, the bored passengers, the overworked gendarme, out of the entries themselves. It is an early instance of a method Chekhov would keep and deepen for the rest of his life – let the concrete particular carry the meaning, and say nothing yourself.