The Bridegroom

1 The Bridegroom (Жених) appeared in 1883, in the early run of short, fast comic sketches Chekhov produced under the pseudonym “Antosha Chekhonte” for the weekly humor press. It is a two-page miniature built on a single absurd engine: a young man’s tearful, operatic farewell to his sweetheart at a departing train, derailed at the last second by a fit of petty bookkeeping.

The piece belongs squarely to Chekhov’s “two gears, one hand” early period – broad, quick comedy rather than the tender-ironic doubleness of his mature stories, though the method that will define his later work is already visible in miniature: the emotional scene is undercut not by commentary but by a concrete detail (a twenty-five-rouble note, a demand for a receipt) that the narrator lets speak for itself. The three station bells that structure Russian rail departures of the period – the last of which sends the train off – provide the sketch’s clockwork timing.

Watch for the shift in Petya’s parting words, from grand sentiment (“Farewell, my darling!... for a loving heart that’s an eternity!”) to the sudden, deflating practicality of the receipt he forgot to ask for. The ending is typical of Chekhonte’s comic pieces: no moral is drawn, the joke simply lands and the sketch stops.