Live Merchandise

1 Live Merchandise (Живой товар, sometimes rendered Living Chattel or Living Goods) is one of Chekhov’s earliest extended pieces of fiction, published in 1882 in the humor magazine Mirskoy Tolk, signed with the pseudonym “Antosha Chekhonte.” It is dedicated, in its opening line, to F. F. Popudoglo, a journalist and older friend of the Chekhov family who had encouraged the young medical student’s first efforts at writing and who died not long after the story’s publication. At three chapters and roughly a hundred sections, it is substantially longer than the anecdotes and comic sketches Chekhov was turning out for the same magazines in these same months – an early attempt at something closer to a novella, and a showcase for how far the twenty-two-year-old Chekhonte could stretch a single premise.

That premise is announced by the title: a husband literally sells his wife. Grokholsky, a wealthy, self-indulgent bachelor, is having an affair with Liza, the young wife of the minor official Bugrov. Rather than face a scandal or a duel, Grokholsky simply buys her – first for fifty thousand rubles, haggled up to a hundred and fifty thousand in the space of a single absurd, breathless scene, with Bugrov mooing out his rising price like an auctioneer while a carriage full of holidaymakers rolls past the window and fills his head with visions of country houses and Aeolian harps. The transaction is played for pure comedy – broad, fast, near-farcical, in the manner of Chekhonte’s early sketches – and yet the story never lets the reader forget what is actually being transacted: a human being, along with the couple’s small son, Mishutka, who becomes a second and more painful bargaining chip between the two households.

The story’s structure turns on proximity and repetition. Chekhov moves his three principals to adjoining dachas on the Crimean coast, where Bugrov reappears – newly rich, newly fashionable, trailing a rotating cast of mistresses, his priest father, and his own unresolved feeling for the wife he sold – and will not stay bought. The comedy of the first chapters (the haggling, the vulgar new wardrobe, the absurd correspondence with Father Pyotr) curdles by the third into something colder: Grokholsky, having paid for Liza once, ends up buying Bugrov off a second time with the gift of an entire estate, only to lose her anyway when she runs back to her husband mid-story, and finally to end his days as a dependent, half-mocked house guest under Bugrov’s own roof – picking out a sentimental romance on the guitar for a passing acquaintance, while Bugrov, portly and content, calls him “brother” and complains about his moods. The final frame, narrated by an unnamed visitor who happens to pass through, delivers the story’s verdict without ever stating it outright: fortunes change hands, but no one here is freed by money, least of all the two men who spent theirs trying to own a woman neither of them, in the end, is shown to actually possess.

Early and unpolished as it is, the story already shows the method Chekhov would refine for the rest of his career: judgment withheld, character built out of gesture and object (the sweating palms at the first confrontation, the cold samovar of comfort visible on Bugrov’s new terrace, the guitar Grokholsky is finally reduced to playing for his supper), and an ending that declines to resolve what it has set in motion. Read as apprentice work, it is a comedy of humiliation with the volume turned up; read against the later Chekhov, it is already asking the question – what does it cost to buy a person, and who really pays – that his mature fiction would learn to ask in a much quieter voice.