A Sign of the Times
Знамение времени
Headnote
"A Sign of the Times" ("Знамение времени") appeared in 1883, in the thick of Chekhov’s Antosha Chekhonte years, when he was turning out squibs and sketches for the comic weeklies at a rate that supported his family and paid his medical-school fees. It belongs to a favorite early form: the scene reduced to almost nothing, a single joke sprung by a single line.
The title is the joke. A proposal scene, straight out of the sentimental tradition of the "physiological sketch" and the drawing-room romance — the trembling suitor, the blue wallpaper, the girl’s parted lips — is interrupted not by a rival or a parent but by a brother whose "sacred duty" is to warn his sister to watch her tongue, because the suitor is an informer who will report anything indiscreet. The scene resumes exactly where it left off, and the girl’s answer is now doubly determined: she says yes, and she is careful. Chekhov does not comment on any of this; he simply lets the brother’s interruption and the girl’s final caution sit side by side, the whole political climate of the period compressed into a domestic aside.
Denunciation and self-censorship were live anxieties in the Russia of the early 1880s, in the aftermath of Alexander II’s assassination and under the tightened surveillance of his successor. Chekhov’s early comic pieces rarely name politics directly; here, as often, the pressure shows up sideways, in a brother’s throwaway warning at a moment that ought to belong only to love. What to watch for is the speed: nothing in the piece slows down to explain itself, and the title supplies the only commentary the story allows itself.