ABSTRACT

One day in early winter of 1882 Chekhov was walking through the streets of Moscow when he heard a shout, and a sledge drew up beside him. The occupant, a prosperous-looking gentleman who was smoking a cigar, introduced himself as Nicholas Leykin, the proprietor and editor of the Petersburg magazine Fragments. Chekhov’s chief complaint against Fragments was directed against the rigidity of Leykin’s ‘programme’. Perhaps the most interesting new feature in the Little Stories is an element of social criticism and satire, which had been almost completely absent in Chekhov’s earliest work. Corporal Prishibeev is perhaps the best known of all Chekhov’s early comic stories, so much so that the word Prishibeev is said to have passed into the Russian language. The character of Chekhov’s journalism, as emerges from the programme, was completely in accordance with the traditions of the Russian comic press. In style and general approach Chekhov’s column was much of a piece with his Antosha Chekhonte fiction.