Moscow, however, was both where the Chekhovs lived and where the cheap printers were located, and so, accordingly, was where the Chekhov brothers turned to publish their book. Moscow, then, was where the book would have to clear the censor. The first step in this process required the author to have the book typeset and then put in a preliminary application to have the censor read it. Early in the summer of 1882, Chekhov submitted this preliminary application for a book entitled Good-for-Nothings and Good-Sorts (Shalopai i blagodushnye) through the printer and publisher Nikolay Skodi, to whose magazine, The Spectator, both he and Nikolay were frequent contributors. Permission was denied on a technicality. Chekhov submitted a new application. The book was now to be called The Prank. As part of the new application, Chekhov pointed out that all the stories, except for one, had been cleared by the censor for previous publication in journals and promised to send a manuscript version of the one exception.
This time, the preliminary application passed. Chekhov’s typeset book was assigned to be read by V. Ia. Fedorov, “a stern censor and influential bureaucrat,” who became the chairman of the Moscow censorship committee later that year,10 and Fedorov blocked it. No official documents remain, but Chekhov recorded his own view of what had happened in a letter to Leikin (concerning where to bring out a possible publication of a later collection of his work). “According to Moscow’s notions,” Chekhov wrote, “all my best stories uproot the foundations...”11
Even allowing for some exaggeration on Chekhov’s part, how could Fedorov have supposed that The Prank, a collection of humorous stories, threatened the very foundations of Russian society? The question is all the more puzzling because before submitting the book to the censor, Chekhov had combed through it to take out any passages that could be perceived as critical of religion or the censor. Why, for that matter, didn’t Chekhov try to appeal the censor’s decision, or—if he thought that in Moscow it would be a lost cause, since Fedorov was so high up—to bring out the book in St. Petersburg, where he would publish his next two collections, under a different title? Perhaps the reason for abandoning the book was that Chekhov, having done his best to make his stories acceptable, realized that they were, in the end, just too subversive, at least in the new climate of repression.
For The Prank Chekhov selected the twelve stories he considered his best and arranged them to have the maximum impact. The first story in the book, “Artists’ Wives,” sets the tone. It is presented as having been “translated from the Portuguese” and is ostensibly about a bunch of Portuguese bohemians: artists, actors, singers, and writers. It depicts the problems and pretensions of these aspiring artistes (“Sleep won’t get us anywhere,” intones a singer who goes on maddening his young family with his nonstop vocalizing. “Let those who wish to sleep sleep, but—for the glory of Portugal, and maybe even that of the entire world—I must not sleep—”), and it even makes fun of how distorted and exotic things Russian appear to be to other Europeans: A young Portuguese writer publishes a novel implausibly titled Execution by Catherine Wheel in Saint-Muscovy of Forty-Four Polygamists with Twenty Wives Each, and the narrator archly comments that it was “a novel, as you can see, taken directly from Russian life, and what could be more interesting than that!” But if that sounds absurd, it is just another hint that the story is not at all about Portugal but about contemporary Russia, where the prevalence of repression, violence, and smothering orthodoxy made the absurd familiar enough. Russian readers, used to reading, as they say, “Aesopically,” would no doubt have suspected as much from the winking ellipsis in the subtitle.
“Artists’ Wives” is, however, chiefly a satire on the Russian bohemian crowd that Chekhov knew well and was a part of himself. Lisbon’s Hotel of the Venomous Swan has its Russian counterpart in Moscow’s grandly named but no less squalid Oriental Suites, where Nikolay Chekhov, Isaac Levitan, and other students lived in the early 1880s, and where Anton Chekhov came to study for his medical exams, seeking a respite from his chaotic home life.12 The young artists, writers, and singers of the story—all male, all involved in a single-minded pursuit of fame, and none of them exactly gifted—are chiefly remarkable for the callousness or plain disregard they demonstrate for the women in their lives, a theme to which Chekhov would return again and again in his work.
“Artists’ Wives” may appear harmless enough, but after it The Prank goes on to criticize systematically almost every level and sphere of Russian society. “Papa,” in which a father struggles to get a math teacher to pass his overgrown dolt of a son, shows the corruption not only of Russian institutions but of the Russian family: Rich Papa is bedding the housemaid, which Mama overlooks, at least as long as Papa does as she says. “St. Peter’s Day”—the story that most closely resembles mature Chekhov—describes a feckless hunting party, involving a retired general, a schoolboy, a doctor, various landowners, and representatives of other classes of Russian society. The customary cruelty of the hunt proves a mirror of endemic social cruelty: Bolva, ninety years old and of humble background, is abandoned in the middle of nowhere by the rest of the party. It’s hot and the question of whether to go back for the old man arises, but the general decrees “the hell with him.... We’re not going back!” No one is about to disagree with the general and Bolva’s fate—death by heat exhaustion or dehydration?—is left to the reader’s imagination.
And so it goes, as Chekhov targets the venality of Russian marriage, the persistence of vicious practices associated with serfdom, and all sorts of ignorance, backwardness, and ugliness. “A Sinner from Toledo,” set during the Spanish Inquisition, shows the baneful effect of religious dogmatism and superstition, with obvious parallels to the Russia of Chekhov’s time, where the reactionary Pobedonostsev was deeply involved, not only in the functioning of the church, but in formulating state policy. Two parodies, of Jules Verne and of Victor Hugo, wildly popular writers in Chekhov’s Russia, send up Russia’s enthrallment by European fashions, and also return once again to the sheer incredibility, the utter absurdity of what passes for Russian reality. “Flying Islands by Jules Verne,” for example, is not only a parody of Verne’s preposterous adventures (and a parody, at that, of the incompetence of his Russian translators) but, in the context of The Prank as a whole, a critique of the triumphal follies of Russian imperialism: A character proposes to bore a hole through the moon for the greater glory of his country, which will then own the hole.
“1,001 Passions, or, A Dreadful Night,” which has been called “a condensation of an imaginary Victor Hugo novel so violent as to collapse the romantic novel into a surrealist joke,”13 ends the book on a note of exultant madness that draws attention to the artifice of storytelling while recalling the stories preceding it: “Yesterday my second son was born—I was so happy, I hanged myself. My second boy reaches out his little hands to the readers, exhorting them not to listen to his papa. His papa had no children; his papa had no wife. His papa fears marriage like the plague. My boy doesn’t lie. He is an infant. Believe him. Infancy is a holy age. None of this has ever happened... Good night.”