The exclamation mark
The exclamation mark ( Russian Восклицательный знак , Wosklizatelny snak ) is a short story by the Russian writer Anton Chekhov , which appeared on December 28, 1885 in the Petersburg joke sheet Oskolki .
content
On Christmas night the college secretary Jefim Fomitsch Perekladin goes to bed in anger. A few hours ago he had smiled gently when a young man, the graduate son of a councilor, accused him of his terrifying illiteracy at an evening party in front of everyone. The latter can be seen from the documents of Perekladin written over forty years. In response to a direct request from the vain dude, the honorable gray official had frankly admitted that education had never been asked of an official. Because: "You have to write correctly, that's enough."
Perekladin cannot sleep that night. The punctuation marks comma, semicolon, colon, period and question mark shimmer and dance in a dance. The question mark turns into an exclamation mark. Stop. A civil servant like Perekladin cannot do anything with that, because he does not remember it in his mountain of files, swollen to ten thousand documents. His wife Marfuscha sleeps next to Perekladin. She occasionally boasted that she had studied grammar for seven years at the boarding school. Perekladin wakes the sleeper and actually receives information promptly: The "sign is set when addressing, calling out and expressing enthusiasm, indignation, joy, anger and other expressions of feeling."
On Christmas morning, Perekladin has to register with his manager and wish him all the best. The exclamation mark - however the officer turns and turns - still shimmers within his field of vision. When he stopped a cab in the street, he felt as if an exclamation point had hit him.
In the anteroom of the superior, the afflicted writes: "College Secretary Jefim Perekladin !!!" and the illusion is gone.
Remarks
In 1895, Platon Krasnow praised the author's mastery in the magazine Das Werk , with which the sleepless night of that elderly official was described, who in vain remembers in which of his handwritten documents he used an exclamation mark. During the author's lifetime, the text was translated into Bulgarian, Hungarian, German, Polish, Romanian, Serbo-Croatian and Czech.
Used edition
- Gerhard Dick (Hrsg.), Wolf Düwel (Hrsg.): Anton Chekhov: Collected works in individual volumes : The exclamation mark. A Christmas Story. P. 445–451 in: Gerhard Dick (Ed.): Anton Chekhov: From the rain to the eaves. Short stories. Translated from Russian by Ada Knipper and Gerhard Dick. With a foreword by Wolf Düwel. 630 pages. Rütten & Loening, Berlin 1964 (1st edition)
Web links
- The text
- January 10, 2010: online bilingual Russian / German at de.sputniknews.com (Translator: Gerhard Dick)
- Wikisource: Восклицательный знак (Чехов) (Russian)
- online in FEB (Russian)
- online in Lib.ru (Russian)
- online in the Komarow library (Russian)
- Chekhov Bibliography, Entry Stories No. 342 (Russian)
- Reference to first appearance in the Laboratory of Fantastics (Russian)
- 1985 Wladimir Etusch : Reading (13 min) on YouTube (Russian)