It was her!
It was her! , too, only his wife! ( Russian То была она! , To byla ona! ), Is a short story by Russian writer Anton Chekhov , in the weekly magazine on December 27, 1886 Oskolki appeared. The text was translated into Bulgarian, German, Norwegian, Polish and Czech during the author's lifetime.
content
The widowed Colonel Pyotr Ivanovich Wywertow tells young women a story from the year 1843, when he was still a wild lad. The now elderly gentleman, then a lieutenant and regimental adjutant, had already been married to a very pretty woman.
On Christmas Eve of all times, with deep snow and freezing frost, he was sent from Częstochowa to a slaughterhouse , more precisely to the rich Polish Count Bojadlowski, in his village Szewelki. Because the count was just in Paris, Wywertow was received hospitably by his administrator Kazimierz Chapcinski. Soon the Russian guest was rasping liquorice with Chapcinski's wife by the fireplace.
At bedtime, the manager assigned Wywertow a secluded room to the absent Count. While wishing good night, Chapcinski asked him: “Are you not afraid of ghosts either?” Out of sheer fear, Wywertow extinguished the candle and continued to fear in the dark until someone came in. Two down-soft woman's arms lay on his shoulders and a woman's voice fluted vows of love.
The breathlessly listening young ladies wanted to know from the colonel who the visitor would have been. “That was my wife! ... She stayed ... in the next room ", he replied. The punchline was not taken from the narrator. Annoyed, the cornered, inventive colonel added a new detail to his story, which was already rather overloaded with hair-raising embellishments; lied that he had mentioned that his wife had accompanied him.
Dissatisfied, the listeners sat down at the table and poked sullenly at the food. Finally, one of the young women expressed her displeasure with such "directly pointless" stuff. The Colonel thought about it and admitted that he had been joking. It was not his wife who came to bed with him, but Chapcinski's wife. Thereupon the young women became funny again, asked incessantly, turned to the food and enjoyed it.
reception
Schklowski referred to the formal element of oversubscription, which constitutes humor . The listener forces the narrator to turn around. The colonel satisfies the young ladies' expectations.
literature
Used edition
- Gerhard Dick (Hrsg.), Wolf Düwel (Hrsg.): Anton Chekhov: Collected Works in Individual Volumes : She was it! P. 607–612 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)
Secondary literature
- Wiktor Schklowski : Theory of prose. Edited and translated from Russian by Gisela Drohla . 192 pages. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1966 (translation of the Russian original edition О теории прозы (O teorii prosy), Moscow 1925)
Web links
- The text
- Just his wife! online in the Gutenberg-DE project (Leipzig 1901, translated by Wladimir Czumikow )
- Wikisource: То была она! (Чехов) (Russian)
- online at Lib.ru (Russian)
- online in FEB (Russian)
- Chekhov Bibliography, Entry Stories No. 454 (Russian)