Eesh, this is an incredibly irritating story. It’s particularly painful because, in the Constance Garnett translations, it follows two masterpieces at the beginning of Volume 11. A story this bad looks even worse in the wake of “The Schoolmaster” and “Enemies.”
It begins with a bit of stilted dialog like something out of a bad costume drama. “‘There is a great deal that is enigmatic and obscure in nature…’” says a magistrate, who then bloviates a bit before getting to the point: He knows of a woman who predicted that she would die on a specific day, and then she really did die that day.
His companion, a doctor, is similarly a bloviator, and responds in similarly stilted terms: “There’s no effect without cause,” he says.
If the plummy talk of the first page isn’t enough to drive you away, you get a mystery of sorts. The magistrate provides further details, The doctor solves the mystery. The magistrate is stunned and chastened: It was his wife! SPOILER ALERT: She killed herself because he had had an affair!
There, I’ve spared you the trouble of reading this story. It’s pretty dreadful.
READ THIS? READ THAT!
The one interesting thing about this story is the remarkable resemblance the dialog has to that of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The blithe superiority of the doctor in this story (of course Chekhov would create a doctor character who was blithely superior) reminds me of nobody so much as Sherlock Holmes, and I assumed (blithely!) that Chekhov must have stolen the tone from Doyle.
But as it happens, the first Sherlock Holmes story did not appear until November 1887, fully six months after the publication of “The Examining Magistrate.” So Chekhov had not read Doyle when he wrote this story! I suppose it’s possible that by the time Constance Garnett got around to translating this and others of Chekhov’s stories, Doyle’s voice had infected her a little, and her wording choices for mystery stories inadvertently picked up an inflection of Holmes.
Whatever Chekhov’s influences, he was interested in the mystery genre, and even a bit of a pioneer. His first and only novel, written in 1884 and pretty much forgotten now, is a mystery about a woman murdered in the woods. Forgive me for giving things away, but that novel, “The Shooting Party,” may be the first mystery narrated by the perpetrator.
I really don’t want to inflict Chekhov’s mysteries on anyone, but if you like “The Examining Magistrate,” then by all means go ahead and read “The Swedish Match,” a detective story that is meant to provide a laugh as well as a mystery to be solved.
A Chekhov Circus 