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History of a Business Enterprise
This article originally appeared in the July 2010 Other Press newsletter. Click here to subscribe.
“History of a Business Enterprise”
by Anton Chekhov
Andrei Andreych Sidorov inherited four thousand roubles from his mother, and decided to open a bookshop with the money. Now there was a great need for such a shop. The town was stagnating in ignorance and prejudice; old men did nothing but go to the public baths, civil servants played cards and swilled vodka, ladies gossiped, young men lived without any ideals, young girls dreamt of marriage all day long and ate buckwheat porridge, husbands beat their wives and pigs wandered about the streets.
We need ideas, more ideas! thought Andrei Andreych. Ideas! When he had rented the necessary premises, he went to Moscow, from which he returned with a great many books, both classical and the most modern authors, and a great many text books, and he arranged all that stuff on the shelves. Not a single customer came in the course of the first three weeks. Andrei Andreych sat behind the counter reading Mikhailovsky and trying to think honestly. For example, when it would suddenly occur to him that it would not be a bad idea to have some bream with gruel to eat, he would immediately catch himself out: “Oh, how trivial!” he would say to himself.
Every morning a servant girl chilled with cold, wearing a kerchief and with leather galoshes on her bare feet, would rush headlong into the shop and say:
“Give us two copecks’ worth of vinegar!’
And Andrei Andreych would answer her disdainfully:
“You’ve mistaken the door, madam! You’ve come to the wrong place, madam!”
When one of his friends came to see him, he would put on an important and mysterious expression, reach for the third volume of Pisarev from the highest shelf, blow the dust off it and, with a look as if he had something else as well in the shop but was afraid to show it, he would say:
“Yes, sir, this little piece is so to speak… well, I mean in fact… You read it, it would make you sit up all right… m-m-m…”
“Look out you don’t get it in the neck for reading it, old man!”
Three weeks passed before the first customer came. He was a fat, grey-haired gentleman with side whiskers, and wearing a cap with a red band round it – by all appearances, a landowner. He demanded the second part of Our Native Tongue.
“You haven’t any slate pencils?” he asked.
“I don’t keep them.”
“Pity… It’s a bore to have to go to the bazaar for a little thing like that.”
It really is a pity that I don’t keep slate pencils, thought Andrei Andreych when the customer had left. It’s no use specializing too narrowly here in the provinces, one should sell everything that has anything to do with education and which promotes it in one way or another.
He wrote to Moscow, and before a month was out pens, pencils, pen-holders, school exercise books, slates and other school materials were displayed in his window. Boys and girls began dropping in from time to time, and there even came a day when his takings were one rouble, forty copecks. One day the servant girl in leather galoshes rushed headlong into the shop; he had already opened his mouth to tell her disdainfully that she had come to the wrong place, when she shouted:
“Give us a copeck’s worth of paper and a seven copeck stamp!”
After that Andrei Andreych began keeping stamps, as well as application forms. About eight months after the opening of the shop a lady came in to buy pens.
“You don’t happen to have any school satchels?” she asked.
“Alas, madam, I don’t keep them!”
“Oh, what a pity! In that case, show me what dolls you have, only they mustn’t be expensive…”
“I haven’t any dolls either, madam!” said Andrei Andreych sadly.
Without further ado he wrote to Moscow, and soon satchels, dolls, drums, swords, accordions, balls and all sorts of toys appeared in his shop.
“Those are all trifles!” he said to his friends. “But just you wait, I’ll introduce educational toys and instructive games! You see, in my shop the educational section will be founded, as the saying goes, on the subtlest deductions of science, in short…”
He ordered dumb-bells, croquet, backgammon, bagatelle, gardening tools for children and about two dozen very clever instructional games. Then, to their great delight, the inhabitants of the town saw, as they passed his shop, two bicycles, one large and the other slightly smaller. And business went with a swing. Business was especially good before Christmas, when Andrei Andreych hung a notice in the window that he had Christmas tree decorations for sale.
“You’ll see, I’ll get hygiene across to them yet,” he said to his friends, rubbing his hands. “Just you let me get to Moscow! I’ll have such filters and all kinds of scientific improvements as in fact you’ve never dreamt of! Science can’t be ignored, my friends, no-o-o!”
Having made a lot of money, he went to Moscow and bought – for cash and on credit – about five thousand roubles’ worth of goods. There were filters, and excellent lamps for writing tables, and guitars, and hygienic underpants for children, and feeding bottles, and purses, and zoological collections. While he was about it, he bought five hundred roubles’ worth of best-quality china, and was glad that he had done so, as beautiful things develop refined taste and make for gentler manners. On his return from Moscow he set about arranging the new goods on the shelves and bookcases. Somehow it so happened that, as he climbed up to tidy the top shelf, something shook, and one after another the ten volumes of Mikhailovsky fell off the shelf; one volume hit him on the head, the others fell down right on the lamps, and broke two lamp globes.
“How… heavily they do write!” muttered Andrei Andreych, rubbing himself.
He collected all the books together, tied them up firmly with string, and hid them under the counter. About two days later he was told that his neighbour the grocer had been sentenced to hard labour for assaulting his nephew, and therefore the shop was to let. Andrei Andreych was very pleased, and asked if he could have the first refusal for it. A door was soon made in the wall, and both shops, joined into one, were filled up with goods; as the customers who went into the second half of the shop all asked for tea, sugar and kerosene from habit, Andrei Andreych without more ado introduced groceries as well.
He is now one of the most prominent shop-keepers in our town. He sells china, tobacco, tar, soap, bread rolls, red wine, haberdashery and chandlery, rifles, skins and ham. He has taken over a wine cellar in the market and, it is rumoured, is going to open public baths and a hotel. As to the books which once lay on his shelves, they – including the third volume of Pisarev – have long ago been sold for one rouble, five copecks the hundredweight.
At name-day parties and weddings his former friends, whom Andrei Andreych now calls “Americans” in derision, sometimes bring the conversation round to progress, literature and other elevated subjects.
“Andrei Andreych, have you read the last number of the European Herald?” they ask him.
“No, I haven’t read it…” he replies, screwing up his eyes and playing with his thick watch chain. “That doesn’t concern us. We are occupied with more constructive business.”
Translation © Kyril Zinovieff, 2009. Courtesy of Oneworld Classics Ltd, from THE WOMAN IN THE CASE AND OTHER STORIES.
