Author: Swati

In the closed eyes of a dozing Perekladin, a fiery comma flew like a meteor. The golden commas spun around and raced off to one side. They were replaced by fiery periods.

This excerpt is from Chekhov’s short story Exclamation Point and is one of his earlier works, published way back in 1885. It is also available as part of a short story collection called Fifty Two stories published by Alfred A Knopf, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.

Punctuation marks were my regular tormentors for a good two months of my primary school student life. This was a painful reminder of those times of my life. 

Oh, those commas, colons, and semicolons. In that, my torments were quite similar to the ones of Perekladin, but that’s where the similarities end. His story is way more fun than mine. Let’s get on with it.

The Exclamation Mark: Summary and Plot Analysis

Efim Fomich Perekladin is a collegiate secretary who is extremely pissed at the treatment meted out to him earlier that day at a party. A conversation on the importance of education pops at the party, and he ends up being a subject of conversation. 

Efim, having a good post in government, is asked about the kind of education that he received.

For us, No education is needed

And where did you learn to write correctly?

Habit, sir… After forty years of service, you get a knack of it.

Embarrassed by Grisha’s response, the young man underlines the importance of a conscious understanding of language and discounts his understanding of education. 

This unconscious reflex orthography of yours isn’t worth a kopeck. It’s mechanical production and nothing more.

Being the highly-placed government official that the young man was, Grisha chose to smile and stay silent. He was seething with anger inside. 

Later that evening, when he gets home looking disturbed, he explodes on his wife when she asks him about the reason he looked gloomy.

Stop bothering me, you she-devil!

He replays the conversation in his head and feels angrier. After all, who was the young man to think that Efim’s education was mechanical and nothing more?

Unconscious Mechanical Production! Ah, you, devil take you! Anyhow, maybe I understand more than you do, even if I didn’t study in your universities.

He marinates himself in that line of thoughts so much that he starts dreaming of punctuation marks. He was desperate to prove that he knew where each of them applied.

They (question marks) are always used when there’s a request to be made or let’s say documents are being examined. 

First the commas, then the periods, semi-colons, colons, he vividly imagined them all and felt triumphant placing them all correctly till he hit a snag with an Exclamation point. He had no clue where to use it, having never used it once, in 40 years of public service. 

Devil take them.. When should they be used? Is it possible that I have forgotten or have I simply never used them? When does the long devil get used?

Completely clueless, he reaches out to his wife for help. After all, she boasted about completing boarding school. She would know!

Do you know , sweetheart, when to use exclamation points in documents?

The answer from his wife surprises him. The exclamation point is a punctuation mark to use when expressing happiness, indignation, joy, anger etc. What use was such a thing! Why would a government official feel the need to use it? When would it ever be warranted?

For forty years, he had been writing documents, he had written out thousands but didn’t remember a single line that expressed delight of any sort. But is there a need for feelings in documents? Even a man with no feelings can write them out.

Exclamation points still completely crowd Efim’s imagination; he sees them everywhere. Since he hasn’t used them yet, they will just not leave him. 

Overcome with the impulse to use the punctuation mark, he settles down at his desk and writes his name followed by an exclamation point, feeling jubilant at finally making the exclamation points vanish.

Collegiate secretary Efim Perekladin!!! “There, take that! Take that!”

The Exclamation Point: Review and My Thoughts

The story was hilarious, I loved it immensely, but I have to admit, I did feel a little bit of regret for not having come across this before. It’s loaded with content that would have benefited me greatly. Oh! What would I have not given to understand the punctuation sooner (barring the peanut butter jelly sandwich lunch of course!). 

I loved the story for many reasons – the childish fixation of an old man, the vivid imagery of the same old man, and his latent OCD, of course! 

He was even treating the punctuation marks as people or ghosts in his imagination, to the extent of having conversations with them! 

For him, somehow, the idea of education was totally reduced only to writing and then just the punctuation marks. I found it cute that instead of just hurling insults at the young man, in absentia, he was trying to prove to himself that he knew. 

Efim Perekladin taught me many things – the most important of them being:

Don’t shy away from using emotions that warrant exclamation points!

You are talking to a friend from a different country. And suddenly, he mentions something about your country that makes your jaw drop. 

Your friend seems sensible enough in all other areas of his life. You wonder to yourself: maybe just this one time, I would let it slip. 

Some days pass, you meet again, and he does that again. You get curious but still not mad enough to confront him yet. You let it pass. Well, surprise, surprise! He does it again! What would you do?

Say, they do this not every few weeks, but with every conversation they have with you. What would you do then? 

Let’s add another little twist. Your friend pays you so he can insult you and your country. How far would you let him go without flinching (assuming that you still mean to be friends)?

Just take this scenario and marinate it in a little Chekhov humor, Voila! –In a Foreign Land

Nobody likes French mustard, except maybe the French.

This excerpt is from Chekhov’s short story In a Foreign Land. The story is a hilarious take on cultural differences in Russia and France, captured through the means of a dialogue, bordering on a monologue, between a Russian landowner and his French employee/tutor. 

The story is one of his earlier works and was published way back in 1885. It is also available as part of a short story collection called Fifty Two Stories published by Alfred A Knopf, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.

In a Foreign Land: Summary and Plot Analysis

The story opens in a dining room at lunch with what seems like a monologue between a landowner called Kamyshev and a French tutor in his employ, Shampooing. 

The duties of a former tutor are not complicated. He has to dress decently, the smell of perfume, listen to Kamyshev’s idle talk, eat, drink, sleep – and that it seems, is all. In return, he receives room, board, and an unspecified salary.

What seemingly begins as a generic conversation between two adults from a different cultural setting, seems to convert into a ruthless racial slurring episode quickly. 

Kamyshev goes on to insult everything French – their food, their land, their bookish intelligence, their morality, their family values, everything! The guy leaves nothing on the table. Nothing!

Nobody likes French mustard, except maybe the French. But a Frenchman will eat anything you give him: frogs, rats,cockroaches-brr!

Well, what is France, honestly speaking? A little scrap of land! Send our policemen there, and a month later, he will ask to be transferred: there’s no room to turn around.

I remember reading somewhere that you all have an intelligence acquired from books, while ours is inborn.

With us, whoever marries, cleaves to his wife and there’s no more talking, but with you devil knows what goes on. The husband sits in a cafe all day, and his wife infests his house with Frenchmen and cancans away with them.

One must be impartial. Pigs are pigs.

Shampooing takes offense, and understandably so. He asks Kamyshev to relieve him of his duties and let him leave Russia to go to France. He goes and packs up his belongings.

Even an enemy couldn’t have come up with a worse insult to my feelings than you have just done! All is finished!

At this time, dinner is served, Kamyshev is eating alone and is overcome with a thirst for idle talk. He doesn’t have Shampooing to have a conversation with. He enquires the servant of his whereabouts and being told that he is all set to leave, goes to pay Shampooing a visit. 

Kamyshev jokes about having lost Shampooing’s passport. Shampooing expresses his pain at France being insulted that way but admits to being attached to their family and Russia. 

Kamyshev, hooking on to that bait, succeeds in making up with him.

Why on earth should you be offended if I denounce the French? We denounce all sorts of people – should they all be offended? Take my other tenant. I call him this and that, Yid and Kike, pull him by the whiskers.. He doesn’t get offended. (Philosophical fallacy)

It doesn’t even take a meal before Kamyshev repeats the same behavior he apologized for.

The first course is eaten in silence. After the second, the same story begins, and so Shampooing’s sufferings never end.

In a Foreign Land: Review and My Thoughts

Now, what begins as a seemingly harmless and playful conversation doesn’t take long before taking a turn for the worse. Kamyshev is obviously aware that his behavior hurts the Frenchman, but doesn’t do anything to address his discomfort. If anything, he adds on more. 

He obviously cares enough not to let him go and risk losing his only listener. Maybe making fun of other people doesn’t satisfy the quota of sadistic pleasure he derives from torturing people less well off than him.

Poor Shampooing (I wonder if the naming was deliberate here!) seems like a prisoner of his circumstances. He makes a pretty decent living doing nothing but accompanying Kamyshev on his meals and listening to his idle banter or his insults. Is money fair compensation for the constant insults thrown his way? Does comfort mean more to him than his ego? Or is he really attached to his captor?

I don’t know; I wasn’t able to decide. 

What I do know is that, unfortunately, this was not just an 1885 problem when the story was written. It’s a much bigger problem now. 

With more and more immigrants calling a new country their home with every passing year, the problem is exponentially magnified. And Kamyshev has taken many forms – the governments, the employers, the citizens.

Hidden in this fantastic story is a great lesson:

Don’t be a Kamyshev because in this day and era of frequent international turbulence, the day you could be Shampooing may not be far.