There are two absolutely lancing sentences in this story: “In that minute he had told it all and was quite amazed to find that the story had taken such a short time. He had thought he could go on talking about the kiss all night.”

What a serious noticer a writer must be to write those lines. Chekhov appears to notice everything. He sees that the story we tell in our heads is the most important one, because we are internal expansionists, comic fantasists. For Ryabovich, his story has grown bigger and bigger, and has joined, in real time, the rhythm of life. Chekhov sees that Ryabovich, painfully, does and doesn’t need an audience for his story. Perhaps Chekhov is also jokily suggesting that, unlike Chekhov, the captain wasn’t much of a storyteller. For there is the inescapable irony that Chekhov’s own story, while taking a bit longer than a minute to tell, does not take all evening to read: like many of his tales, it is brisk and brief. Had Chekhov told it, people would have listened. Yet Chekhov also suggests that even the story we have just read—Chekhov’s brief story—is not the whole account of Ryabovich’s experience; that just as Ryabovich failed to tell it all, so perhaps Chekhov has failed to tell it all. There is still the enigma of what Ryabovich wanted to say.