Chekhov's gun

Chekhov's gun is a dramatic principle that every memorable element in a fictional story must be necessary and irreplaceable, and any that are not should be removed.^[1][2][3]

Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there.

— Anton Chekhov^[3][4]

Variations on the statement include:

• "One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn't going to go off. It's wrong to make promises you don't mean to keep." Chekhov, letter to Aleksandr Semenovich Lazarev (pseudonym of A. S. Gruzinsky), 1 November 1889.^[5][6][7] Here the "gun" is a monologue that Chekhov deemed superfluous and unrelated to the rest of the play.
• "If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there." From Gurlyand's Reminiscences of A. P. Chekhov, in Teatr i iskusstvo 1904, No. 28, 11 July, p. 521.^[8]

See also

• Red herring, drawing attention to a certain element in order to mislead
• MacGuffin, a plot motivator with little or no narrative explanation
• Foreshadowing, a plot device where what is to come is hinted at, to arouse interest or to guard against disappointment
• Occam's razor, a philosophical razor that states that, all things being equal, the explanation with fewest assumptions should be investigated first

References

1. Petr Mikhaĭlovich Bit︠s︡illi (1983), Chekhov's art, a stylistic analysis, Ardis, p. x
2. Daniel S. Burt (2008), The Literature 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Novelists, Playwrights, and Poets of All Time, Infobase Publishing
3. Valentine T. Bill (1987), Chekhov: The Silent Voice of Freedom, Philosophical Library
4. S. Shchukin, Memoirs (1911)
5. "Quotations by Berlin". ox.ac.uk.
6. Чехов А. П. (1 November 1889), "Чехов — Лазареву (Грузинскому) А. С.", Чехов А. П. Полное собрание сочинений и писем, АН СССР. Ин-т мировой лит.
7. Leah Goldberg (1976), Russian Literature in the Nineteenth Century: Essays, Magnes Press, Hebrew University, p. 163
8. In 1889, 24-year-old Ilia Gurliand noted these words down from Chekhov's conversation: "If in Act I you have a pistol hanging on the wall, then it must fire in the last act". Donald Rayfield, Anton Chekhov: A Life, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1997, ISBN 0-8050-5747-1, 203. Ernest. J. Simmons says that Chekhov repeated the point later (which may account for the variations). Ernest J. Simmons, Chekhov: A Biography, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962, ISBN 0-226-75805-2, 190.