State Councillor

Reading notes

• A Long Tongue §22 wife of a state councillor

  Natalya invokes her husband's civil rank -- state councillor (статский советник), a senior mid-level position on the Table of Ranks -- as the class and status barrier she claims she never let her guide forget, even as the anecdote itself shows an intimacy the rank-consciousness is meant to disguise.

• From the Notebook of Ivan Ivanych (Thoughts and Notes) §21 State Councillor

  Statsky sovetnik, class V in the Table of Ranks, one grade below Actual State Councillor -- the two were routinely confused by status-conscious strivers, the pun this passage turns on.

• A Short Anatomy of Man §15 state councillor

  A senior civil rank (class V in the Table of Ranks), one grade below Actual State Councillor -- the two ranks were routinely confused by status-conscious strivers, which is the pun the passage turns on.

• Something Serious §9 state councillors

  Statskiy sovetnik, civil rank V in the Table of Ranks, addressed as 'Your High-Born' (Vashe Vysokorodie) -- one grade below Actual State Councillor (rank IV), which alone entitled its holder to be addressed as 'Your Excellency.' The satirized 'article' targets petty status-inflation: officials one rank short of Excellency who claim the title anyway.

• Forgiveness §8 State Councillors

  A senior civil rank in the imperial Table of Ranks, stereotyped in the satirical press as fond of rich food and comfortable living.

• The Turnip §7 state councillor

  Statskiy sovetnik, the fifth of fourteen ranks in Peter the Great's Table of Ranks -- a solidly respectable civil rank achieved here not through merit but through the successive pull of family connections, the story's satirical point.

• Old Age §2 state councillor

  A senior civil rank (class V in the Table of Ranks) that Uzelkov holds alongside his architectural profession -- a marker of solid establishment status that makes his youthful scandal, and his present emotional numbness, feel all the more incongruous.

• Fat and Thin §10 A State Councillor

  Fifth grade in the Table of Ranks (статский советник, statskiy sovetnik). This is the thin man's guess at his old friend's rank, and the joke's escalation depends on it being a plausible but too-modest guess: the fat man tops it in §11 by revealing he is in fact a privy councillor (third grade, far senior). An earlier draft of this translation mistakenly imported the word "privy" into this line -- borrowing from the punchline that follows -- which had the thin man nearly guess the answer outright and flattened the joke's structure. Corrected to "A State Councillor," matching the source's статский and preserving the rank-escalation gag.

• At the Baths §151 The state councillor Tsitseronov-Gravyansky

  Class V in the Table of Ranks, senior enough to command real deference -- his kneeling supplication to a merchant's daughter is comically undignified precisely because of that rank.

• Vint §83 State Councillors -- kings

  State Councillor (statsky sovetnik), class V in the Table of Ranks, one grade below Actual State Councillor -- assigned the king.

• The Exclamation Mark §12 the son of a state councillor and himself had the right to a rank of the tenth class

  Statsky sovetnik, the fifth of fourteen grades in the Table of Ranks -- a senior civil rank well above Perekladin's own tenth class. The young critic's father outranks Perekladin considerably, and the young man himself already holds nominal rights to a comparable class by birth and education, sharpening the class insult behind his taunt about 'machine work.'

• A Living Chronology §7 state councillor

  A senior civil rank in Imperial Russia's Table of Ranks (grade 5), placing Sharamykin comfortably among the local gentry-officialdom whose leisurely reminiscing the sketch skewers.

• The Bad Boy §24 state councillor

  A senior civil rank (class V in the Table of Ranks); invoking one to authorize a joke about the water-closet mocks the pomposity such officials brought to trivial pronouncements.