A Man (A Bit of Philosophy)
Человек (немножко философии)
Headnote
1 "A Man (A Bit of Philosophy)" (1886) is one of Chekhov’s shortest and most pointed early sketches, built almost entirely around a single pun. A young waiter, standing at the edge of a ballroom in his black tailcoat, watches the dancers and indulges in a swelling interior monologue on the misery of being human – a slave to his own passions and to the whims of the glittering, indifferent crowd he serves. He works himself up to a near-Hamletian pitch, longing for the moment he will "cease to be a man."
2 The joke turns on the Russian word "человек" (chelovek), which means both "a human being" – the grand philosophical subject of his monologue – and, in the everyday usage of the period, the standard form of address for a waiter or manservant, roughly equivalent to calling out "Garçon!" A beautiful young woman promptly interrupts his reverie by summoning him exactly that way, asking for a glass of water. He instantly drops his philosophy and obeys. The English translation renders her line as "Waiter, bring me some water!" to preserve the pun’s logic for readers without access to the Russian double meaning: the man who has just spent several paragraphs agonizing over the indignity of being "a man" is immediately reduced to his function as "the man," an interchangeable piece of the furniture of the ball.
3 The piece belongs to Chekhov’s early comic miniatures for the humor press, published under deadline pressure in the mid-1880s, and it anticipates the mature Chekhov’s recurring interest in the gap between a character’s inflated self-regard and the smallness of the social role actually available to him.