What Is Better?

“What Is Better? (The Idle Reasonings of Second Lieutenant Krokodilov)” belongs to 1883, deep in Chekhov’s years of piecework for the Moscow and Petersburg comic weeklies, when the twenty-three-year-old medical student signed himself Antosha Chekhonte and turned copy for the humor magazines by the yard. This is one of his smallest and most mechanical forms: not a story at all but a mock syllogism, a chain of nine numbered “propositions” built to a foregone and absurd conclusion, staged as the reasoning of an invented mouthpiece, “Second Lieutenant Krokodilov” (the surname means, transparently, “Crocodile”).

The target is real. The early 1880s in Russia saw a running public argument over the zemstvo (district self-government) primary schools then spreading through the countryside, and a strain of reactionary journalism – often tied to the liquor excise, a major source of state and local revenue – that found the tavern more useful to the peasantry than the schoolhouse. Chekhov does not argue against this position; he simply lets Krokodilov argue it with a straight face, piling up non sequiturs dressed as logic: alcohol comforts the body where learning cannot, the tavern turns a profit where the school only costs money, and so a school is, on brisk statistical grounds, a poorer public investment than a bar. The two quotations Krokodilov weighs against one another are both genuine and both familiar to a Russian reader: Mikhail Lomonosov’s line on the sciences nourishing the young and comforting the old (from his ode on the taking of Khotin), set against the Primary Chronicle’s report of Prince Vladimir’s supposed remark, on the eve of his conversion, that “drinking is the joy of the Rus” – the line traditionally cited to explain why Vladimir rejected Islam for its ban on wine. Krokodilov’s method for adjudicating between a scientist and a prince is itself the joke: whichever authority is older wins.

The form is the entire effect. No narrator intrudes to call Krokodilov a fool or his logic a fraud; the sketch simply lets the nine articles run their course to the closing concession – that literacy might, after all, have some narrow use, since it lets a man read the sign over a tavern door. It is disposable copy in the sense that most of the 1883 humoresques are disposable, tossed off against a magazine’s weekly hunger for filler, but it already shows the discipline Chekhov would keep for the rest of his career: the case is made entirely by its own logic, and the author never once steps in to correct it.