Philosophical Definitions of Life
Философские определения жизни
Headnote
1 Written in 1880 for the same run of squibs that produced “What Is Most Often Found in Novels, Novellas, and So Forth?,” this is a string of mock aphorisms on the single available subject of aphorism: life itself. Each definition is a comic simile – life as a man sweating on the top shelf of a bathhouse, as a torn boot forever begging for porridge, as a frostbitten ear no one has the heart to cut off – and each is signed with the name of some eminent authority who never said any such thing.
2 The joke has two moving parts. The similes themselves are the small, homely, faintly grotesque images Chekhov reached for even at twenty – bathhouse steam, a compositor’s tray of punctuation, an old maid’s hope, a battered snout that still resents being struck. And the false attributions – Sarah Bernhardt, George Sand, Kant, Confucius, Buckle, Charcot, the actor Coquelin, the historian Draper, the Egyptian rebel Arabi Pasha – are borrowed names dropped onto homespun Russian nonsense purely for the absurdity of the mismatch: no one of these figures is being quoted, or even parodied in any specific way, only invoked, the more famous and more foreign to the joke the better. One name, Prince Meshchersky, is not foreign at all – he was a reactionary journalist and publicist well known to Chekhov’s newspaper-reading contemporaries, and his sudden appearance among Bernhardt and Kant is its own small dig.
3 The piece closes, as several of the 1880 squibs do, with a two-line sign-off that turns the whole list into a found object: not philosophy but scraps “scooped up” by Antosha Chekhonte, the pseudonym under which the twenty-year-old medical student was supporting his family with exactly this kind of copy for the comic weeklies. The form – seventeen numbered fragments, most no more than a sentence, several nothing but a row of asterisks marking the gap where a joke was expected and withheld – is the same instinct for compression that the mature Chekhov would later put to graver use: say little, let the shape of the list do the work, and trust the reader to supply the laugh, or its absence.