From an Old Schoolmaster's Notebook

1 From an Old Schoolmaster’s Notebook (“Iz zapisnoy knizhki starogo pedagoga”) is a brief 1892 humoresque cast as a set of six aphorisms supposedly copied from the private notebook of a veteran teacher. It belongs to the small, late cluster of mock-documentary squibs – fake maxims, mock advertisements, spurious excerpts – that Chekhov continued to toss off for the comic press even after he had largely moved into the mature fiction of the 1890s.

2 Each numbered fragment skewers a different piece of pedagogical self-satisfaction: snobbery toward merchant and lower-class families dressed up as concern for "perfection"; a leering aside about pupils’ reactions to grammar terms; a mock-logical argument for cutting teachers’ pay as the Russian alphabet sheds letters; a teacher’s boast of willful ignorance dressed as principle; a swipe at corporal punishment disguised as bookbinding advice; and a closing cry of unguarded joy at the thought of a pension. The satire is aimed less at any one man than at a type – the self-important, class-conscious, intellectually idle schoolmaster – rendered in his own voice, without editorial comment.