A Goat, or a Scoundrel?
Козел или негодяй?
Headnote
1 A Goat, or a Scoundrel? (“Kozel ili negodyay?” in the original) dates from 1883, the densest year of Chekhov’s apprentice output under the pseudonym “Antosha Chekhonte,” when he was placing dozens of squibs, captions, and miniature sketches in the Moscow and Petersburg humor weeklies to support his family while still a medical student. It belongs to the shortest and fastest of those forms: a single comic situation, set up and detonated in nine sentences.
2 The joke turns on a stock type of the era’s humor press – the elderly gallant who steals a kiss from a sleeping girl and then, caught, talks his way out of it by insisting the whole encounter is only her dream. Chekhov signals the type’s lineage openly, calling him one of “Gogol’s mousy young studs” (gogolevskikh myshinykh zherebchikov), a phrase pointing to the fussy, wig-and-whiskers old seducers of Gogol’s fiction. The prince’s logic – you are asleep, therefore nothing that happens is real – is absurd on its face, and the girl’s drowsy, half-willing acceptance of it is the story’s real subject: not the theft of the kiss but the comedy of a lie both parties find convenient.
3 The title is the punchline. Startled awake, the girl complains, with no sense of irony, that she is always dreaming of “goats” and “scoundrels” – a girl’s stock complaint about being pestered by lecherous old men, voiced here to the very old man doing the pestering, who overhears himself described and slinks off. The English idiom of the “old goat” preserves the same image and the same joke. It is early, disposable Chekhov – pure setup and snap, no pathos yet – but the mechanism he will refine for decades is already visible: the story ends the instant the joke lands, with no moral appended and no verdict pronounced on either character.