A Literary Table of Ranks

1 "A Literary Table of Ranks" (1886) is a brief comic sketch built on a single conceit: Chekhov takes the Table of Ranks, the fourteen-tier hierarchy of civil, military, and court service that Peter the Great established in 1722 and that still governed status in imperial Russian society, and applies it wholesale to the living writers of the day. Working down from the vacant top rank of Active Privy Councillor, he sorts dozens of real contemporary authors, critics, and journalists into bureaucratic grades according to their literary standing – Tolstoy and Goncharov at Privy Councillor, Saltykov-Shchedrin and Grigorovich just below them, and so on down through Collegiate Councillors, Titular Councillors, and Provincial Secretaries to a final, solitary figure "Holding No Rank" at the very bottom.

2 The joke depends entirely on the reader recognizing the names and sensing where Chekhov has placed them relative to where literary opinion (or self-opinion) of the 1880s would have placed them: the piece is a miniature, deadpan burlesque of the literary establishment’s own vanity about precedence, dressed in the deadening language of civil-service paperwork. It belongs to the small-scale comic journalism Chekhov wrote under his early pseudonyms for the humor magazines, half a decade before the mature stories that made his reputation, and functions today as much as a historical index of who mattered in Russian letters in 1886 as a piece of humor in its own right – many of the names (Nadson, Boborykin, Notovich) are now obscure and best appreciated with a period biographical dictionary at hand.

3 No offensive language or ethnic content appears in the source. The piece is an insider’s joke at the expense of named, real, historical public figures (a genre with clear precedent in period feuilleton writing) and is preserved here as a faithful literary-historical document rather than as commentary on any of the individuals named.