My Ranks and Titles

1 My Ranks and Titles (Moi chiny i tituly) appeared in 1883, one of the rapid-fire humoresques the twenty-three-year-old Chekhov was turning out for the Moscow and Petersburg comic weeklies under the byline “Antosha Chekhonte.” It belongs to a favorite vein of these years: a piece built entirely on wordplay, with almost no narrative at all.

The joke is structural and depends on the layered meanings that Imperial Russian bureaucratic vocabulary happened to share with ordinary domestic words. A posol is an ambassador, but the verb posylat’ just means “to send” – so a husband sent to market by his wife is, by a pun, an “envoy.” A dvoryanin, a nobleman, shares its root with dvor, a yard, so a man who likes to loiter in his own yard, talk to the yardkeeper (dvornik), and keep mongrel dogs (dvornyazhki – literally “yard-dogs”) can claim, by the same pun, to be of the nobility. A kavaler, a holder of an order of chivalry, is technically correct of any man decorated with the Order of St. Anna – but “wearing an Anna round the neck” also reads, with a straight face, as a joke about a difficult woman. Line by line the narrator works through the whole ladder of civil ranks, military ranks, and clerical and municipal titles of the Table of Ranks, deflating each one into a domestic pun: the privy councillor who merely keeps secrets from his mother-in-law, the battery commander who commands only a battery of bottles, the man who is his own cashier, bookkeeper, clerk, watchman, and bellringer because he tends his own household. The final entry – “a man without a spleen, whenever I put a full stop to things” – plays on the old physiological idiom (a man without a spleen, i.e. without bile, is imperturbably calm) merged with the literal marks of punctuation, and closes the numbered list with a period in both senses.

The text then pivots, without transition, into a fragment of an imagined vaudeville – The Fool, or The Captain in Retirement – a comic duologue between a retired captain, aggressively certain of his own worth and looking for a bride stupid enough to admire it unreservedly, and the professional matchmaker Lukinishna, whose extended pitch for a “marriageable fool” is a small set-piece of its own: she disqualifies her own candidate with every fresh detail she offers, unable to stop elaborating even as the elaboration proves the girl unsuitable. It is a type-scene Chekhov returned to often in these years – the marriage market observed with comic detachment – planted here as a coda to the title’s wordplay rather than a separate, finished piece.