My Witticisms and Sayings
Мои остроты и изречения
Headnote
"My Witticisms and Sayings" appeared in 1883, during Chekhov’s years as Antosha Chekhonte, the twenty-three-year-old medical student turning out copy for Moscow’s comic weeklies to keep his family solvent. The piece belongs to a minor but telling genre of the period: the mock miscellany, a string of unrelated one-liners presented under a single title as if gathered from a wit’s notebook, each separated by the printer’s row of asterisks that stood in for a fresh, unconnected item.
Little unifies the eleven fragments beyond their form. A pun on "official duties" turns a beating into a bureaucratic technicality. A peasant’s arithmetic problem, dressed up as a schoolbook riddle, resolves into a joke about a freeloading guest. A line from Hamlet — "use every man after his desert, and who shall ’scape whipping?" — gets redirected at the newspaper critics who were, at this point in Chekhov’s career, reviewing his own early work. A butcher’s pun plays on Okhotny Ryad, Moscow’s meat market and by extension its whole guild of tradesmen. A dentist joke borrows the vocabulary of John Stuart Mill’s Logic to skewer a police inspector’s pretensions to learning. A final image — a cobra that is "liberal" only in wearing spectacles and "conservative" in everything else — glances, in the coded language the censor required, at the perennial argument between reform and reaction.
None of this is Chekhov the mature ironist of The Cherry Orchard or The Lady with the Dog. It is journeyman comic writing, built for the pace of a weekly humor page rather than for rereading, its jokes resting on wordplay and topical reference that would have needed no gloss for a Moscow reader in 1883. What is already visible, even at this scale, is the compression: no joke here outstays its welcome, and the punchline is always the last word.