A Few Thoughts on the Soul

"A Few Thoughts on the Soul" appeared in 1883, one of the hundreds of brief comic sketches the twenty-three-year-old Chekhov was turning out under the signature Antosha Chekhonte for the humor magazines of Moscow and St. Petersburg. It belongs to a favorite subgenre of his early work: the parody of learned discourse, in which the trappings of scholarship — the citation, the technical vocabulary, the solemn premise — are set spinning around an absurdity until the whole apparatus collapses into farce.

The piece opens as a mock definition, the kind a schoolgirl might copy from a governess, and proceeds through a spoof of scientific method (a "scholar’s" recipe for locating the soul by anatomical violence) before settling into its real engine: a burlesque of the Buddhist doctrine of transmigration, restaged as the autobiography of a Russian careerist. Each life stage — infancy, entry into government service, marriage, worldly success — earns its own animal epithet, and the epithets are drawn not from zoology but from the ordinary insults of Russian speech: the petty clerk as vermin, the henpecked husband as horned livestock, the self-satisfied parvenu as a fattened pig. The joke is double-edged even this early — the narrator’s rise from puppy to "triumphant hog" reads as much as a small satire of bureaucratic careerism as it does a joke about metempsychosis.

The sketch is slight by design — one of the two-hundred-word trifles Chekhov produced at a rate that supported his family and his medical studies at once — but it already shows the comic timing, the taste for mock-erudition, and the willingness to let a joke double as social observation that mark the Chekhonte period.