The Turnip
Репка (перевод с детского)
Headnote
"The Turnip" appeared in 1883, one of the hundreds of squibs the young Chekhov — writing as Antosha Chekhonte — turned out for the comic weeklies to keep his family solvent while he finished his medical degree. Its subtitle, "translated from the children’s," announces the joke before the first line: this is a parody of the Russian nursery tale "Repka," in which a grandfather, a grandmother, a granddaughter, a dog, a cat, and a mouse link hands in a chain to haul a giant turnip out of the ground.
Chekhov keeps the tale’s chain-link structure and its cumulative, call-and-response refrain almost intact, but swaps the vegetable for a young man named Serge — literally turnip-headed — and swaps the folk-tale’s cat and mouse for a princess-aunt, a general-godfather, and finally a rich merchant bought in with hard cash. Each new helper outranks the last; what gets "pulled out into the world" is not a turnip but a career, assembled by string-pulling rather than merit. The tale’s cheerful nonsense rhythm carries the satire without ever breaking to state it.
The punchline lands in a single rank: Serge ends the story a state councillor (статский советник), a substantial civil grade under Peter the Great’s Table of Ranks, respectable enough to confer "Your Excellency" — reached here by uncles and dowries rather than by labor. It is a two-minute joke, but a recognizably Chekhovian one: the target is not incompetence but the machinery, already well oiled by 1883, that promoted people sideways through family.