The Congress of Naturalists in Philadelphia
Съезд естествоиспытателей в филадельфии (статья научного содержания)
Headnote
1 Published in 1883, one of the miniature “news items” the young Chekhov turned out at speed for the comic weeklies over the signature “Antosha Chekhonte.” It takes the form of a dispatch from a scientific congress – a genre the humor magazines of the day used constantly, since a fake proceedings-report let a writer parody both the pomposity of learned bodies and the credulous foreign-news digests that Russian papers translated wholesale from the Western press. The dateline “Philadelphia” places it, tongue in cheek, at one remove from Russia: the congress is American, the joke is Russian.
2 The immediate target is the vulgarized reception of Darwin, still a live controversy a year after his death: a “paper” on human descent collapses at once into a mock-legal absurdity, with the monkey formally blamed for the existence of criminals and the matter referred to a prosecutor. The telephone – a genuine novelty of the early 1880s – supplies the sketch’s running sight gag: an assembly so self-important that its own hall is wired for remote listening, and so squeamish that the receiver itself must be stuffed shut before an unpleasant vote.
3 The closing run of national jokes (Russian from the magpie, Jew from the fox, Englishman from the frozen fish) trades on a stock nineteenth-century form, the comic ethnography of national character. The glancing reference to the “Bush and Makshev trials” points to notorious contemporary criminal cases whose lurid coverage had made Russian courtroom reporting a byword for scandal; the joke is that a learned congress finds a slur on the Russian character easier to credit than not, given what the newspapers have just been printing about Russians. The signature “(Times)” at the close is part of the parody: a fabricated dispatch dressed, to the last, as a translation from the English press.