The Height of Loyalty

1 A single paragraph, published in 1883 among the topical squibs Chekhov supplied by the column-inch to the Moscow comic weeklies under his “Antosha Chekhonte” signature. The title is ironic before the first word is read: blagonamerennost’ — “right-thinkingness,” loyal-mindedness, the officially approved civic virtue of the day — and the anecdote it introduces pushes that virtue to its logical, absurd extreme.

2 The Kievlyanin was a real Kiev newspaper of pronounced conservative, pro-government sympathies; Chekhov’s imagined staff writer there is so thoroughly marinated in the loyalist press of the capital that reading it induces a kind of moral panic in himself, with no external accusation required. He searches his own person, finds nothing, and reports himself to the police anyway. The joke is the entire piece: denunciation has become so reflexive an act of citizenship that a man performs it on himself, unprompted, out of sheer conscientiousness.

3 It belongs to the smallest and fastest of Chekhov’s early forms, closer to a caption or a squib than to a story proper, and it shows the young journalist’s eye for a single absurd image that needs no further development to land. The self-search and self-denunciation is the whole mechanism; nothing else is asked of the reader.