The Height of Civic-Mindedness

1 The Height of Civic-Mindedness (“Verkh grazhdanstvennosti” in the original) is one of Chekhov’s one-sentence squibs from 1883, published in the fast-turnaround humor press he was writing for constantly that year under the “Antosha Chekhonte” signature. These pieces trade almost entirely on a single verbal device worked to its limit in the space of a line or two, and this one is built on the Russian root grazhdan- – “citizen” / “civic” / “civil” – which the speaker piles up in four different senses in a single breath: his hereditary legal estate (potomstvenny grazhdanin, “hereditary citizen,” a real category in the Russian civil register), the newspaper he reads (Grazhdanin, The Citizen, the conservative organ edited by Prince Meshchersky and closely associated with official, patriotic respectability), the cut of his clothes (civilian dress, as opposed to a uniform), and finally his domestic arrangement with one Anyuta, which he calls a civil marriage – period slang for cohabiting without a church wedding.

The joke is the collision of the last term with the first three. Everything that precedes it establishes the speaker as a model of civic and even official propriety – rank, reading matter, dress. The punchline reveals that his one departure from convention, living with a woman he has not married, has been laundered by the same word that has just done three pages of respectable work. The title’s irony follows: this is offered, deadpan, as the height of civic virtue. The piece asks nothing of a reader beyond noticing how far one word can be made to stretch, and stops the instant the trick is complete – the trailing ellipsis in the source is Chekhov’s own, not an editorial omission.