The Height of Absent-Mindedness

"The Height of Absent-Mindedness" appeared in 1883, one of dozens of squibs the young Chekhov – writing as Antosha Chekhonte to feed the comic weeklies of Moscow and Petersburg – turned out at a pace that still startles bibliographers. Pieces like this one rarely ran to more than a paragraph: a single absurd premise, reported in the flattened, official tone of a newspaper item, and left to detonate on its own.

The joke here is structural as much as verbal. Chekhov borrows the diction of the "reliable report" – the hedged opening, the clinical noun phrases, the closing bulletin that both parties have received care – and pours into it a piece of slapstick violence so total it loops back around into pure absurdity. A surgeon amputating a patient’s legs who instead amputates his own leg, and his assistant’s, is not merely careless; the joke insists on being taken as a straight-faced medical report, which is precisely what makes it funny.

It is easy to underrate these squibs as apprentice work Chekhov outgrew. But the discipline he is drilling here – deadpan delivery, zero editorializing, the punchline supplied entirely by the facts as stated – is the same discipline that, refined and slowed down, will carry "Ward No. 6" and "The Lady with the Dog." The narrator who reports a surgeon’s blunder without comment is a distant but recognizable ancestor of the narrator who reports a cold samovar without comment.