Questions and Answers

1 "Questions and Answers" appeared in 1883, one of dozens of squibs Chekhov placed that year in the comic weeklies under the byline Antosha Chekhonte. These papers ran a standing repertoire of filler forms — mock advertisements, spoof regulations, fake letters to the editor — and the paired list, question on one side and answer on the other, was one of the stock shapes. Chekhov’s early apprenticeship was largely served in exactly this kind of miniature: tight word limits, a single mechanical joke, no room for anything else.

2 The joke here is the gap. Four questions are posed with straight faces — how to read a woman’s mind, where an illiterate man can read, whether a wife loves her husband, where a man might sit while standing — and four answers follow that address none of them. The pairing is only typographic: question 1 sits over answer 1, but the content refuses to connect. The effect depends on the reader’s trained expectation that a numbered answer below a numbered question must respond to it; Chekhov exploits the form against itself.

3 The line dividing the two lists — "the text is printed upside down" — is itself part of the gag, a printer’s-note aimed at the reader of the physical page: turn the magazine over to read the answers the right way up. It is preserved here as text, since the joke is about the mismatch of form and content rather than a typesetting effect a translation could reproduce.

4 Nothing in the piece asks to be taken further than this. It belongs with the mass of Chekhonte’s 1880s trifles that exist to test a single mechanism in the fewest possible words — the training ground from which the mature economy later emerged.