Problems of a Madman Mathematician

1 Published in 1880 over the signature “Antosha Chekhonte,” this is another of the squibs the twenty-year-old Chekhov turned out for the comic weeklies to keep the family solvent while he finished his medical degree. The premise is a parody of the arithmetic “problem” as it appeared in schoolbook primers and the puzzle columns of the popular press: a stock word-problem setup – travelers, purchased goods, trains on a schedule – rendered in painstaking numerical detail, and then, instead of the expected mathematical question, a non sequitur that arithmetic cannot possibly answer.

2 The comedy is entirely in the gap between apparatus and payoff. Each problem front-loads the furniture of a real textbook exercise – precise ages, exact quantities of nails and tea and dead horses, a train timetable specific down to the hour – building the reader’s expectation of a sum to be performed. The final clause then asks something wholly unanswerable by the numbers just supplied: which leg was bitten, whether a man now dead was married, what a parrot costs, who loves longer. Problem four dispenses with any pretense of content at all – an addition problem with nothing to add. The joke does not need a punchline delivered in prose; the mismatched form is the joke.

3 It sits with Chekhov’s other early dictionary-and-catalogue parodies – lists, inventories, mock notices – in which the young Chekhonte found he could get a laugh from pure structure, without describing a single character or scene. The instinct to let an absurd juxtaposition speak for itself, unglossed and undefended, is recognizably the same instinct that would mature into the mature Chekhov’s famous withholding: he does not tell the reader why the door has swung shut on the day’s problem, he simply sets the numbers down and moves on to the next one.