I admit that I laughed when I read the final sentence of this story.
But it wasn’t a laugh I was proud of, because, like another 1883 sketch, “Fat and Thin,” what we are laughing at in “The Death of a Government Clerk” is servility.
All of Russian society was ruled by ranking systems, and these required each man to be a lickspittle to the man above him on the totem pole. But you couldn’t be too sycophantic. If you were not servile enough, you might be demoted or worse. On the other hand, if you were too servile, you invited the scorn of your betters, and that might lead to disaster as well.
Chekhov’s stories are full of supposedly comic scenes of stupidly servile men (seems like it’s always men) scraping and bowing before their superiors, while the higher ranking men generally accept the groveling as merely their due.
In this case, the particulars are sort of funny (and gross, in a way that seems very modern): The clerk of the title happens to sneeze at the opera, sending a little fleck of spittle onto the head of a man in the row in front of him. Alas, that man is the chief of the clerk’s department.
This unfortunate accident sends the clerk into a frenzy of apologizing, simpering, and whining… in a word, he is unmanned.
How does the brief tale end? I won’t say, but there’s a pretty strong hint in the title. Chekhov concludes the story so abruptly, you can’t help but guffaw. But I for one regretted laughing at this poor clerk. If Chekhov meant to elicit this complex a response, more’s the credit to him. But I suspect this is mainly a mean-spirited little entertainment, meant to provoke mean laughter from readers living in a mean society.
READ THIS? READ THAT!
One of the reasons it was easy for Chekhov, and readers of the day, to laugh at a little toady like this government clerk is that they, in all likelihood, suffered at the hands of supercilious bureaucrats on a regular basis. The frustrations of dealing with government bureaucracy are laid out in “An Inquiry.”
A Chekhov Circus 