A Parody of Science: Between Science and Spectacle in Anton Chekhov’s Writings on the Moscow Zoo

• In Event: Zoological Gardens of the Romanov Empire

Abstract

In 1891, Anton Chekhov published a scathing critique of the Moscow Zoo in a feuilleton entitled “Magicians” (Fokusniki) co-written with the zoologist and comparative psychologist Vladimir Vagner. The feuilleton was a response to botanist Kliment Timiryazev’s 1891 essay “A Parody of Science,” a polemic against the new botanical station installed at the Moscow Zoo, which Timiryazev argued was an abomination of science, providing nothing more than cheap entertainment for the Moscow public. This paper uses Chekhov’s “Magicians” to interrogate the purported boundary between science and spectacle at the Moscow Zoo, arguing that the zoo as an institution purposefully blurred these distinctions as part of its mission as a space somewhere between museum, theater, and scientific research center. In “Magicians” and his broader writings about animals in captivity, Chekhov suggests that it is precisely the zoo’s ambiguous position as a place between science and spectacle that facilities an anxious questioning among its visitors about the boundary between human, animal, and commodity.

Author

• Emily Ziffer, Yale U