Buckwheat Porridge Praises Itself
Гречневая каша сама себя хвалит (нечто спиритическое)
Headnote
1 Written in 1880 for Oskolki (“Splinters”), the Petersburg comic weekly edited by Nikolai Leikin that gave the young Chekhov his first steady outlet and his pen name, “Antosha Chekhonte.” The Russian title is a proverb — “buckwheat porridge praises itself” — used of anyone caught singing their own praises, and the parenthetical subtitle, “something spiritualistic,” mimics the vogue for séance transcripts and mystical numerology that the piece then sends up.
2 The joke is a piece of self-advertisement disguised as occult number-mysticism: the seven letters of Oskolki (О-С-К-О-Л-К-И) are solemnly assigned the cosmic importance of the number seven, and the word is then cracked open to yield a run of shorter Russian words hidden inside it — silok (snare), kol (stake), kolki (pegs, or “sharp-tongued”), ksi (the Greek letter xi, numerically 600), kliko (a Russian rendering of “Clicquot,” the champagne house), sokol (falcon), and iks (the letter X). None of this survives translation as wordplay — it depends entirely on Cyrillic spelling — so the English keeps each Russian fragment in italics and glosses it, the way a reader of the original would silently supply the meaning while watching the letters rearrange themselves.
3 Each fragment becomes a pretext for a line of shop talk about the magazine itself: its taste for satire aimed at people not quite important enough to be untouchable (section 4), its habit of failing bad poets and impaling worse targets (section 5), its own supposed sharpness (section 6), an inflated boast about its circulation dressed up as numerology (section 7), a dig at both champagne and the traditional Russian spiced vodka yerofeich as rival cures for a well-fed readership (section 8), and a self-portrait as a hunting falcon flown on someone else’s leash — censorship left unnamed but plainly meant (section 9). The piece breaks off mid-sentence at section 10; the manuscript simply does not survive further, one of many such fragments from Chekhov’s earliest and most disposable journalism, kept here because even the scraps show the instincts — economy, an eye for the absurd shape hiding in an ordinary word — that never left him.