Mayonnaise

"Mayonnaise" ("Майонез") is a 1883 miscellany piece from Chekhov’s "Antosha Chekhonte" apprentice years, when the humor weeklies of Moscow and Petersburg paid by the item and the young medical student supplied them at a clip – captions, mock-notices, and, as here, a small string of unrelated comic anecdotes bundled under one whimsical title and separated by rules of asterisks. The title itself is a joke at one remove: "mayonnaise" names not a dish that appears anywhere in the piece but the form – ingredients that do not obviously belong together, whisked into a single serving.

Four scraps make up the dish. The first is a single aphoristic jab at astronomers cheered by the discovery of sunspots – schadenfreude dressed as science. The second catches a minor official mid-bribe, caught by his superior with the money still in his fist, and talks his way out with a transparent lie that fools no one, least of all the reader. The third is a rural anecdote, told by a landowner, about a neighbor’s goat that will not be deterred from his nannies by beating, flogging, or practical-joke humiliation – a piece of barnyard comedy that also needles the local landed gentry’s taste for storytelling at length. The fourth turns on a Petersburg reporter’s quick wit at a manufacturing exhibition, milking a stranger’s honesty for a second banknote with a single well-timed lie.

Watch for how little connects the four beyond their brevity and their shared taste for a very fast pivot to punchline – this is the Chekhonte machine at full speed, unconcerned with unity of subject, proving out timing and the one-line reversal that the mature stories will later deploy with far more restraint. The narrator makes no comment and draws no moral in any of the four; the closing line of the piece – "this is not a joke, it is a true story" – is itself the joke, a deadpan assurance that undercuts its own claim to earnestness.