On the Transience of Things
О бренности. (масленичная тема для проповеди)
Headnote
1 On the Transience of Things (O brennosti), subtitled “A Shrovetide Theme for a Sermon,” is a very short comic sketch Chekhov published in 1885, in the tradition of the Maslenitsa (Shrovetide) feuilleton that Russian humor magazines ran every year in the week before Lent, when the eating of blini – pancakes topped with butter, caviar, sour cream, and fish – was the season’s defining ritual, and gluttony its expected vice.
The story consists of little more than a single tableau: Court Councillor Semyon Petrovich Podtykin, seated at a table laid out like a general’s battle map of bottles and delicacies, builds himself an increasingly extravagant stack of blini, butter, caviar, salmon, and vodka, savoring every stage of the construction with mounting sensual delight – and drops dead of an apoplectic fit the instant he opens his mouth to eat it. The title’s irony is the whole point: “on the transience of things” is homiletic language, the kind of phrase a Lenten preacher would use to remind a congregation that earthly appetite is fleeting and death is certain, and Chekhov delivers that sermon not as moralizing but as a sudden, deadpan sight gag. It belongs to a small cluster of Chekhov’s early Shrovetide pieces that use gluttony-then-collapse as a stock comic turn.
The final section in the source is a bare “Notes” apparatus marker with no content of its own and has been carried through as such.