Fruits of Long Reflection

1 A 1883 squib in the same vein as the earlier “Philosophical Definitions of Life,” but stripped of even the mock-attributions: these are eight unsigned aphorisms, each a sentence or two, separated by rows of asterisks standing in for whatever connective tissue a real essay would supply. The title is the joke’s whole engine – Fruits of Long Reflection promises a harvest of wisdom and delivers instead a string of quick, deflating one-liners, several of them barely more than wordplay.

2 The targets are small and domestic: elders who deserve either praise or silence (the borrowed Latin tag is itself a tired commonplace, which is part of the joke), the futility of knowing in advance what dinner will be, a woman’s arithmetic of husbands, a lawyer’s inability to outmaneuver nature – except, pointedly, one particular lawyer, named as if the reader could not fail to recognize him. Vodka’s effect on nose and reputation is a piece of tavern wisdom dressed up as a law of chemistry. The closing lines – on wooden houses and on what a reader risks by subscribing to the wrong magazine during Lent – turn on idiom and on the specific texture of Russian provincial and religious life; render them and they still land as jokes, but the soil they grew from was entirely local.

3 Nothing here aims higher than a newspaper filler column, and that is exactly the point: the twenty-three-year-old Chekhov, publishing constantly and for money, treats the aphorism – traditionally the vehicle for compressed wisdom – as an empty form to be filled with whatever fits in two lines. The asterisked gaps do real work: they are punctuation as much as content, marking off each small collapse of expectation from the next.