"Shrove Tuesday" (Russian: Накануне поста, romanized: Nakanune posta, in literal translation, "A day before Lent") is an 1887 short story by Anton Chekhov.

In a revised version (with Pavel Vasilyevich's speeches considerably curtailed and another aunt added) Chekhov included it into Volume 2 of his Collected Works published by Adolf Marks in 1899 (pp.

Pavel Vasilyevich is summoned by his wife Pelageya Ivanovna to help out his son Styopa, a high-school boy in the second class, who sits in the nursery, crying over the textbook, having trouble understanding division of fractions, apparently as a result of having eaten too much pancakes.

Rather dazed himself after heavy lunch, the father makes a poor job of it and, having totally lost the plot, starts relating his own stories about his school.

Pavel Vasilyevich makes an attempt to return to his school memoirs with the story about a big schoolboy called Mamakhin who terrorized his teachers.