`Lived in Another's Story for a Short While'

Chekhov’s “Gooseberries,” written in 1898, less than six years before his death, is about the deluded seductiveness of happiness. Ivan Ivanych tells the story of his brother, Nikolai Ivanych, a government bureaucrat who longs for a comfortable life in the country, a vision distilled in his single-minded wish to raise gooseberries. He marries “an ugly old widow for whom he felt nothing” simply to get her money. After three years she dies, Nikolai Ivanych inherits her money, buys 300 acres and at last plants his gooseberry bushes.

Ivan Ivanych visits his brother who has “grown old, fat, flabby; his cheeks, nose and lips thrust forward – he looks as if he were about to grunt into the blanket.” He has turned into a parody of a country squire. With tears in his eyes he serves his brother his first crop of gooseberries, extolling their flavor. Ivan Ivanych says:

“They were tough and sour, but as Pushkin said, `Dearer to us than a host of truths is an exalting illusion.’ [a misquotation from “The Hero,” according to Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, the translators] I saw a happy man, whose cherished dream had so obviously come true, who had attained his goal in life, had gotten what he wanted, who was content with his fate and with himself.”

At this point Chekhov gives the story his distinctive twist. Ivan Ivanych tells his listeners he is just like his brother. He too, is pompous and free with unsolicited advice, and wishes he were young again. He tells Alekhin, the owner of the estate where he is staying:

“…don’t settle in, don’t let yourself fall asleep! As long as you’re young, strong, energetic, don’t weary of doing good! There is no happiness and there shouldn’t be, and if there is any meaning and purpose in life, then that meaning and purpose are not at all our happiness, but in something more intelligent and great. Do good!”

This sounds like nothing so much as Lambert Strether’s revelatory outburst to Little Bilham in The Ambassadors: “Live all you can!” Alekhin’s reaction is to feel “a strong desire to sleep.” W.H. Auden told Josef Brodsky that of all the great Russian writers only Chekhov had what he called “common sense.” If Nikolai Ivanych and his brother are Chekhov’s way of satirizing Tolstoyan back-to-the-land idealism, Alekin is a real farmer who possesses precisely that quality:

“…farming got him up early, before three in the morning, and his eyes kept closing, but he was afraid that the guests would start telling something interesting without him, and he would not leave. Whether what Ivan Ivanych had said was intelligent or correct, he did not try to figure out; his guests were not talking of grain, or hay, or tar, but about something that had no direct bearing on his life, and he was glad and wanted them to go on…”

In The Pear as One Example: New & Selected Poems 1984-2008, Eric Pankey includes an early poem, “Reading in Bed”:

“Chekhov writes of a man
who loved gooseberries so much
that little else mattered.
His devotion was simple,
complete, yet involved loss,
the way the lack of foliage
in the midst of winter
allows the mind to imagine
the abstraction of a line.
In the story, as now, a sudden rain
taps the window.
As we both sit up reading tonight,
the light from our individual lamps
sets us apart,
the room somehow larger
in the evening's diminishing clarity.
Months from now I will remember
everything I did not say tonight
--how it is possible to love,
how the air at the beginning
of any season smells the same,
the sky different
only in the number of birds
cutting the frail arc of blue . . . .
Once I believed that in touching
there was a language that outlives loss.
But now, as you turn out your light,
I am glad I have said nothing
and have instead lived
in another's story for a short while.
I could say I am happy
but I know what I am feeling
is no more permanent
than the narrowness of a road
where it becomes a point on the horizon,
and if I walked down that road
the trees on either side
would grow larger and separate,
detailed, though bare.”

This is not the sort of poem I care for normally. Its rhythms are slack and prose-like. Its sincerity and self-regard are cloying, and I think the poem misrepresents the complexity of Chekhov’s multi-voiced story. But I like these lines, which attest to the powerful attraction of fiction:

“I am glad I have said nothing
and have instead lived
in another's story for a short while.”

And I like the final line, “detailed, though bare,” as a description of landscape and of the lives led by the brothers in “Gooseberries.” Theodore Dalrymple shows deeper insight in a 1999 essay, also titled “Gooseberries,” published in The New Criterion:

“The point of `Gooseberries’ is the ironic contrast between Nikolai Ivanovich's mean-spirited pursuit of his goal and the smug satisfaction to which its attainment gives rise. For the sake of his triumphal but petty enjoyment of a few gooseberries -- both sour and unripe, according to the narrator -- he has inflicted suffering not only upon himself but upon others. In having sacrificed for so long enjoyment of the present for a thoroughly worthless vision of the future, he has become so desiccated and devoid of human feeling that the pleasure he takes is as appalling as the cruelties he has inflicted.”

Dalrymple reminds us of another work by Henry James, “The Beast in the Jungle,” and John Marcher’s “arid end.” An interesting anthology – one which no one would publish – might be devoted to works illustrating the wages of self-centeredness.