I Don’t Know 2: Chekhov’s Gooseberries
This is but one example of Chekhov’s
immense storytelling power, the one I thought best suited to “IDK.” In
“Gooseberries”, an old man named Ivan speaks of his brother Nikolai’s desire to
flee the city and buy a farm: “To leave town, and the struggle and the swim of
life, and go and hide yourself in a farmhouse is not life – it is egoism,
laziness; it is a kind of monasticism, but monasticism without action. A man
needs, not six feet of land, not a farm, but the whole earth, all Nature, where
in full liberty he can display all the properties and qualities of the free
spirit.”
Nikolai is given some dashes of telling
characterisation during his pursuit of the farm, such as that “he liked reading
newspapers, but only the advertisements of land to be sold…” We learn how Nikolai
eventually obtained his own farm with the gooseberry bush that was so essential
to him: “[He] married an elderly, ugly widow, not out of any feeling for her,
but because she had money.” Although Nikolai obtains his blissful little
farm-world, his hands are not clean.
Ivan pays Nikolai a visit, and finds that
his brother is still enraptured by gooseberries. Ivan tries one: “It was
hard and sour, but, as Poushkin said, the illusion which exalts us is dearer to
us than ten thousand truths.”
All this rumination culminates in Chekhov’s
philosophical payload: “In my idea of human life there is always some alloy of
sadness, but now at the sight of a happy man I was filled with something like
despair… I thought: ‘After all, what a lot of contented, happy people there
must be! What an overwhelming power that means! I look at this life and see the
arrogance and the idleness of the strong, the ignorance and bestiality of the
weak, the horrible poverty everywhere, overcrowding, drunkenness, hypocrisy,
falsehood… . Meanwhile in all the houses, all the streets, there is peace;
out of fifty thousand people who live in our town there is not one to kick
against it all. Think of the people who go to the market for food: during the
day they eat; at night they sleep, talk nonsense, marry, grow old, piously
follow their dead to the cemetery; one never sees or hears those who suffer,
and all the horror of life goes on somewhere behind the scenes. Everything is
quiet, peaceful, and against it all there is only the silent protest of
statistics; so many go mad, so many gallons are drunk, so many children die of
starvation… . And such a state of things is obviously what we want;
apparently a happy man only feels so because the unhappy bear their burden in
silence, but for which happiness would be impossible. It is a general hypnosis.
Every happy man should have some one with a little hammer at his door to knock
and remind him that there are unhappy people, and that, however happy he may
be, life will sooner or later show its claws, and some misfortune will befall
him – illness, poverty, loss, and then no one will see or hear him, just as he
now neither sees nor hears others. But there is no man with a hammer, and the
happy go on living, just a little fluttered with the petty cares of every day,
like an aspen-tree in the wind – and everything is all right.'”
Realising his own blissful folly, Ivan
compels his young listeners to take action: “"Pavel Koustantinich,”
he said in a voice of entreaty, “don’t be satisfied, don’t let yourself be
lulled to sleep! While you are young, strong, wealthy, do not cease to do good!
Happiness does not exist, nor should it, and if there is any meaning or purpose
in life, they are not in our peddling little happiness, but in something
reasonable and grand. Do good!"”
But will they take his advice?
“Ivan Ivanich’s story had satisfied neither
Bourkin nor Aliokhin… it was tedious to hear the story of a miserable official
who ate gooseberries… . Somehow they had a longing to hear and to speak of
charming people, and of women. And the mere fact of sitting in the drawing-room
where everything – the lamp with its coloured shade, the chairs, and the
carpet under their feet – told how the very people who now looked down at them
from their frames once walked, and sat and had tea there, and the fact that
pretty Pelagueya was near – was much better than any story.”
Much like Nikolai and his gooseberries,
Ivan’s young listeners are exalted by their own illusion. They perhaps feel
indignant: older generations will always lecture the young to do not as they
did. They carry the suspicion that this hypocritical message is delivered with
the intent of denying them their birth-right of peaceful happiness. It seems as
if each generation needs to learn the same lesson about the hollowness of bliss
by repeating the same mistakes. But Ivan does plant a seed: “A smell of burning
tobacco came from his pipe which lay on the table, and Bourkin could not sleep
for a long time and was worried because he could not make out where the
unpleasant smell came from.”
The questions the story raises aren’t
answered: they are articulated through the story and delivered to the reader
for him or her to consider. And yet they are so monumental in size that we
don’t expect the reader to answer the question themselves. This story is the
“someone” with the little hammer at the door to knock and remind us that there
are unhappy people. How much happiness we should have versus how much social
injustice we should find it within our power/responsibility to tackle is
forever unclear. Nowadays we have never been more aware of the world’s social
injustices. The internet is the man with the hammer at the door, but he doesn’t
have Chekhov’s humanity. “FW: FW: Leo: Tell Cameron Ice Caps Can’t Melt Bees!”
Those of us plugged in have no farms on which to hide, and the effect can be
debilitating: surely there is a balance? Everyone requires their dose of happiness
as much as their face-rubbed-into-it-ness, but when, how, where, which, and to
what degree is something I will never know, something Chekhov can’t know, nor
does he expect the reader to know. Is it really true that while social
injustice prevails, happiness doesn’t exist?
Chekhov has successfully reflected life and
the human condition without claiming to know what to do about it, which is the
most intelligent and truthful thing a storyteller can do.
