Gooseberries, Anton Chekhov - Mark Schorer (essay date 1950)
Mark Schorer (essay date 1950)
SOURCE: "Comment on 'Gooseberries'," in The Story: A Critical Anthology, edited by Mark Schorer, Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1950, pp. 61-5.
[In the following excerpt, Schorer examines "the interplay between the framing action and the framed anecdote, the way that each illuminates the other" in "Gooseberries."]
In Chekhov's "Gooseberries," we begin . . . with the direct anecdotal convention: "'. . . you were going to tell me a story'" . . .". . . only then did Ivan Ivanych begin his story . . . 'We are two brothers,' he began." But how remarkably everything here has opened up to give us a wide and richly detailed view of human life and then gently closed down and framed that view for us! And when we finish the story (perhaps not after the first reading, but after the third or fourth) we are left not with a sharp jab at our nervous system but with vastly more. How does Chekhov accomplish that more? How does he get...
[The entire page is 1226 words long]
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