he has failed). He hopes, as Chekhov does, that his words alone will change others, yet he can never really know whether he has reached anyone or not.

The two brothers’ perceptions are opposite, and the men are unable to understand each other as a result. The difference is that Ivan forms very strong opinions about his brother, while Nicholai does not seem at all interested in sizing up Ivan. These fundamental differences between the brothers relate to another theme presented in this story, which is that of isolation. When Ivan first sees his brother, he seems to expect them to connect on a meaningful level because he projects his own feelings onto his brother. Ivan says, ‘‘We embraced and shed a tear of joy and also of sadness to think that we had once been so young, but were now both going gray and nearing death.’’ It soon becomes apparent to the reader that while this may have been what Ivan was thinking, it is unlikely that Nicholai (who has never been happier in his life) was thinking the same thing. This comment shows the reader that Ivan is completely unable to understand and accept his brother.

The reader is best equipped to understand Ivan after he concludes the story about his brother and begins entreating Bourkin and Aliokhin to learn from Nicholai’s example. Ivan especially focuses on Aliokhin because he is ‘‘young, strong, [and] wealthy.’’ As he does so, the reader sees that, deep down, Ivan feels passionate but powerless. He hopes that he can get someone else to take up his cause, and this quest has become an obsession for him just as the farm was an obsession for Nicholai. Ivan is hypocritical, but only the reader can see that. Similarly, when Chekhov reveals that neither Bourkin nor Aliokhin is the least bit moved by Ivan’s story, the reader understands more about the characters’ perceptions than the characters do. Aliokhin is more like Nicholai than he is like Ivan, but Ivan does not realize it because he is so narrowly focused on what he believes is important. Aliokhin, like Nicholai, lives a life of contentment in which he concerns himself with his immediate environment. He is no more likely to take on Ivan’s point of view than Nicholai is. In fact, after Ivan’s story ends, Aliokhin’s mind is wandering. Chekhov writes,

He did not trouble to think whether what Ivan Ivanich had been saying was clever or right; his guests were talking of neither goats, nor hay, nor tar, but of something which had no bearing on his life, and he liked it and wanted them to go on.

That Chekhov is able to lead the reader smoothly through two layers of storytelling to convey a theme is evidence of his genius as a writer. The technique is quite subtle and realistic. In fact, this is precisely the way people often learn about each other— through the stories they tell and how they tell them. Ivan does not give an objective telling of his brother’s story, and while the reader may wonder what Nicholai’s version of the story would be, the real lesson is about the incompatibility of narrowly defined perceptions. While Ivan is pleading with his friends to learn the lesson of Nicholai’s example (which they do not do), Chekhov is showing the reader how to learn from Ivan’s example.

Source: Jennifer Bussey, Critical Essay on ‘‘Gooseberries,’’ in Short Stories for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.

In the short story ‘‘Gooseberries’’ by Russian writer Anton Chekhov two men out walking seek refuge from the rain at the house of a friend who lives nearby. After they settle down for the evening, one of the men, Ivan Ivanich, begins a story he was about to tell his walking companion, Bourkin, before the rain began. This story-within-a-story involves Ivan’s brother Nikolai, who, in his quest to buy land, denies himself, as well as his wife, any comfort until he is an old man. After he acquires a piece of land, thereby becoming part of the landed gentry, he claims he has found true happiness. However, his brother’s happiness has come at a price that Ivan finds deplorable. Nikolai’s delight while eating the hard, sour gooseberries that he has spent most of his life dreaming about attests to Ivan’s claim that his brother, though happy, will die a deluded old man.

However, such a compassionate and complex writer as Chekhov does not put any weight in moral pronouncements such as those made by Ivan Ivanich. Instead, in his analysis of ‘‘Gooseberries’’ in the Reference Guide to Short Fiction, critic Simon Baker notes, ‘‘The power of the story lies in its ability to convey emotion which surpasses the words used to describe such a feeling.’’ Therefore, rather than look for a moral, one must look for an evocation. Writing this in 1898, Chekhov aptly reveals the malaise of the Russian middle class, including its inefficiency, indulgence, and apathy. He does this by utilizing a clever apparatus, known as a frame story, to suggest that there are connections to be made between the story of Nikolai and that of Ivan, Bourkin, and Aliokhin. In doing so, the reader may realize that the illusion of happiness that Nikolai has succumbed to is not an exceptional case; instead, as Chekhov implies through his use of setting, details, and character, it is a middle-class epidemic.

On first reading ‘‘Gooseberries,’’ one may find, as Russian critic Avrahm Yarmolinsky notes in The Portable Chekhov, that ‘‘Chekhov’s stories lack purely narrative interest. They no more bear retelling than does a poem.’’ Indeed, if one were to sum up ‘‘Gooseberries,’’ it would take little effort: three men get together during a rainy afternoon and one of them tells the others a story that seems detached from their own lives and experiences. Afterwards, they sit silently and eventually go to bed, although one of them, Bourkin, has trouble sleeping. To understand the complexity of this story, one must understand the psyche of the Russian middle class in the late nineteenth century. The quest for happiness that drives Nikolai to fixate on attaining a social status that is beyond his means and limits attests to the fantasy worlds that many mid- dle-class Russians created for themselves. Rather than confront the instability of a world changing right under their feet, many of them chose to ignore the social ills that would eventually lead to the events of the Russian Revolution in 1917 by focusing on their own desires and pleasures.

Typical of Chekhov’s stories is the need to suggest through setting that, despite the appearance of ordinary activities and landscapes, things are not what they appear. Writer Richard Ford, in The Essential Tales of Chekhov,notes that the subtlety in stories like ‘‘Gooseberries’’ is due to Chekhov’s particular approach to storytelling ‘‘in which the surfaces of life seem routine and continuous while Chekhov goes about illuminating its benighted other terrains as a way of inventing what’s new . . . in human existence.’’ Thus, the description of the vista that opens up the story is compelling to both Bourkin and Ivan Ivanich simply because it appears so familiar; the stillness of the day as well as its monotonous tone all signal business as usual on the Russian plain. However, although a dullness pervades the day, there is also the possibility of bad weather approaching. The air is filled with expectation, yet the men choose to ignore it and go for a long country walk. When the rain does finally come, the men are not at all prepared.

The suddenness of the rain reflects the increasing possibility of social and political upheaval. On the brink of a social and political revolution, the Russian middle class ignored the signs of turmoil such as peasants’ rebellions and workers’ demands for living wages just as Nikolai chooses to ignore his own material needs (and his late wife’s) to obtain a childhood dream. In his analysis of ‘‘Gooseberries’’ in the Reference Guide to Short Fiction, critic Simon Baker notes:

The disintegration of feudal Russia in the 1890s resulted in increased poverty for the lower classes; apathy, boredom, and frustration for the middle classes; and a kind of cocooning paralysis throughout Russian society as a whole.

This cocooning is best illustrated by Ivan and Bourkin’s retreat from the bad weather to Aliokhin’s farm where they are treated to a warm welcome by Aliokhin and the impeccable service of the chambermaid Pelagueya. Their misery at walking in the rain dissipates as they take baths and settle down in ‘‘silk dressing-gowns and warm slippers . . . lounging in armchairs.’’ The comforts provided them in their host’s house reveal how cushioned their lives are from any disturbing thoughts or discomforts; the chambermaid Pelagueya is an ideal servant, one who silently takes care of the men, never demonstrating in thought or appearance the despair and poverty pervasive among the peasant class.

The gentle irony infused throughout the story is made possible by the cross-pollination of the two stories, revealing certain parallel moments. Although most of the story is about Nikolai and his obsessive need to acquire an estate, the reader is constantly brought back to the scene of the storytelling. As writer Eudora Welty notes in her introduction to the story in You’ve Got to Read This,

As Ivan talks, the farm, the day, the house . . . the seductive room with its beautiful attendant, its romantic portraits of ladies and generals around the walls, and the rain falling outside, all stand about the story he tells like screens of varying substance of reality and dream.

The men at Aliokhin’s farm are distanced from the outside world of terrible weather and dreary lives. Listening to Ivan tell his story, it is easy to distance themselves from Nikolai’s experience due to the elegant surroundings, the beautiful Pelagueya, the warm clothes, and the food. Although they are unaware of it, the men, though appearing drastically different from Nikolai, are actually very similar.

Because Nikolai’s situation appears much different from their own, both Aliokhin and Bourkin are quick to dismiss the story as irrelevant to their own lives. However, on closer inspection, all of the men, including Ivan, share in differing degrees an ideal image of rural life that ignores its sordid and troubling aspects symbolized by the factories bordering Nikolai’s estate. Instead they embrace what is familiar and comfortable but ultimately illusory. As Ivan notes while telling his story, ‘‘‘Once a man is possessed by an idea, there is no doing anything with him,’’’ so these four men are each enamored with particular images of rural life that refuse to accommodate the changes undergoing Russian society at the time.

On the surface, the details that Ivan uses to describe Nikolai’s estate seem worlds away from that of Aliokhin’s farm. The sour gooseberries, the ‘‘fat dog with reddish hair that looked like a pig,’’ the overweight cook, the river that is the color of coffee all appear in stark contrast to Aliokhin’s farm, which conveys a sense of efficiency with its mill, its peasants working, the beautiful Pelagueya, the bathing cabin, and the room upstairs with its pictures of elegant people. Yet Nikolai’s illusion of happiness is not much different from Aliokhin’s, the gentleman farmer who has surrounded himself with pastoral beauty and solace but who has not worked for it. Whereas Nikolai has tried to reproduce an image of rural life from his childhood and failed, Aliokhin is living a life that is enviable but also ephemeral. The idealistic image of the ‘‘country gentleman’’ that both Aliokhin and Nikolai believe in will soon become part of Russia’s bourgeois past. However, it is so compelling an image that it prevents Ivan’s message about happiness from affecting Aliokhin. The mill owner cannot understand the point Ivan is making because he is so saturated in a life that is incredibly removed from any other reality. The fact that he has not bathed for months underscores how circumscribed his life is. Only when he is confronted by his own filth in front of visitors does he decide to take a bath.

On the other hand, Bourkin, who is a high school teacher, seems to have little sympathy for Ivan’s exhortations to ‘‘Do good,’’ yet at the end of the story he is disturbed by the smell of Ivan’s pipe next to his bed. Impatient yet reluctant to disagree with his friend, Bourkin is complicit in a social class that averts its eyes from impending disaster. Instead, he is lulled by the atmosphere of the room, with its frames of elegant people, and the beautiful chambermaid. His distraction is so ingrained that he cannot even detect the bad smell of Ivan’s pipe but instead throughout the night he ‘‘kept wondering where the unpleasant odor came from.’’

Lastly, even though the story-within-a-story focuses on his brother Nikolai, central to the mean ing of ‘‘Gooseberries’’ is the effect it has on Ivan. Rather than see his brother’s story as one of success, Ivan realizes that accumulating material wealth and being content only shields people from the harsh realities that most people undergo: deprivation, struggle, and indigence. Yet in his desire to tell his story, Ivan does not take into account where he tells it. His lack of understanding this point contributes to the story’s lack of effect on the others. As critic Milton Mays notes, in ‘‘Gooseberries and Chekhov’s Concreteness’’: ‘‘The issue is not whether Ivan’s views are ‘true’ . . . nor even whether they might be Chekhov’s. It is rather that Ivan’s story exists in a dramatic context which crucially modifies its meaning.’’ In other words, his condemnations of illusion fall on deaf ears because his story is being told out of context. Aliokhin and Bourkin are incapable of understanding the story’s message when sitting among such luxury and comfort. Their inertia is representative of the Russian middle class who, having been cushioned from discomfort for centuries, do not have the capacity to understand why society should change. The more dire become Ivan’s pleadings, the more disillusioned Aliokhin and Bourkin become with their friend’s story and the more they want to talk ‘‘about elegant people, about women.’’

Ultimately, this story is an indictment against the apathy of the middle class despite the growing signs of impending societal change. Educated, mobile, and powerful, the Russian middle class were also incredibly misdirected in their energies as is represented by Ivan, Nikolai, and Aliokhin. In his introduction to The Kiss and Other Stories, critic Ronald Wilks notes that

The human spirit is worthy of greater things than a few miserable gooseberry bushes and Chekhov saw the men of his generation as quite satisfied within the world of their own petty little domestic bliss and trivial amusements.

More effective than any diatribe against delusion and happiness is the symbol of the gooseberries that lies at the heart of the story. So invested has Nikolai become in acquiring personal happiness through material possessions that he has no ability to discern how terribly tasting the gooseberries really are. To do so would mean exploding the myth that Nikolai and the others ascribe to: the view of Russian rural life as being sweet and delicious, not hard and sour.

Source: Doreen Piano, Critical Essay on ‘‘Gooseberries,’’ in Short Stories for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.