Comment on 'Gooseberries'

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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 from a sketch to a short story, from the convention of the anecdote to the full, evocative beauty of form?

His anecdote is itself "framed." The anecdote is placed within a surrounding action and a surrounding atmosphere, and the first observation to be made is the interplay between the framing action and the framed anecdote, the way that each illuminates the other, gives the other its significance. It is a story that moves by counter-point, and its formal and therefore its thematic beauty exists in the interwoven harmonies, the two strains of present events (the action) and remembered events (the anecdote).

Two men are walking in the country, we are told, and the essential contrast of the story is announced at once, there, in the opening paragraph. First we are presented with a landscape that is tedious gray, and dull, and with two men who are weary, and weary of it; then, at the end of the paragraph, by some magical elision, the same landscape has become attractive, "mild and pensive," and the men are aware of their deep affection for it. The contradiction is not in the landscape, for that has not changed (the rain has not even begun), but in the varieties and waverings of human response to facts, which emotions apparently create.

The men seek shelter from the rain at the farm of a friend, and the farm is like most farms—dirty. The mill is working, the horses are wet, the hired hands are drenched, their heads in sacks, every thing is "damp, muddy, dreary." The owner is a model of filth and the rooms he lives in are sordid. The visitors are miserably uncomfortable. Then comes that remarkable scene of the bath. Alyohin begins to wash off his several seasons of dirt, and suddenly the chief character, Ivan, leaps into that river whose waters only a few moments before had "looked cold and unkind," and, with the most marvelous emotional release and physical pleasure, swims and shouts in the rain. Then, when the three of them are clean, dry, and comfortable, they go into the house and to the drawing room upstairs. Upstairs is different from downstairs, as pleasure is different from pain, or dreams different from reality, or emotions different from the facts to which they are responses. Still, upstairs and downstairs are parts of the same house. Upstairs, the anecdote at last begins.

The anecdote has to do with another farmer, Ivan's brother, a drudging clerk who all his life aspired to be a landed gentleman and ended as a perfectly happy, perfect parody of a landed gentleman, ecstatic in his failure. To an outside eye, Ivan's, for example, there is no relation whatever between the drab actuality of Nikolay's farm and Nikolay's dream of it, but to that dream, meanwhile, Nikolay has sacrificed years of effort, all comfort, a moral sense, and a woman's life. That is the first large irony of the anecdote: that all these human actualities should have been thrown so willingly into the trough of this dream. The second is that this dream, in which Nikolay is so happy, is a miserable actuality, in which even the gooseberries are inedible, except, of course, to Nikolay. But there are intermediate ironies—the two boys had been raised as peasant children, and therefore, we are told, they love the country, a large unlikelihood; Ivan does not believe that one can "retire" from the world, for man, a free being, needs the challenge of the world to prove his freedom, yet there are the examples of Nikolay, supremely happy out of it, and Ivan himself, in it, and hardly so. There are other such ironies, but the great one is of course in the fact that the reality of Alyohin's farm, apart from that upstairs room where Ivan is talking, is much like that of Nikolay's, and the two descriptions, of Alyohin's first appearance on his farm in the frame story, and of Nikolay's in the anecdote, should be observed for their similarity. This similarity Ivan does not see, as he spins out his tale in the upstairs drawing room, as he announces the contrast he felt (and told his brother of) between youth, with its potentialities of fulfillment, and death, with its frustrating finality. So he concludes with the observation that happiness is a form of blindness, of illusion, a perception that came to him on his brother's farm and that changed him ("I want to tell you about the change that took place in me"), and then, after adjuring his host to make something noble of his life, to do good, so that he will not have to live in the regret of lost dreams, Ivan himself reverses his position (as he did at the river) and tells us how now he must always wish to live in the country—that is, in an illusion of the country.

Then the anecdote lapses back into its frame, the actuality. Who has cared so far? Not Alyohin, not Burkin; they have been disappointed in the tale. But the pictures seem to have been listening; the ghosts, the noble shades, the unrealities. For Alyohin, the tale has been a fantasy, it has "had no direct bearing on his life, and he was glad of it"; it has been a "story." Burkin suggests bed, and Alyohin goes back downstairs to the sordid actuality. Ivan falls asleep, but Burkin is disturbed for a long time by the smell of Ivan's pipe, which he cannot identify. It is the smell of some lingering falsehood, of Ivan's story, in fact, which tired at once to prove and disprove its point. The frame of the story—the landscape, the arrival, the farm, the bath and the swim, the downstairs and the upstairs rooms, the sleep at last—all these have proved the proving-disproving attempt. The frame has judged the anecdote; its actuality reveals the confusion of fact and dream in the anecdote it contains. The story is like Ivan's wished-for hammer: it knocks at the door of our consciousness, telling us of the lovely vanity of human wishes, or of the way that wishes transform the world into vain loveliness.

Why, at the end of the story, is it still raining?

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