'Gooseberries' and Chekhov's Concreteness
[In the essay below, Mays argues that Ivan Ivanych's diatribe against human contentment in "Gooseberries" is undermined by his "obsessive" tone as well as the contrasting motif of the story's luxurious setting.]
The readings of Chekhov's "Gooseberries" all seem to run one way: Ivan Ivanych, who tells the "story within a story," and who points its moral, speaks for the author. "'Man needs not six feet of earth, not a farm, but the whole globe, all of Nature, where unhindered he can display all the capacities and peculiarities of his free spirit,'" says Ivan, passing judgment on the sordid life of his brother Nikolay, who has sacrificed everything for the country estate with the symbolic gooseberry bush. Professor Ernest J. Simmons, in his excellent life of Chekhov [Chekhov, 1962], says of this pronouncement "Here is expressed Chekhov's own unquenchable thirst for all of life, for everything accessible to man." It seems to me that this reading much oversimplifies "Gooseberries," one of Chekhov's finest stories, and one which is central to an important thematic pattern in the author's work as a whole.
If the meaning of "Gooseberries" is reducible to the moral Ivan Ivanych draws from his brother's story, we may ask why Chekhov has elaborated the circumstances with such care. Why Burkin and Ivan Ivanych's walk over the plain, the rainstorm, the refuge at Alyohin's, the bathing, and the tea upstairs with the "pretty Pelageya, stepping noiselessly across the carpet and smiling softly"? Why does Ivan Ivanych's story satisfy neither Burkin nor Alyohin? And why, finally, does Burkin, unable to sleep, notice an "unpleasant odor" in the room he shares with Ivan Ivanych—an odor that comes from his roommate's pipe? None of these circumstances receive much attention from Chekhov's critics. But the tendency of Chekhov's work is toward great economy of means—we recall the dictum about the gun on the wall in Act One which must be discharged before the play is over. "Gooseberries" is devised as a story within a story, and neither "envelope" nor "contents" alone can speak for the whole. The issue is not whether Ivan's views are "true" (who can quarrel with abstractions like "the meaning of life is to do good," as such?)—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.
Since the whole situation is significant, a recapitulation will be useful. Burkin and Ivan Ivanych, two old hunting companions, are trudging wearily through the fields on a dull day when it begins to rain; by the time they have reached the estate of a nearby acquaintance, Alyohin, they are soaked. In a glum mood they arrive at Alyohin's mill, with its noise, vibration, wet horses standing about, and peasants running here and there with sacks over their heads. "It was damp, muddy, dreary; and the water looked cold and unkind. Ivan Ivanych and Burkin felt cold and messy and uncomfortable through and through; their feet were heavy with mud and when, having crossed the dam, they climbed up to the barns, they were silent as though they were cross with each other." But Alyohin greets them with pleasure, and invites them to bathe with him in his bathhouse on the millstream before changing. Later, all three men sit upstairs in Alyohin's best parlor "savoring the warmth, the cleanliness, the dry clothes and the light footwear," while Pelageya, the chambermaid—"a young woman so beautiful that both [Burkin and Ivan] . . . glanced at each other"—brings in the tea. In a mood of perfect physical content after fatigue and discomfort Alyohin and Burkin listen to Ivan's story of his brother Nikolay.
Nikolay's life-long dream of a country estate has co-existed with a sordid reality of avarice, cruelty, and self-delusion; indeed in a sense the dream has entailed this reality. As he tells his story, Ivan gets more and more worked up, ending with a diatribe against all contentment, and a pathetic plea to Alyohin to "do good" while he has his youth and strength. But "Ivan Ivanych's story satisfied neither Burkin nor Alyohin"; and the reasons for this are crucial to an understanding of "Gooseberries." Chekhov could be saying that Ivan's listeners are examples of that very complacency he is inveighing against. But this is not so: both the tone and the sense we get of their character in the other two stories of the group ("The Man in a Shell" and "About Love") prevent our thinking of Burkin or Alyohin as insensitive men. It is rather that Ivan has told the wrong story, in the wrong situation, and, especially, in the wrong tone. Certainly Nikolay has led a degraded life, and his happiness is disturbing: he has killed his own soul to acquire the property that is his dream; and he has also killed the woman he married for her money. Nikolay's contentment is swinish; he is a pompous, opinionated, snobbish ass eating sour gooseberries beside a polluted stream amid his equally swinish servants. In all this one agrees with Ivan; but we must be very careful about condemning "illusion" in Chekhov's world, for in too many stories (see and for instance) he suggests, like Ibsen in The Wild Duck, that illusion underlies much of life, perhaps most of its happiness—and that "truth-saying" is often destructive.
But in any case the conclusion Ivan Ivanych draws from his brother's experience is an ethical non-sequitur: because Nikolay's happiness is disgusting, it does not follow that all happiness everywhere is guilty or illusory. "'Behind the door of every contented, happy man,'" holds Ivan, "'there ought to be someone standing with a little hammer and continually reminding him with a knock that there are unhappy people, and that however happy he may be, life will sooner or later show him its claws. . . . '" For Ivan, "'there is no happiness, and there should be none,'" and the purpose of life is to feel guilt and do good. Ivan has ironed the rich texture of life out to a liberal platitude; but the very scene into which he introduces his story, like a bad smell, proves him wrong. Ivan, Burkin, and Alyohin are sitting in a luxurious drawing room, dressed in "silk dressing gowns and warm slippers," savoring the physical ease after a long, fatiguing, wet day. "With the ladies and generals looking down from the golden frames, seeming alive in the dim light, it was tedious to listen to the story of the poor devil of a clerk who ate gooseberries. One felt like talking about elegant people, about women." And finally, "the fact that lovely Pelageya was noiselessly moving about—that was better than any story." As life is better than any, even the best, abstractions. The reality of the moment is caught in the concreteness of Chekhov's prose: we are made to feel the circumstances, sense the well-being, respond to the splendid woman. Only Ivan is a discord. No authorial statement of this is necessary, not even conveyed through the minds of Alyohin and Burkin, for the whole situation is expressive.
Even worse than Ivan's "moral" is his tone—querulous, strained, even obsessive. Ivan is prone to extremes, it seems—lacking in a certain saving balance or humor. His "man needs not six feet of earth, not a farm, but the whole globe . . ." is a piece of flatulence of the kind 19th century Russian liberals are famous for, than which nothing could be further from the personal tone of Chekhov. It reminds us of Trofimov, the student radical in The Cherry Orchard (for whom the orchard represents a load of guilt that must be atoned for by suffering and work) when he says "All of Russia is our orchard." As Ivan Ivanych gets more carried away he confronts Burkin "wrathfully," and pleads "with a pitiful imploring smile" for Alyohin to "do good" while he has still his youth. Ludicrously excessive is Ivan's "'There is nothing that pains me more than the spectacle of a happy family sitting at table having tea.'" As for himself, Ivan Ivanych admits "'I can only grieve inwardly, get irritated, worked up, and at night my head is ablaze with the rush of ideas and I cannot sleep.'"
Ivan belongs, in fact, to a fairly distinct breed of Chekhovian character that might be called the "irritated man"—idealists, all, no doubt, but finally unbalanced. Ivan shares with his brother Nikolay a kind of "excessiveness"—he is the manic phase of which Nikolay is the depressive, so to speak. Ivan, with his oppression, irritation, and wrath, is akin to Pavel Ivanych, perhaps Chekhov's most interesting example of the type, in "Gusev." Pavel and Gusev are both dying in the sick-bay of a troop ship on its way back to Russia from the Far East. But if Gusev seems sane in his acceptance of life, for all his peasant simplicity, Pavel's is a rancorous hatred of life, fundamentally abstractive and life-denying. "Joy" is associated with Gusev—even if it comes only in the delirium in which he thinks he sees his family back in the village; and it is a joy reflected by nature as his body is received by the waters. Pavel, that "uneasy chap" with a "boastful, challenging, mocking expression," prides himself on being a truth-seer and a truth-sayer, whatever the consequences: "'I always tell people the truth to their faces. . . . My mind is clear. I see it all plainly like a hawk or an eagle when it hovers over the earth and I understand everything. I am protest personified. I see tyranny—I protest. I see a hypocrite—I protest, I see a triumphant swine—I protest.'" Nothing can shut him up; he is Ivan Ivanych's man with a hammer. But "'all my acquaintances say to me: "You are a most insufferable person, Pavel Ivanych." I am proud of such a reputation. . . . That's life as I understand it. That's what one can call life.'"
Chekhov's comment on life as Pavel Ivanych sees it is made quite concretely: "Gusev is not listening; he is looking at the porthole. A junk, flooded with dazzling hot sunshine, is swaying on the transparent turquoise water. In it stand naked Chinamen, holding up cages with canaries in them and calling out: 'It sings, it sings!'" Gusev sees a fat Chinaman in a boat and thinks "'Would be fine to give that fat fellow one in the neck,'" yawning as he watches. This is life as Chekhov sees it—a close weave of beauty, love, and joy, with brutality, ugliness, and meaninglessness, no single strand of which is to be reveled out as "Truth."
Ivan Ivanych's story is a "bad smell" in the context in which he tells it, and his "truth" traduces reality. Similarly, ideologically-bound critics traduce literature in trying to reduce it to statement. Ivan is in such a state that he is insensitive to the social circumstances; one might call his diatribe an expression of "bad form," an offense against taste. When Trofimov has his comic-pathetic encounter with Madame Ranevskaya in Act III of The Cherry Orchard it is again an encounter between abstractive ideology and rich, if muddled, life-involvement. "You mustn't deceive yourself. For once you must look the truth straight in the face," says Trofimov. Madame Ranevskaya replies "What truth? You know what truth is and what it isn't. . . . You're able to solve all your problems so decisively—but tell me . . . isn't it because . . . life is still hidden from your young eyes?" She asks for sympathy, not a moralistic lecture, but when Trofimov says "You know I sympathize with you from the bottom of my heart" Ranevskaya replies in a way also appropriate to Burkin and Alyohin's response to the gooseberries tale: "But you should say it differently . . . differently." Image and tone suggest Chekhov's meaning in the conclusion to "Gusev": as Gusev's canvas-shrouded body sinks into the sea, there is a shark waiting, but there is also a magnificent sunset; as Burkin lies in the cool bed "which had been made by the lovely Pelageya" and "gave off a pleasant smell of clean linen" Ivan Ivanych's pipe with its unpleasant odor keeps him awake for a long time, but "the rain beat against the window panes all night."
The pipe with the bad smell may seem the only crude touch in this story; but we see what Chekhov's intention is, and it cannot be ignored, because his endings are carefully contrived. "My instinct tells me," Chekhov has said, "that at the end of a novel or story I must artfully concentrate for the reader an impression of the entire work." The endings of "Gusev" and "Gooseberries" project a sense of resolution, of a truth beyond "Truths," something for which (as Chekhov puts it at the end of "Gusev") "it is hard to find a name in the language of man."
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