[In the excerpt below, O'Faolain praises the irony, humor, and double-edged meaning of "Gooseberries."]

[In Chekov's "Gooseberries"] a civil servant dreams of the day when he will retire—as so many civil servants do. He will have a farm, a very little farm, just three or four acres, and a little cottage, and a gooseberry bush. The gooseberries become to him the symbol of the Simple Life. Time goes on, as time does, and he begins to amass rouble after rouble, as men do. But, then—and this is one of those unexpected touches with which human nature always surprises us—as the roubles accumulate the idealistic civil servant begins to get avaricious and ambitious. There is the first sly comment. Do not the dreams of youth always harden a little as we grow old? Lose their urgency, become in fact mere dreams—day dreams—deceiving us into constant procrastination? When we think of it do we not all know a dozen dreams of our own that we have silently discarded—so many little unrecorded defeats of the spirit?

So our civil servant gets older and older, and we find him marrying—not for love so much as for her money. And does this not suggest another comment on humanity—that it can fool itself into believing that the end justifies every means: so different from that noble ethic of the great Epicureans who held that the means justify the end? Presently the lady dies, and now the civil servant has a good deal of money, and at last he does retire, and he does buy a farm. But where has the Simple Life gone to? For it is an enormous farm; hundreds and hundreds of acres; and there is no gooseberry bush at all. (How the dream deceives us! Or rather how we deceive the dream!) However, he buys a score of gooseberry bushes and plants them, and one day his brother—who recounts the tale—comes to visit him, and finds him living in a very real sort of slatternly discomfort, the whole place shabby and untended—oh! very far from the simple dream in its pristine purity!—and they eat, and after the meal, in comes a plate of those symbolical gooseberries. They are the sourest, hardest, hairiest, toughest old gooseberries that Nature ever produced out of a cross between a rubber-tree and a cactus bush. But the face of the civil servant glows. He beams. He takes the sour fruit and as he savours it, it is plain that, at that moment, he is the happiest man on earth!

It is one of the loveliest of stories. So much irony; so much humour; so kind and understanding; and wrapped up in the most delicate poetic mood. It is probably one of the most perfect stories in the whole of the world's literature. At the end of it the brother moralises—wondering how on earth people can so deceive themselves into being happy. Which gives the tale a double edge—for the brother is himself not happy; he has been cast into a most melancholy mood. By what? By the happiness of the man with the gooseberries. What is happiness?—asks Chekov, with a kindly ironical smile on his face, inviting us to answer as we will but never to forget that human nature is like that, an instrument playing tricks on itself.