Life in a Shell
[In the following excerpt, Winner examines "Gooseberries" as a response to Leo Tolstoy's story, "How Much Land Does Man Need?"]
The second part of [Chekhov's] allegoric trilogy, "Gooseberries," is told by Ivan Ivanych, who bears the grotesque surname Chimsha-Gimalayski. It is the story of his brother, Nikolay Ivanych, who, obsessed with the desire for a little estate upon which to retire, scrimps and saves, and, like Akaki in Gogol's "The Overcoat," denies himself all the pleasures of life and even food. He had entered into a mariage de convenance with a rich old widow and had contributed to her death by forcing her also to stint on food. The idyllic life of retirement was symbolized for him by a gooseberry bush from which he could eat his own gooseberries. When Nikolay finally realizes his dream, Ivan Ivanych visits him and he finds Nikolay, the landowner, old and fat. The first homegrown gooseberries are served; but they taste sour. Nikolay has achieved what he had dreamed of, but Ivan realizes its futility and is appalled at the price at which it had to be bought.
This story can be explained, as many critics have done, as a comment on Tolstoy's late moral philosophy, and specifically on his didactic exemplary tale, "How Much Land Does Man Need?" (Mnogo li eloveku zemli nu no?) in which Tolstoy advocates refusal of wordly goods. In Tolstoy's parable the peasant Pakhom, greedy for land, is told that he can buy cheaply as much land as he can walk around in one day. His avarice forces him to overstrain himself. He dies at the moment when he acquires a huge plot of land and is buried in six feet of earth. Tolstoy's answer to the question posed in the title of his exemplum is thus that man needs only enough earth to be buried in.
"Gooseberries" has many parallels with Tolstoy's story. The heroes of both stories lust for material possessions and both die as their desire is to be realized, although Chekhov's protagonist dies only spiritually having lost his humanity in his quest for property. But while externally the stories are similar, the treatment and implications of the theme are very different.
The import of Chekhov's story is more complex than that of Tolstoy's, as is implied by the remarks of the narrator, who seems to comment on the moral of Tolstoy's story.
It is a common saying that man needs only six feet of earth. But six feet is what is needed by a corpse, not by a man. It is also asserted that if our educated class is drawn to the land and seeks to settle on farms, then that is good. But then these little farms represent the same six feet of land. To leave the city, to leave the struggle and the noise, to escape, and to hide in one's own little homestead—that is not life, that is only egotism, laziness, a special kind of monasticism, but a monasticism without great deeds. Man needs not six feet of soil . . . but the whole earth, all of nature, where unhindered he can display all his capabilities and the properties of his free spirit.
How closely "Gooseberries" is related not only to Tolstoy's parable, but also to Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilich, can be gleaned from earlier versions of the story. In all but the final version, Nikolay truly dies; before death, like Ivan Ilich, he becomes conscious of the futility of his life. We read in Chekhov's notebook:
When he has cancer of the stomach and death is near, he is given a plate of his own gooseberries. He looks indifferently. . . . Looking at the plate with gooseberries: this is the final achievement of my life.
In a later entry we read:
The gooseberries were sour. "How stupid," said the official and died.
But in the final version there is neither death nor awareness. Awareness, in the reversal of the story, is transferred to the narrator Ivan Ivanych and, in a scene heavy with irony, Nikolay, sentimental over his gooseberries, can hardly speak from agitation, and eats the sour berries greedily, exclaiming over and over again: "how tasty, how tasty!"
The emptiness of Nikolay's quest is implied, then, by the contrast between his sentimentalized dream of rural life and its reality, while in Tolstoy's works the quest ends more obviously in death ("How Much Land Does Man Need?") or in disillusionment and death (The Death of Ivan Ilich). Of Nikolay's dreams of idyllic country life Ivan Ivanych says:
My brother Nikolay . . . dreamed of eating his own cabbage soup, which would fill the whole farmyard with its delicious smell, of eating on the green grass, of sleeping in the sun, of sitting for hours on a bench behind the gate, gazing at the fields and forests. Agricultural books . . . were his pleasure, beloved nourishment for his soul.
Expressions common in the language of the sentimental novel, as "nourishment for the soul" and "beloved," used with prosaic terms like agricultural books, set the note of the absurdity of Nikolay's aims. When he finally achieves his dream, the estate has none of the sentimental accouterments which he had imagined: there is no orchard, no gooseberry patch, no duck pond. "Country life has its advantages," Nikolay had said in his youth, "you sit on the porch drinking tea, your ducks swim in the pond, and everything smells so good and—and the gooseberries are growing." But reality brings a stream, on the banks of which there are a brick and a glue factory, which turn the water to the color of coffee. Even the gooseberries are not there and have to be planted.
The reality of the dream is clear in the narrator's description of his first view of his brother's estate, grotesquely called "Chumbaroklov" or "Himalayan Waste," which is strongly reminiscent of the description of Sobakevich's estate in Gogol's Dead Souls:
. . . It was hot. Everywhere there were ditches, fences, hedges, rows of fir trees. . . . I made my way to the house and was met by a reddish dog, so fat it looked like a pig. It wanted to bark, but was too lazy. The cook, a fat, barelegged woman, who also looked like a pig, came out of the kitchen and said that the master was resting after dinner.
Nikolay, who had hoped to free himself from the banal life of the civil servant, finds only the pošlost' which he had sought to escape. In his retour à la nature he has become a typical landowner who cures his peasants with castor oil. While he used to be afraid to voice an opinion, he now speaks only in platitudes masked as "incontrovertible truths" and does so "in the tone of a minister of state": "Education is necessary, but the masses are not yet ready for it; corporal punishment is generally harmful, but under certain circumstances it is useful"; "I know the common people . . . they love me and will do anything I want." And twenty times over, he would repeat "we of the gentry."
The theme, stated as "man needs not six feet of soil but the entire earth," is poetically implied in the introduction to the story, which paints a limitless nature, a picture which also ended the preceding story; both pictures present a contrast to the constricted lives of Belikov and Nikolay Ivanych. The deliberate slowing of the action makes this introduction more impressive. Burkin is reminded that Ivan Ivanych had promised him a story. But before Ivan Ivanych begins his tale, the weather and the countryside are described; there follows a delaying episode in which the two huntsmen are seen on the estate of Alekhin where idyllically all three swim in the millstream (Alekhin will later tell his own story in "About Love"). This little prologue then introduces the allegory of the gooseberries.
In the conclusion Ivan Ivanych . . . says that he is old, too old to carry into effect his dreams of action, but turns to Alekhin and begs him never to forget the aims of life. As the next story ["About Love"] indicates, however, this is ironic, for Alekhin's life is also limited; it is essentially a vie manquèe as were Belikov's and Nikolay Ivanych's.
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