WALDEN – If you haven’t read Chekhov’s short story “Gooseberries” or haven’t read it recently, now is the perfect time to do so.
It’s a story about two brothers of rather humble birth. Ivan, the older one, becomes a veterinary surgeon, the younger Nikolay, a clerk whose work in cramped offices leads to a consuming ambition to have a little farm in the country. After many years by dint of penury and maneuvering he is able to purchase a modest estate where he proceeds to live a princely life lording it over the peasants. To complete his dream he plants a patch of gooseberries.
When Ivan visits he sees how (literally) fat and happy his brother has become, how he insists the villagers address him as “Your Honor,” and how he finds ostentatious ways to demonstrate his piety. He exemplifies the social psychology idea that on achieving success the poor and down trodden either become more empathetic and want to uplift others or become exploitative, lording it over other people. The younger brother, of course, does the later.
Confronted with how happy Nikolay is and how oblivious to the plight of others in less comfortable circumstances, Ivan experiences a kind of conversion. He reflects that in fact people everywhere who are comfortable fail to see the suffering, misery and poverty around them and that “the happy man is at his ease only because unhappy ones bear their burdens in silence.” Later Ivan watches his younger brother relishing his home-grown gooseberries, hard and sour, further suggesting his feelings about his brother’s new life.
While Chekhov wrote this story against a backdrop of rebellion and revolutionary fervor in late 19th-century Russia, the story speaks to people of all times with regard to those who are comfortable by and large being insensitive to the suffering around them, and especially it speaks to us in our time when complacency and inaction may cost us our freedom.
You can perhaps find “Gooseberries” in your library or online, but if you’re of a mind to purchase it, I highly recommend George Saunders’ book, “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain.” The title is derived from a deliciously sensuous scene in the “Gooseberries” story.
Billed as a “master class on what makes great stories work and what they can tell us about ourselves and the world today,” Saunders, who teaches in the creative writing program at Syracuse University, has included stories by Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Gogol as well as Chekhov in “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain.”
Sarah Houston is an artist living in Walden.
