Gooseberries Page #2

"Gooseberries" is a poignant short story by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov that explores themes of longing, disillusionment, and the quest for happiness. The narrative follows a character named Ivan Ivanovitch, who shares his philosophical reflections during a visit to his friend, the optimistic landowner, Nikolai. Through their conversation, Ivan reveals his deep-seated skepticism about the pursuit of self-satisfaction and the nature of contentment as he recounts his brother's dream of owning a country estate. Chekhov’s subtle wit and profound insights into human nature highlight the complexities of aspiration and the often-unattainable ideals of happiness, culminating in a bittersweet contemplation of life's simple pleasures and realities.

								

childhood running wild in the country. Like peasant children, we passed
our days and nights in the fields and the woods, looked after horses,
stripped the bark off the trees, fished, and so on.... And, you know,
whoever has once in his life caught perch or has seen the migrating of
the thrushes in autumn, watched how they float in flocks over the
village on bright, cool days, he will never be a real townsman, and will
have a yearning for freedom to the day of his death. My brother was
miserable in the government office. Years passed by, and he went on
sitting in the same place, went on writing the same papers and thinking
of one and the same thing--how to get into the country. And this yearning
by degrees passed into a definite desire, into a dream of buying himself
a little farm somewhere on the banks of a river or a lake.

"He was a gentle, good-natured fellow, and I was fond of him, but I
never sympathized with this desire to shut himself up for the rest of
his life in a little farm of his own. It's the correct thing to say that
a man needs no more than six feet of earth. But six feet is what a
corpse needs, not a man. And they say, too, now, that if our
intellectual classes are attracted to the land and yearn for a farm,
it's a good thing. But these farms are just the same as six feet of
earth. To retreat from town, from the struggle, from the bustle of life,
to retreat and bury oneself in one's farm--it's not life, it's egoism,
laziness, it's monasticism of a sort, but monasticism without good
works. A man does not need six feet of earth or a farm, but the whole
globe, all nature, where he can have room to display all the qualities
and peculiarities of his free spirit.

"My brother Nikolay, sitting in his government office, dreamed of how he
would eat his own cabbages, which would fill the whole yard with such a
savoury smell, take his meals on the green grass, sleep in the sun, sit
for whole hours on the seat by the gate gazing at the fields and the
forest. Gardening books and the agricultural hints in calendars were his
delight, his favourite spiritual sustenance; he enjoyed reading
newspapers, too, but the only things he read in them were the
advertisements of so many acres of arable land and a grass meadow with
farm-houses and buildings, a river, a garden, a mill and millponds, for
sale. And his imagination pictured the garden-paths, flowers and fruit,
starling cotes, the carp in the pond, and all that sort of thing, you
know. These imaginary pictures were of different kinds according to the
advertisements which he came across, but for some reason in every one of
them he had always to have gooseberries. He could not imagine a
homestead, he could not picture an idyllic nook, without gooseberries.

"'Country life has its conveniences,' he would sometimes say. 'You sit
on the verandah and you drink tea, while your ducks swim on the pond,
there is a delicious smell everywhere, and... and the gooseberries are
growing.'

"He used to draw a map of his property, and in every map there were the
same things--(a) house for the family, (b) servants' quarters, (c)
kitchen-garden, (d) gooseberry-bushes. He lived parsimoniously, was
frugal in food and drink, his clothes were beyond description; he looked
like a beggar, but kept on saving and putting money in the bank. He grew
fearfully avaricious. I did not like to look at him, and I used to give
him something and send him presents for Christmas and Easter, but he
used to save that too. Once a man is absorbed by an idea there is no
doing anything with him.

"Years passed: he was transferred to another province. He was over
forty, and he was still reading the advertisements in the papers and
saving up. Then I heard he was married. Still with the same object of
buying a farm and having gooseberries, he married an elderly and ugly
widow without a trace of feeling for her, simply because she had filthy
lucre. He went on living frugally after marrying her, and kept her short
of food, while he put her money in the bank in his name.

"Her first husband had been a postmaster, and with him she was
accustomed to pies and home-made wines, while with her second husband
she did not get enough black bread; she began to pine away with this
sort of life, and three years later she gave up her soul to God. And I
need hardly say that my brother never for one moment imagined that he
was responsible for her death. Money, like vodka, makes a man queer. In
our town there was a merchant who, before he died, ordered a plateful of
honey and ate up all his money and lottery tickets with the honey, so
that no one might get the benefit of it. While I was inspecting cattle
at a railway-station, a cattle-dealer fell under an engine and had his
leg cut off. We carried him into the waiting-room, the blood was
flowing--it was a horrible thing--and he kept asking them to look for his
leg and was very much worried about it; there were twenty roubles in the
boot on the leg that had been cut off, and he was afraid they would be
lost."

"That's a story from a different opera," said Burkin.

"After his wife's death," Ivan Ivanovitch went on, after thinking for
half a minute, "my brother began looking out for an estate for himself.
Of course, you may look about for five years and yet end by making a
mistake, and buying something quite different from what you have dreamed
of. My brother Nikolay bought through an agent a mortgaged estate of
three hundred and thirty acres, with a house for the family, with
servants' quarters, with a park, but with no orchard, no gooseberry-
bushes, and no duck-pond; there was a river, but the water in it was the
colour of coffee, because on one side of the estate there was a
brickyard and on the other a factory for burning bones. But Nikolay
Ivanovitch did not grieve much; he ordered twenty gooseberry-bushes,
planted them, and began living as a country gentleman.

"Last year I went to pay him a visit. I thought I would go and see what
it was like. In his letters my brother called his estate 'Tchumbaroklov
Waste, alias Himalaiskoe.' I reached 'alias Himalaiskoe' in the
afternoon. It was hot. Everywhere there were ditches, fences, hedges,
fir-trees planted in rows, and there was no knowing how to get to the
yard, where to put one's horse. I went up to the house, and was met by a
fat red dog that looked like a pig. It wanted to bark, but it was too
lazy. The cook, a fat, barefooted woman, came out of the kitchen, and
she, too, looked like a pig, and said that her master was resting after
dinner. I went in to see my brother. He was sitting up in bed with a
quilt over his legs; he had grown older, fatter, wrinkled; his cheeks,
his nose, and his mouth all stuck out--he looked as though he might begin
grunting into the quilt at any moment.

"We embraced each other, and shed tears of joy and of sadness at the
thought that we had once been young and now were both grey-headed and
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