Reading Chekhov

In "Gooseberries," the aversion for the actual is illustrated by Ivan Ivanovitch's younger brother, Nikolai, a government clerk, who lives wrapped in a cocoon of longing for a small country estate, fitted out not only with the usual amenities-kitchen garden, duck pond, servants' quarters-but with a stand of gooseberry bushes. Achieving this gemutlich fantasy becomes an obsession, driving him to extremes of miserliness and avarice. He marries an elderly and ugly widow for her money, and keeps her on such short rations that she dies three years later. Now, at last, he can buy his estate, a charmless place without a gooseberry on it. However, he plants twenty gooseberry bushes and settles into the life of a country squire. Ivan Ivanovitch comes for a visit and finds his brother living like an escapee from Dead Souls-fat, uncouth, complacent, putting on airs, spouting platitudes about the management of the peasants. A servant brings a plate of sour, unripe berries-the first harvest from the new bushes-and Nikolai greedily eats them, as though they were the finest fruit of ancient bushes. Watching him, Ivan Ivanovitch has an epiphany, which he relates to Burkin and Alehin: Like Nikolai, he says, we are all insulated against reality. "We do not see and we do not hear those who suffer, and what is terrible in life goes on somewhere behind the scenes… Everything is quiet and peaceful, and nothing protests but mute statistics: so many people gone out of their minds, so many gallons of vodka drunk, so many children dead from malnutrition. And this order of things is evidently necessary; evidently the happy man feels at ease only because the unhappy bear their burdens in silence, and without that silence happiness would be impossible." He goes on: There ought to be behind the door of every happy, contented man someone standing with a hammer continually reminding him with a tap that there are unhappy people; that however happy he may be, life will show her laws sooner or later, trouble will come for him- disease, poverty, losses, and no one will see or hear, just as now he neither sees nor hears others. Ivan Ivanovitch goes on in this didactic vein, ending with a plea for activism: "Do good," he says. Then Chekhov, as if anticipating the reader's reaction, writes, "Ivan Ivanovitch's story had not satisfied either Burkin or Alehin… It was dreary to listen to the story of the poor clerk who ate gooseberries. They felt inclined, for some reason, to talk about elegant people, about women."

The final story, "About Love," narrated the next day by Alehin during lunch, satisfies this inclination. This time, the aversion for the actual takes the form of renunciation. It is a fragment of Alehin's autobiography. Several years before, he and a young woman named Anna Alexyevna, who was married to a good but dull man, had met and fallen in love. However, unlike Gurov and Anna Sergeyevna (whom, in her delicate charm, Anna Alexyevna resembles), Alehin and Anna Alexyevna did not act on their feelings. For years they suppressed them, Alehin playing the part of the friend of the family, the bachelor uncle to the children, and Anna maintaining the appearance of the devoted wife. Only when the husband was taking up a new post in a distant region and Alehin came to say good-bye to Anna Alexyevna on the train did they finally acknowledge their love. When our eyes met in the compartment, our spiritual fortitude deserted us both; I took her in my arms, she pressed her face to my breast, and tears flowed from her eyes. Kissing her face, her shoulders, her hands, wet with tears-oh, how unhappy we were-I confessed my love for her, and with a burning pain in my heart I realized how unnecessary, how petty, and how deceptive all that had hindered us from loving was. I understood that when you love you must either, in your reasonings about that love, start from what is highest-from what is more important than happiness and unhappiness, sin or virtue in their accepted meaning-or you must not reason at all.

I kissed her for the last time, pressed her hand, and parted forever. The train had already started. I went into the next compartment-it was empty-and until I reached the next station I sat there crying. Alehin, though hardly a caricature like the Greek master or the squire brother, shares their existential malady. Like the coat and galoshes in which Byelikov encases himself and the fantasy with which the brother protects himself from the real, his attachment to conventional morality condemns him to his life of quiet desperation. A fourth desperate life- Anna Alexyevna's-is shown encasing itself in the padding of nervous illness; the train that bears her away is taking her to a transitional rest cure in the Crimea. When Chekhov wrote "The Lady with the Dog," he doubtless remembered her.