One of my favorite short stories is Anton Chekhov’s “Gooseberries.” It was one of his last, written in 1898. He died a few years later of tuberculosis. He was forty-four years old.
In “Gooseberries,” Ivan Ivanych tells two friends about his brother’s lifelong desire to own a farm. The brother dreamed of growing and selling gooseberries. And it happened. The dream, though, blinded the brother to those around him. His wife, who financed his dream, died at a young age. The peasants who worked his land lived in poverty.
Ivan recounted the time he visited his brother. The brother gave him some of the cherished gooseberries. They were hard and sour. Ivan had difficulty eating them. The brother, however, devoured them. Later, as he lay in bed, Ivan heard his brother in the next room get up and eat more gooseberries. This continued all night, leading Ivan to conclude:
“I saw a happy man, one whose cherished dream has so obviously come true, who had attained his goal in life, who had got what he wanted, who was satisfied with his lot and himself. For some reason an element of sadness had always mingled with my thoughts of human happiness, and now with the sight of a happy man I was assailed by an oppressive feeling bordering on despair....
That despair, however, arose not so much from what his brother was doing nor from seeing his brother happy. For Ivan, it reflected something larger about society and himself.
[O]bviously the happy man is at ease only because the unhappy ones bear their burdens in silence, and if there were not this silence, happiness would be impossible. It is a general hypnosis. Behind the door of every contented, happy man there ought to be someone standing with a little hammer and continually reminding him with a knock that there are unhappy people, that however happy he may be, life will sooner or later show him its claws, and trouble will come to him.... But there is no man with a hammer.”
Much depends here on how one interprets “life will sooner or later show him its claws, and trouble will come to him.” One can take it as justice wills out—the brother will get what he deserves—or as the admonition that tragedy in one form or another awaits us all. Either way, Ivan skirts up to a polemical wall then backs away. After philosophizing about the world’s inequality and injustices, he suggests trouble is around the corner for those responsible. They’ll get theirs, maybe; they just don’t know it yet because no one is really pressing the issue—the hammerers aren’t coming.
Ivan then confesses that he, too, had “been contented and happy.” He, too, “espouse[d] the universal refrain: equality, justice, and education for all, but not now and not all at once.” He then asked, “Why must we wait? Wait until we have no strength to live.... As long as you are young, strong, alert, do not cease to do good!”
As much as I want to agree with this sentiment, it’s a bit trite to me. Maybe coming out of Ivan’s mouth and from Chekhov’s pen it was a fresh response to socioeconomic inequality, a heartfelt call to arms a hundred twenty-five years ago. Today, it rings hallow even as it comes from a good place and is motivated by good intentions. Still, Ivan’s confesses his own failures and calls us to action.
In Chekhovian irony, however, Ivan’s two friends, who had sat silently through the long story, didn’t respond. Instead, they began to talk of beautiful women and the elegance of the room they were in. For the two friends, Chekhov wrote:
it was tedious to listen to the story of the poor devil of a clerk who ate gooseberries.... [The host] did not trouble to ask himself if what Ivan Ivanych had just said was intelligent or right. The guests were not talking about groats, or hay, or tar, but about something that had no direct bearing on his life...”
Of course, we aren’t supposed to like these two. There’s nothing in the story to suggest they aren’t anything but bastards. We all know people like them. Sometimes they are us. Or more to the point, it was me when I got to Ivan confession and call to action. “Nice story, Ivan, but stop the moralizing.”
What Ivan did, though, is what we all tend to do more often than we’ll admit. He confesses or speaks to who he is and aspires to be. Confession, in a non-religious or non-spiritual sense, is a concept from Michel Foucault’s later work. It’s a form of truth telling about oneself. Without wallowing in the academic weeds, we can think of it as our response to the reciprocity of the material and ideological structures that frame our existence (Foucault’s technologies of power) and the ways of being we enlist in identifying who we are as humans (Foucault’s technologies of self). As a way of self-actualizing, confession is a way of telling the world about ourselves (I’ve written about this elsewhere).
For example, the “Me Writing” link on this website is chocked full of my confessions. It gives you a pretty good idea of not only who I am but also how I want to present myself. Same goes for blog posts, even when they aren’t about me (like this one).
Ivan’s brother’s story gave Ivan a platform to talk about himself, mostly implicitly but explicitly at the end (which may be why people like me roll their eyes and call it moralizing). He was confessing to friends who he was and wanted to be in the world as he understood it. His friends, however, have none of it, and the rest of the story is pretty much about how the visit was ruined for everyone.
The greater irony of all this is that Ivan was wielding a big hammer at the end of his story. He wields it, however, with the effect of smashing any pleasure anyone was having. To a small degree, I can’t help but sympathize with Ivan’s two friends. How seriously can we take Ivan’s claims that his brother’s life was miserable? His brother appears happy or at least enjoys eating his gooseberries. And how bad could the gooseberries be? They have made the brother rich. Someone’s buying them. And might the wife have died regardless of the brother’s actions? And what peasants in czarist Russia weren’t poor?
Ivan’s claims about his brother and others of his ilk, however, are not the point of the story. His friends know that. Neither is how the friends respond the point. Remember, they’re bastards. The point is that Ivan is like us, or maybe Ivan is Chekhov and Chekhov is like us. Ivan’s jockeying amongst others to make sense of the world and define himself in it in a way that gives his life the meaning he seeks. And so are his friends, and so are the rest of us. And maybe so was Chekhov who was diagnosed with tuberculosis a year before “Gooseberries” was published.
We want people to notice and praise us, encourage us, or at least commiserate with us. So what if Ivan’s friends don’t do that? Their comeuppance is coming. Or as Ivan said, “life will sooner or later show him its claws, and trouble will come to him.” But it won’t be by someone like Ivan wielding a hammer, especially not a metaphorical hammer and the tap, tap, tap of disdain.
I’ve read “Gooseberries” more times than I can count, but I’m still left wondering what Chekhov was trying to do. What is he confessing? Might he be saying that good stories like Ivan’s and, in turn, his own do not make very good hammers, especially if no one is listening? I mean, really listening. I’ve come to wonder what Chekhov, the doctor, thought about Chekhov, the storyteller, and which of these time-consuming preoccupations consumed him most and gave him the greatest satisfaction. Maybe he knew it’s not enough to be a storyteller. Maybe he realized one can only confess so much before action becomes essential, before you need to come out swinging that hammer…smash, smash, smash.