Some bits from Anton Chekhov's Gooseberries

[Borg Refinery]

Was just trying (& mostly failing, my mind can't frickin concentrate today..) to listen to an audiobook of Chekhov's the black monk & other stories.

So having half-listened to it, and read some more analysis, this quote really spoke to me -

When Ivan visits he finds his brother pompous, insufferable. The gooseberries – the first harvest – are "tough and sour", but Nikolai, "with tears in his eyes", pronounces them delicious. Ivan then embarks on a passionate tirade against the inequality of a society where "'the happy man feels good only because the unhappy bear their burden silently, and without that silence happiness would be impossible'":

We see those who go to the market to buy food, eat during the day, sleep during the night, who talk their nonsense, get married, grow old, complacently drag their dead to the cemetery; but we don't see or hear those who suffer, and the horrors of life go on somewhere behind the scenes.



Ivan's speech drags injustice and misery into Alekhin's snug drawing room. It is, to borrow Jack Kerouac's description of Naked Lunch: "a frozen moment when everybody sees what is on the end of every fork". As Malcolm writes of Gooseberries and its fellow stories, they "do not celebrate the hearth but, on the contrary, constitute a three-part parable about the perils of staying warm and safe, and thereby missing what is worthwhile in life, if not life itself". The meaning and purpose of life, Ivan exhorts his friends, does not reside in happiness and comfort, "but in something more intelligent and great", in kindness to one's fellow humans.

Ivan's behaviour irritates Burkin and Alekhin, who find it "boring to hear a story about a wretched official who ate gooseberries". They understandably don't want to hear about inequality and hardship, cosily swaddled as they are. But there is another, more enigmatic layer to Chekhov's story, one that perhaps only rereading unearths. Ivan calls happiness, just like the perceived succulence his brother's gooseberries, an illusion; and yet a suspicion grows that it is Nikolai's happiness, pure and simple, that angers Ivan

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2013/dec/11/comfort-reading-anton-chekhov-gooseberries

It just really spoke to me, I'll have to relisten anyway. What do you think? Any truth in it, care to expand on it in any way? It seems poignant too right now..