pschutt28

[pschutt28]

Re-reading Chekhov. From 'Gooseberries'

"But the point was not in him, but in myself. I want to tell you what a change took place in me during the few hours I spent at his place. In the evening, while we were having tea, the cook served a full plate of gooseberries. They weren't bought, they were his own gooseberries, the first picked since the bushes were planted. Nikolai Ivanych laughed and gazed silently at the gooseberries for a moment with tears in his eyes-he couldn't speak for excitement; then he put one berry in his mouth, glanced at me with the triumph of a child who has finally gotten his favorite toy, and said:

'How delicious!'

"And he ate greedily and kept repeating:

'Ah, how delicious! Try them!'

"They were tough and sour, but as Pushkin said, 'Dearer to us than a host of truths is an exalting illusion.' I saw a happy man, whose cherished dream had so obviously come true, who had attained his goal in life, had gotten what he wanted, who was content with his fate and with himself. For some reason there had always been something sad mixed with my thoughts about human happiness, but now, at the sight of a happy man, I was overcome by an oppressive feeling close to despair. It was especially oppressive during the night. My bed was made up in the room next to my brother's bedroom, and I could hear that he was not asleep and that he kept getting up and going to the plate of gooseberries and taking a berry. I thought: there are, in fact, so many contented, happy people! What an overwhelming force! Just look at this life: the insolence and idleness of the strong, the ignorance and brutishness of the weak, impossible poverty all around us, overcrowding, degeneracy, drunkenness, hypocrisy, lies… Yet in all the houses and streets it's quiet, peaceful; of the fifty thousand people who live in town there is not one who would cry out or become loudly indignant. 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 behind the scenes. Everything is quiet, peaceful, and only mute statistics protest: so many gone mad, so many buckets drunk, so many children dead of malnutrition… And this order is obviously necessary; obviously the happy man feels good only because the unhappy bear their burden silently, and without that silence happiness would be impossible. It's a general hypnosis. At the door of every contented, happy man somebody should stand with a little hammer, constantly tapping, to remind him that unhappy people exist, that however happy he may be, sooner or later life will show him its claws, some calamity will befall him — illness, poverty, loss—and nobody will hear or see, just as he doesn't hear or see others now. But there is nobody with a little hammer, the happy man lives on, and the petty cares of life stir him only slightly, as wind stirs an aspen—and everything is fine.

"That night I understood that I, too, was content and happy," Ivan Ivanych continued, getting up. "Over dinner or out hunting, I, too, gave lessons in how to live, how to believe, how to govern the people. I, too, said that knowledge is light, that education is necessary, but that for simple people literacy is enough for now. Freedom is good, I said, it's like air, we can't do without it, but we must wait. Yes, that was what I said, but now I ask: wait in the name of what?" Ivan Ivanych asked, looking angrily at Burkin. "Wait in the name of what, I ask you? In the name of what considerations? They tell me that it can't be done all at once, that every idea is realized gradually, in due time. But who says that? Where are the proofs that it's so? You refer to the natural order of things, to the lawfulness of phenomena, but is there order and lawfulness in the fact that I, a thinking man, must stand at a ditch and wait until it gets overgrown or silted up, when I could perhaps jump over it or build a bridge across it? And, again, wait in the name of what? Wait, when you haven't the strength to live, and yet you must live and want to live!

"I left my brother's early the next morning, and since then it has become unbearable for me to live in town. I'm oppressed by the peace and quiet, I'm afraid to look in the windows, because there's no more painful spectacle for me now than a happy family sitting around a table and drinking tea. I'm old and not fit for struggle, I'm not even capable of hatred. I only grieve inwardly, become irritated, vexed, my head burns at night from a flood of thoughts, and I can't sleep… Ah, if only I were young!"

Ivan Ivanych paced the room in agitation and repeated:

"If only I were young!"

He suddenly went up to Alekhin and began pressing him by one hand, then the other.

"Pavel Konstantinych!" he said in an entreating voice, “don't settle in, don't let yourself fall asleep! As long as you're young, strong, energetic, don't weary of doing good! There is no happiness and there shouldn't be, and if there is any meaning and purpose in life, then that meaning and purpose are not at all in our happiness, but in something more intelligent and great. Do good!"

And Ivan Ivanych said all this with a pitiful, pleading smile, as if he were asking personally for himself.

--

Pevear & Volokhonsky translation.