“Man in a Case”, “Gooseberries”, “About Love”

After reading Rosamund Bartlett’s biography of Tolstoy (which is brilliant and fair-minded), I returned to Chekhov with the Penguin Lady with the Little Dog and Other Stories, translated by Ronald Wilks. I shouldn’t be writing about these stories because I’m new to them and don’t have a lot to say, but if that doesn’t stop others, why should it stop me. 

“Man in a Case”, “Gooseberries”, and “About Love” form a triptych, and they’re interesting for 2 main reasons. 

First of all, I can’t help thinking that quite a lot of Chekhov’s stories are some kind of reaction against Tolstoy. “My Life” is an obvious example, depicting the complications when a member of the intelligentsia returns to manual labour and marries a woman of the same class, who likes his ideals and decides to buy a farm but has never worked on one. “The House with the Mezzanine”, the first story in this collection, raises the question of what should be done about peasants and poor people in Russia, through its depiction of a conflict between a woman who is deeply engaged in the affairs of the local zemstvo and devoted to helping peasants, and a landscape painter who has different ideas.

“Gooseberries” has a passage that seems to be a direct reference to Tolstoy’s “How Much Land Does a Man Need”. “About Love” seems to be another of Chekhov’s responses to Anna Karenina, like “Lady with the Little Dog” and “Anna on the Neck”. It is about a man who falls in love with a friend’s wife and often visits them both, but never mentions his feelings till she is sick and moves away. 

Look at this passage:

“Whether I was at home, out in the fields, in the barn, I couldn’t stop thinking about her, and I tried to unravel the mystery of that young, beautiful, clever woman who had married an uninteresting man, who could almost be called old (he was over forty) and had borne his children. And I tried to solve the enigma of that boring, good-natured, simple-minded fellow, with his insufferable common sense, always crawling up to the local stuffed shirts at balls and soirées, a lifeless, useless man whose submissive, indifferent expression made you think he’d been brought along as an object for sale, a man who believed, however, that he had the right to be happy and to be the father of her children. I never gave up trying to understand why she was fated to meet him, and not me, why such a horrible mistake should have to occur in our lives.” 

Does that not make you think of Anna Karenina? 

Note too that her name is Anna Alekseyevna. In Anna Karenina, both Karenin and Vronsky are named Alexey.

But Anna Alekseyevna isn’t Anna Karenina and Alyokhin isn’t Vronsky, so they do nothing: 

“Although I loved her tenderly, deeply, I reasoned with myself and tried to guess what the consequences would be if we had no strength to combat it. It seemed incredible that my gentle, cheerless love could suddenly rudely disrupt the happy lives of her husband and children – of that whole household in fact, where I was so loved and trusted. Was I acting honourably? She would have gone away with me, but where could I take her? It would have been another matter if my life had been wonderful and eventful – if, for example, I’d been fighting to liberate my country, or if I’d been a famous scholar, actor or artist. But I’d only be taking her away from an ordinary, pedestrian life into one that was just the same, just as prosaic, even more so, perhaps. And just how long would we stay happy? What would become of her if I was taken ill, or died? Or if we simply stopped loving each other?” 

“About Love” is my favourite in the trilogy. 

The trilogy is also interesting because of the framing device: in “Man in a Case”, the story of Belikov is told by Burkin, a teacher, to his friend Ivan Ivanych, a vet; in “Gooseberries”, Ivan Ivanych tells Burkin and Alyokhin the story of his brother Nikolay; and in “About Love”, Alyokhin tells his love story to Ivan Ivanych and Burkin. 

Why does Chekhov do so?  

One advantage is that he can get away with moralising—it’s not Chekhov but Burkin who talks about people who enclose themselves in some kind of shell, and it’s not Chekhov but Ivan Ivanych who argues that happiness is a mere illusion and people can only be happy because they don’t know about others’ suffering. More importantly, the device creates some kind of distance and makes us question the “morals” and even the storytellers. In “Man in a Case” for example, Burkin talks about Belikov but he himself was also scared of Belikov and feels relieved after his death, only to realise that everything afterwards remains the same in the village. In “Gooseberries”, Ivan Ivanych preaches about doing good and not getting lulled into complacency, but there doesn’t seem to be any indication that he himself does good—he doesn’t notice the lack of interest from his listeners, and at the end of the story, doesn’t notice that the terrible smell of stale tobacco from his pipe makes his friend Burkin unable to sleep for a long time. 

In “About Love”, there’s no moralising, but the framing device allows us to see Alyokhin and his prosaic life from the outside, before he begins his story, and that has an effect on how we take his story and how we imagine things would be if Alyokhin declared his feelings earlier and Anna Alekseyevna left her husband for him. 

These are wonderful stories. 

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I got my second dose yesterday afternoon and have been sick from last night. I was so miserable earlier that I couldn’t even read. Now I’m still tired but slightly better, and can read some Chekhov.