Moscow, Gooseberries, and Inexorable Motion of Time
reading Chekhov, philosophising, and drinking vodka
Is there anything more frightening, tragic and inevitable than the inexorable motion of time and human's futile attempts to resist it or simply lament how it, time itself, imperceptibly slips away somewhere?
—Ghastly party, this one,—time would say.—Every other person here is some sort of esoteric normie. I bloody hate esoteric normies. Do loosen up already. With that, I take my leave. Adieu.
And then *poof* and it was gone, leaving an unfinished drink by the exit. Good thing it wasn't *bang-bang*, and for that much, we're grateful. What would be your time's drink of choice?
There are, of course, less futile efforts, those that one applies to accelerate time, or to anchor oneself within it. Having accelerated it, one need not think about it, as if it doesn't exist. It will simply pass, but there will be something to remember, to feel nostalgic about. Having anchored oneself, time can be slowed down and bring into one's existence, perhaps, a bit of pleasant boredom, or better put—stability and relaxed enjoyment of the present moment. There will be time both to philosophise and to yearn, and perhaps even to feel nostalgic, if, of course, there's anything to feel nostalgic about. As if there's a certain amount of experience that can be lived through in a certain period of time, and one can either complete the express course, or stretch out the pleasure. If, as they say, one is to "speed", then one must brake with care, for according to all laws of physics, if one suddenly stops, one might fly over the handlebars, face first onto the corrugated asphalt. At worst—you'll break your neck and die from such an unexpected turn, at best—you'll scratch your mug bloody. It might heal, or it might leave scars, if measures aren't taken in time—that's up to chance. Everything is, in a sense, a lottery, and every action is, in a sense, a ticket.
Paradoxically, with the passage of time, what accumulates is not only experience but also the absence of experience, such as unfulfilled dreams, missed opportunities, actions of an untaken nature, which, though they don't exist and have no physical manifestation, often prove more important and defining for a person than those they actually did.
Human beings are creatures that, under normal conditions, constantly wants something, even when they want nothing, for that too is a desire. Is there anything more fundamental to human nature, both in the animal and, pardon the tautology, human sense? Perhaps we should even call it not homo sapiens, but homo cupiens, the desiring human, the striving human. It is precisely this striving towards something or someone, taken in brackets and multiplied by time, that forms the soil for both the brightest achievements and catastrophic fiascos, as well as for those very unfulfilled hopes and untaken actions. Thus, with the accumulation of nostalgic potential grows the potential for regret, the syndrome of delayed life, which develops into the syndrome of unlived life.
If one digs Chekhov’s work deep enough, one can find everything and some extra, but we shall concentrate our efforts on merely two examples, stories that directly, albeit often with subtlety, explore aspirations, dreams, their fulfilment or a lack thereof, and how entirely different people live with these sensations, be it yearning or existential confusion. Since this is Chekhov, finding completely happy and positive examples will be difficult (we'll leave that as an exercise for the reader).
In "Three Sisters," a play which, according to Chekhov, is “as complex as a novel”, the plot revolves around the personal experiences and subsequent tragedies of one family. Moscow general Prozorov receives a brigade and moves with his children, three daughters and a son, to a provincial town, but dies several years later. In the first act of the play, his children, friends and former subordinates gather for the youngest daughter Masha's birthday. In the course of their dialogues, they remember their father, the past, especially Moscow, and how good it was there, and make plans for the future: some dream of work that would bring them peace of mind, some of returning to Moscow, where there's no provincial boredom and everything is good, some—both simultaneously. This "return" runs as a refrain throughout the entire play and at times seems like a mantra, a spell that the characters repeat to draw it nearer.
For Olga, Moscow is the "homeland," associated with spring, warmth and light, contrasted with the provincial cold and mosquitoes. For Andrei, Moscow is a way to satisfy his scientific ambitions or simply spend an evening in a good restaurant. Irina dreams of meeting her love in Moscow. Masha yearns for Moscow's intellectual environment. Baron Tuzenbach plans to enter university there. Even the half-deaf watchman Ferapont follows Moscow news.
Irina. Let's leave for Moscow. Sell the house, finish everything here and—to Moscow...
Olga. Yes! To Moscow, quickly.
For the characters, Moscow is a symbol of hope for a bright future, while the provincial town, which preferred to remain anonymous, is a dead-end where no one is interested in anything except taverns and card games, no one understands music, and the sisters’ excellent education with knowledge of several languages is redundant. Thus, in the town where they have lived for eleven years, have occupations, acquaintances, and so forth, they feel alien and “unnecessary”.
Other characters, for instance, Vershinin, take a more sceptical view of the idea of "Moscow" being capable of solving all life's problems. Happiness, he believes, doesn't exist in principle, for it is only possible in the distant future, in two hundred, three hundred years, while present life with all its attributes is empty, which in this distant future "will be forgotten and seem uncomfortable, unwise, unimportant, or perhaps even sinful."
Vershinin. In two hundred, three hundred years, life on earth will be unimaginably beautiful, astonishing. Man needs such a life, and if it doesn't exist yet, he must anticipate it, wait for it, dream of it, prepare for it, he must for this purpose see and know more than his grandfather and father saw and knew. (Laughs.) And you complain that you know too much that's unnecessary.
Masha (taking off her hat). I'm staying for breakfast.
Irina (with a sigh). Really, all this should be written down...
For him, the phantasmal image Moscow is replaced by the image of a phantasmal future, which is symbolically the same thing, except that he has no hope seeing it himself. Just as the sisters constantly repeat about life in Moscow ("To Moscow! To Moscow! To Moscow!"), Vershinin constantly "philosophises" about the distant beautiful future.
Vershinin. In two hundred-three hundred, finally, a thousand years—the timing doesn't matter—a new, happy life will come. We won't participate in this life, of course, but we live for it now, work, well, suffer, we create it—and in this alone lies the purpose of our existence and, if you like, our happiness.
Masha laughs quietly.
He doesn't believe in the existence of any other kind of happiness.
Masha. Happy is he who doesn't notice whether it's summer or winter now. It seems to me that if I were in Moscow, I would be indifferent to the weather...
Vershinin. The other day I read the diary of a French minister, written in prison. The minister was convicted for Panama. With what delight, what rapture he mentions the birds he sees in the prison window and which he never noticed before, when he was a minister. Now, of course, when he's been released, he once again doesn't notice birds. Similarly, you won't notice Moscow when you live there. We have no happiness and there isn't any, we only desire it.
However, despite all their desires and aspirations, none of the characters dares to take steps towards them. Instead, from act to act, they sink deeper into provincial routine, always prepare for something, doubting, endlessly delay and reflect, have the same conversations about the past, dreams, names of dishes, languish from boredom, and yearn about how their youth is passing.
Irina. I must look for another job, this one isn't for me. What I wanted so much, what I dreamed about, that's exactly what it lacks. Labour without poetry, without thoughts...
...
Tuzenbach. Meaning... Look, it's snowing. What's the meaning in that?
Pause.
Masha. It seems to me, a person must be believing or must seek faith, otherwise their life is empty, empty... To live and not know why the cranes fly, why children are born, why there are stars in the sky... Either know why you live, or else it's all nonsense, thistledown.
Pause.
Vershinin. Still, it's a pity that youth has passed...
Masha. Gogol says: it's boring to live in this world, ladies and gentlemen!
Tuzenbach. And I'll say: it's difficult to argue with you, ladies and gentlemen! Oh, leave it all...
Chebutykin (reading a newspaper). Balzac was married in Berdichev.
Irina hums quietly.
...
Irina (sobbing). Where? Where has it all gone? Where is it? Oh, my God, my God! I've forgotten everything, forgotten... everything's confused in my head... I don't remember how to say window in Italian or ceiling... I forget everything, every day I forget, and life is passing and will never return, never, never will we go to Moscow... I see that we won't go...
...
Irina (to Olga). Dear, my darling, I respect, I value the baron, he's an excellent person, I'll marry him, I agree, only let's go to Moscow! I beg you, let's go! There's nothing better in the world than Moscow! Let's go, Olya! Let's go!
Andrei. The present’s repugnant, but when I think about the future, oh, how good it is!
From a mundane point of view, the reasons for their characters suffering might seem trivial: nothing prevents the well-off and educated sisters from moving to Moscow, even despite it being not simple for a woman in the late 19th century, just as it's within Andrei's power to leave the civil service and pursue science, as he dreams. Though they evoke sympathy, their problems don't appear insurmountable. Their dramas have little in common with religious seeking or struggle against tsarist regime's arbitrariness, which we might encounter in works by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, but, as Chekhov says, this doesn't make them petty and unworthy of attention. For very often people become unhappy from the mere inexorable, irreversible and deceptive motion of time.
Another work by Chekhov, the story "Gooseberries," has a different take on dreams and aspirations. Nikolai Ivanovich, the central character of the story, dreams of an estate in a quiet village, where necessarily, quite definitely, absolutely, without exception—there's no other way—gooseberries must grow, lots of gooseberries. The pictures of the ideal place forming in his head might have a large house, garden, forking paths in that garden, flowers, fruit, birdhouses, a river, crucian carp in the ponds, and so forth, in various variations and degrees of optionality, but none of them can be imagined without gooseberry bushes.
"Country life has its advantages," he used to say. "You sit on the balcony, drinking tea, while your ducks swim in the pond, there's such a lovely smell and... and gooseberries grow."
He would draw the plan of his estate, and each time the plan would show the same thing: a) the manor house, b) servants' quarters, c) vegetable garden, d) gooseberries.
The ironic, in some sense even absurd obsession with gooseberries is diametrically opposed to how the characters in "Three Sisters" behave. Compared to them, Nikolai Ivanovich possesses extraordinary determination and to satisfy his aspiration sacrifices his present life for the sake of future life, life in the estate of his dreams: he undereats, underdrinks, dresses like a pauper, puts all his money in the bank, and even hides received gifts. One might consider this typical miserliness or hyperfocus on the idea of an estate with gooseberries, but "when a man is possessed by an idea, there's no doing anything," says the narrator.
"After his wife's death, my brother began looking for an estate. Of course, you might look for five years, but still in the end you'll make a mistake and buy not at all what you dreamed of. Through an agent, with transfer of the debt, my brother Nikolai bought a hundred and twelve acres with a manor house, servants' quarters, with a park, but no fruit garden, no gooseberries, no ponds with ducks; there was a river, but the water in it was the colour of coffee, because on one side of the estate was a brickworks and on the other a bone-crushing factory. But my Nikolai Ivanich worried little about that; he ordered twenty gooseberry bushes for himself, planted them, and began living as a landowner."
Then Ivan Ivanich tells how he once visited his brother at his estate:
In the evening, when we were drinking tea, the cook served a plateful of gooseberries to the table. These weren't bought ones, but his own gooseberries, gathered for the first time since the bushes were planted. Nikolai Ivanich laughed and gazed at the gooseberries silently for a minute, with tears in his eyes—he couldn't speak from emotion, then put one berry in his mouth, looked at me with the triumph of a child who has finally received his favourite toy, and said:
"How delicious!"
And he ate greedily and kept repeating:
"Ah, how delicious! Do try some!"
They were hard and sour, but, as Pushkin said, "a delusion that exalts us is dearer than a host of low truths." I saw a happy man whose cherished dream had been so obviously fulfilled, who had achieved his goal in life, who had gotten what he wanted, who was satisfied with his fate, with himself. To my thoughts about human happiness there had always somehow been mixed something sad, but now, at the sight of a happy man, I was overcome by an oppressive feeling, close to despair. Especially oppressive at night. They made up a bed for me in the room next to my brother's bedroom, and I could hear how he wasn't sleeping and how he got up and went to the plate of gooseberries and took them one by one.
The story is incredibly voluminous and multilayered. It contains "many good thoughts," as praised by Nemirovich-Danchenko (the theatre director who staged many of Chekhov's plays) and Tolstoy. One can find in it both criticism of petty desires and the limitations of life goals—"case-bound life," in Chekhov's words—as well as pessimism regarding the unattainability of human dreams and aspirations, which can be interpreted both as that the true meaning of life is something more sensible and grand, or even as social criticism of the indifference to society by people like Nikolai Ivanovich, for he didn’t do much “good” in his life while focusing on that only goal. But for me, the main theme is still the relationship between the striving and time, how time reveals the true price of life goals and achievements, about the realisation of the tragic meaninglessness of lived life when it's too late to change anything, and the subsequent acceptance of false happiness.
With the passage of time, Nikolai Ivanich transforms from a timid civil servant into a self-satisfied landowner. Time seems to "conserve" him in his delusions, inside his achieved illusory dream, when even sour and hard gooseberries seem tasty to him, for he has no other choice. Something similar happens to the narrator, Ivan Ivanich. Time makes him simultaneously both witness and judge of the story he tells. Only with the years did he realise the tragic emptiness of his brother's aspirations ("To my thoughts about human happiness there had always somehow been mixed something sad"), but it was too late to change anything ("I am already old and unfit for struggle, I am incapable even of hatred. I only grieve in my soul, become irritated, vexed, at night my head burns from the flood of thoughts, and I cannot sleep... Ah, if only I were young!"), yearning akin to what characters of “Three Sisters” experience.
This bitter confession expresses one of Chekhov's paradoxes, which can be applied to both "Three Sisters" and "Gooseberries," and even to "The Cherry Orchard" in some way—realisation without catharsis. Sometimes realisation comes in time, and yet action seems meaningless, but sometimes realisation comes when it’s already too late to act. In both cases, nothing to be done. Time bestows wisdom but takes away strength, and thus the only thing left for Ivan Ivanich is an impassioned plea to people not to settle down, not to let themselves be lulled to sleep, to try to overcome that inexorable motion of time while that time still exists.
If you enjoyed this essay, you might be interested in reading “Where is that City N?”, another deep dive into the Chekhoverse and antiplaces with my home town.
Nova Nevédoma paid subscribers can also enjoy my translations of Chekhov’s letters to his brother: rules for aspiring authors and traits of cultured people.
If time, memory, nostalgia, emigration are curious topics for you, check out my short stories centered around the semi-mythical Russian village of Tulubaika.
Beams of appreciation!
What a masterpiece to wake up to!! First time running across your work and I’m already a devoted fan. Thank you.
This is very uncanny because I woke up today thinking, I want to write about Chekhov’s short stories, ans was thinking about Gooseberries in particular. Of course you did a much better job than I would have but I love teaching him.