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*edited on 23.05.2021

Happiness doesn’t exist, we don’t need any such thing. If life has any meaning or purpose, you won’t find it in happiness, but in something more rational, in something greater. Doing good!


What is happiness? Human beings�� quest for happiness in life is often narrow-minded as they see happiness as the ultimate pursuit in life. Does it mean that unhappiness is not or should be part of life? Aren't both different aspects of the same emotion? And what does being happy mean? Does it correlate with success? What is a success then, how do we define it? And whose happiness we are talking about? What does it essentially mean? We need to further explore that is it materialistic in nature or metaphysical, don’t both of them represent our myopic vision. Another key point to be addressed is whether this happiness is selfish or altruistic, whether we need to bother about the society as a whole; and what about the social injustice or various other vagaries present in our society. We need to assess the essence of happiness when we have varied anomalies in our society. Let’s go deeper, to the core of ‘happiness��, the meaning we impart of our lives, the truth we seek in our lives to define it, how much it matters when we talk about happiness; the petty achievements we acquire over the course of our lives, do they really matter, if they don’t then why do we worry so much about them.



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Gooseberries is one of the stories written in the last phase of Anton Chekov’s life, the artistic abilities of people often seem to be waned, gradually after touching prime of their prowess but that’s not the case with Chekov, he produced in masterpieces-both in prose and drama- in this phase of his life, perhaps that’s why he is regarded as one of the best short fiction authors, as relevant today as he was then- a timeless beauty. We see that there is an interesting overlapping of modernism and the creative outburst of Anton Chekov in the last phase of his life. During that period, impressionism was gaining popularity in both art and literature, though later it was quickly surpassed by Expressionism and other post-impressionist trends.


It represents a unique feature of its kind, as it is essentially a story within a story, the narrator- Ivan Ivanych, the vet and Burkin, a teacher at a high school took shelter at Alyokhin’s as they get soaked from top to bottom in the divine water pouring from the overcast sky. Ivanych is invited by the group to tell the story which has been impending for some time, the anticipation of the story is so much that not only Burkin and Alyokhin but also the ladies (young and old), and the officers, who were looking down calmly and solemnly from their gilt frames on the walls, are also waiting eagerly, fixing their eyes on Ivanych. The story is about Ivan Ivanych, who is disgusted by the silliness of his brother, Nikolay Ivanych, for he considers the minuscule, materialistic acquisitions in life as happiness, he seems to be blind to the universal human quest for eventual contentment.

Ivanych goes on preaching that people should look for meaning in their lives rather than gratifying themselves with petty things in life. He makes allusion to Tolstoy’s famous story-‘How much land a man need?, They say a man needs only six feet of earth, but surely they must mean a corpse- not a man!, perhaps to emphasize upon the futility of materialistic achievements. The (first person) narrator discusses at length what humanity actually needs in life rather than what it desires for; the empires, estates accumulated by the educated classes but eventually everyone needs just six feet of land. Man sacrifices his personal, real life, in the pretense of acquiring something that is essentially worthless, effectively he lives a meaningless and uncontended life.

A man needs more than six feet of earth and a little place in the country, he needs the whole wide world, the whole of nature, where there’s room for him to display his potential, all the manifold attributes of his free spirit.


The questions about life keep reverberating through the story, it raises the intriguing point of unspeakable poverty, overcrowding, degeneracy, drunkenness, hypocrisy, and lies as we do not get the utmost satisfaction, we quest for in our lives. The peace and quiet that seem to be prevalent in our lives are shallow and baseless since the social injustice, inherent to our society, creates an imitation of happiness for privileged people who seems to oblivious to the underprivileged ones. The vehement critic of Nikolay, his brother Ivanych preaches about the man’s inability to look for real purpose in life rather than taking refuge in so-called happiness, but we see that he himself doesn’t do anything for the same, however, he urges his friends to devise a meaningful life for themselves, reflects the irony of life.

It’s obvious that the happy man feels contented only because the unhappy ones bear their burden without saying a word: if it weren’t for their silence, happiness would be quite impossible. It’s a kind of mass hypnosis.

And I thought how many satisfied, happy people really do exist in this world! And what a powerful force they are! Just take a look at this life of ours and you will see the arrogance and idleness of the strong, the ignorance and bestiality of the weak.



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The author presents a unique mix of narrative style in the story, the tale starts in a third-person narrative with a non-existent but omniscient narrator but with the onset of the 'story within in the story', it switches to first person narrative with Ivanych taking a central role in it. The language is rich and full of imagery, as you expect from Chekov, like an impressionist painting but Chekov demands his reader to play an active role in the story, Chekov’s prose has features of more like modernist literature. He deliberately evades some details of the narrative, adopting a minimalist approach (which later expounded and explored by the likes of Hemingway and Beckett) since the message, themes of a story should not be obvious to the narrator. His prose focuses upon melancholy, mood, feelings, and consciousness of the characters, around lyrical, poetic, and vivid settings. We see that the smallest, peculiar details are given importance in the story, probably to dip the senses of the reader in a tinge of wry humor. We witness an intriguing feature of Chekov’s prose that otherwise gets unnoticed, he uses lyrical repetitiveness (not like Bernhard) in a way that words may not be repeated as such but emotions or moods are repeated in the story, perhaps to pepper the reader with conflicting and unsettling notions.

My thoughts about human happiness, for some, peculiar reason, had always been tinged with a certain sadness.


The tale may across a simple story, as happens with most of the stories of Chekov, to a casual reader, but Chekov did not write for those innocuous readers, for the story has to be read more than once to understand its intended meaning. Gooseberries is a great example of the fact that why Chekov is considered among the most influential modern short stories authors, his impact is omnipresent though we may rarely find authors giving him credit, individually. He wrote to throw questions, basic questions- about life, at his readers, whose job is to actively engage themselves to search for infinite probable answers to those questions.

They were hard and sour, but as Pushkin says: “Uplifting illusion is dearer to us than a host of truths.��