This week we’re reading three of Anton Chekhov’s most beloved short stories: The Man in the Case, Gooseberries, and About Love (The Little Trilogy, 1898).
We get a minor assist from George Saunders and his fantastic book A Swim in the Pond in the Rain but have no shortage of stuff to discuss.
Talking big 5 personality traits, the degree to which people oppress themselves, why Rich fell out of love with the early retirement movement, whether it’s OK to be happy in a world full of suffering, and if having to settle in romantic relationships is antithetical to true love. Also: Cam takes a controversial and brave stance against home-wreckers.
intro
Rich: So we are reading Anton Chekhov’s Little Trilogy.
Benny: After failing to read his play.
Rich: Oh yeah, so we said last time we were going to read —
Cam: It speaks for itself.
Benny: Yeah.
Rich: We’re going to read The Cherry Orchard. I got too bored and I made a switch after Cam had already read it, so we’ll do a bonus segment where Cam just monologues about The Cherry Orchard.
Cam: Benny was chasing girls in Auschwitz instead of reading Chekhov.
Rich: Did you get horny in Auschwitz? Like, you know, they say death and sexuality are closely —
Cam: Did you pull? Did you pull in Auschwitz?
Benny: I did not, I did not pull in Auschwitz. Um, no, yeah, it’s, uh, it’s actually it’s intense being there. It’s emotionally intense. Like that bus ride back, you’re in a different place. I would say like to just like to see the the deliberateness — deliberateness, is that a word? Deliberateness. Um, just, yeah, I don’t know, we don’t have to go into it now, but uh it was emotionally taxing for sure.
Cam: Don’t want to turn it into a Holocaust episode.
Rich: Yeah, all right, let’s try again. So this week we’re doing Anton Chekhov’s Little Trilogy, which were a series of late short stories published in 1898 shortly before his premature death of tuberculosis, and named so because there were going to be more entries. It wasn’t going to be a trilogy, but he didn’t have the energy to keep going with it, so we just have these three stories which have shared characters and some thematic or textual overlaps. I think — maybe let’s find out.
‘The Man in the Case’ synopsis
So they’re called “The Man in a Case,” “Gooseberries,” and “About Love.” So the first one is “The Man in the Case.” We meet our protagonists, who are named Ivan and Birkin. Ivan is a vet and Birkin is a school teacher. They’re out in the countryside. They’ve been shooting and night’s coming. So they doss down in somebody’s barn for the night and they’re telling each other stories. And Birkin tells Ivan the story, a sad story about one of his colleagues at the high school named Belikov, who is the titular man in a case.
So how would you describe Belikov? Yeah, the man in the case is so called because he keeps his pen knife in a little leather case, and he keeps his — what was the other thing?
Benny: Umbrella in a case. His watch. Um, and I think at some point they make an allusion to like his face being in a case because of his collar or something.
Rich: Yeah, he pops his collar on his pink Ralph Lauren polo.
Cam: And metaphorically, he keeps himself in a case, right? Sort of.
Benny: We should bring that look back, I think — the popped collar.
Rich: I can imagine you being one of those guys for some reason.
Benny: I was one of those guys in probably junior high or something.
Rich: I knew it, I knew it. Pop polo.
Cam: Paula?
Benny: Oh yeah, I had polo with popped collar. It was crazy, it was wild. For a while I was doing, like, I would have a tie on but keep the collar popped.
Rich: Oh my god, did you have one of those little wooden bead necklaces?
Benny: Oh my god, it was something else. That was a different phase. Come on, man. Also, the beads come out after hours.
Cam: I can see that as well. After hours in Auschwitz.
Rich: A leather studded bracelet.
Cam: It’s great intuition, Richard, that you called the pop collar.
Rich: Yeah, I don’t know, something about Bennies, it’s like your look would be the preppy look, I think, kind of like the — yeah.
Benny: Yeah, I did have that look. Possibly still do, I’m not sure, but now I just look like a bum.
Rich: Um, okay, so Belikov, he carries an umbrella everywhere and he wears galoshes, which is kind of like overshoes, you know, protection for your shoes.
Cam: I had to Google that one.
Rich: Yeah, me too. And he’s just sort of obsessed with shutting himself away from the world. He’s very averse to trying new things and he wants to be protected from the world. So like, in modern parlance, we would say that he is very low openness to experience through the lens of the big five personality test. And then that sort of manifests itself as like this obsessiveness and anxiety, where he has to create like a protective buffer between himself and the world. And it’s almost like agoraphobia, where he does actually go out into the world, but only when he’s wrapped up and protected with many literal and metaphorical protections against its influence.
So that’s an interesting character, and I think that would be okay, but the reason that it is fit for the topic of a story is that he casts this like oppressive influence onto the people around him as well, and then across the entire town. So people are afraid of his sort of looming presence — that he might be judging any behavior that’s slightly immodest or improper or adventurous. Like there’s a big set piece where he’s absolutely scandalized that a schoolmaster is riding on a bicycle, which is utterly unsuitable for an educator of youth.
The turning point in the story is he gets this big opportunity to break away from this oppressive mold and experience some character development and engage with the world. But before we get there, do you guys have anything to add on his general sort of who is this guy and what his psychological profile is?
Benny: I like that he would visit people in the town and just sit in silence while visiting them.
Rich: For like an hour.
Benny: So he would just, for like an hour, yeah, just force people to endure his presence without saying a single thing for like an hour, and then just stand up and leave. Just having everyone in the town be absolutely terrified that this man’s going to visit or call them out on some sort of behavior while they’re walking down the street or something.
Cam: I could imagine this sort of — I mean, probably not as extreme — but this sort of person that you kind of feel sorry for because it seems so tragic and seems like he’s not happy. And then you could just imagine them doing something and then you’re like, oh yeah, this is why everyone hates you, you know what I mean. Like, you almost extend an olive branch to him and you’re trying to show him compassion or friendship, and then you can imagine his growth, he’s like enjoying it — and this kind of happens maybe a little bit with his love interest — and then you could just imagine him just totally reversing all of it and just dobbing you in on something or saying something rude, and you’re just like, okay, no, fuck this, isn’t worth it. But it is kind of tragic ultimately.
Are some personality types just better than others?
Benny: Here’s a slightly tangential question, which maybe takes us too far afield, but maybe not. Do you guys think it’s better in terms of leading to like more happiness if you’re more open to experience? So like the big five personality traits are often just described totally non-normatively — they’re just described as like dimensions along which people differ. It’s not necessarily better or worse to be high or low on any of these traits, it’s just how people are.
Cam: Yeah, who wants to be highly neurotic, bro? It’s the title of them, mate. To be honest, that’s one of the underrated things about Myers-Briggs. It’s like, yeah, I’m an FMTI or whatever it is. You can say that on a date. I’m really high in disagreeableness — it’s a bit harder to say on a date.
Benny: Yeah, but like, one of my evolving opinions as I get older is I think it’s sort of just easier to be an extrovert in life. And I’m wondering if you can just make the case sort of based on this story that it would just be better for him if he was more open to experience. Like he’s just making himself and other people miserable, and the fact that he’s so closed off from experiencing anything new is not just a personality trait that we can’t pass judgment on. We could just say like, you know, is he just fundamentally missing something by not being more open to experience?
Rich: It’s funny you should say that, Benny, because there was a paper that just came out this week, I think, arguing that there is in fact an objectively superior personality.
Cam: The golden ratio of sorts.
Rich: Yeah, that the big five traits — like, I think the starting assumption should be, or at least for me it is, that you should expect some variation within the population so that people can fulfill different roles. And for instance, you know, it makes sense that women ought to be more neurotic on aggregate on average, and men ought to be more disagreeable in aggregate on average, because it’s useful to have people who are neurotic looking after children, or it’s useful to have people who are disagreeable innovating and pushing back against received knowledge. And that, you know, like game theoretically you would be better off having a population of mixed people than you would having one uniform type of person, and that that’s probably not stable anyway, right? Because it would almost inevitably lead to one type of person having an edge over the generic personality population.
Anyway, I didn’t actually read the paper, but like, I think high openness surely is just good, and high conscientiousness surely is just good, a bit of extroversion. Agreeableness is trickier because you can see it — you could kind of play it either way. And neuroticism as well. But yeah, like, you definitely don’t want to be an extreme on neuroticism.
Cam: I mean, it’s very obvious, I mean, to take away from OCEAN, is like some personality traits or personality types are good and bad, like for the person and like for everyone else hanging around with them. And like, you know, you don’t want to be rude and stuff sometimes. And yeah, this guy’s like an old scold, and he’s lonely. And to preempt a little bit of the next story, like, yeah, I think someone’s happiness is dependent somewhat on their personality type, which is, you know, if your genetics build is genetically influenced. So yeah, I think some personalities are good and some bad, but you know, in some senses it’s like orange vanilla and chocolate ice creams. You know, it’s more about compatibility with, you know, if someone’s very good at sharing or someone’s not doing that, but that can work in its own kind of context with other people.
Rich: Is this guy like earwax flavor? Or like, what’s the worst ice cream?
Cam: It’s one of those — it’s one that you go to a fancy shop, you know, it’s like black, there’s like a black ice cream, it’s like sesame seed or some shit.
Rich: Like squid ink, yeah, sesame.
Cam: Yeah, it’s something that — and he was like, ooh, this is lovely. And he was like, oh my god.
Rich: Oh, let me just read out this quote, which I’ll probably just move earlier in the episode. So Chekhov says: “Reality irritated him, frightened him, kept him in continual agitation, and, perhaps to justify his timidity, his aversion for the actual, he always praised the past and what had never existed; and even the classical languages which he taught were in reality for him galoshes and umbrellas in which he sheltered himself from real life.” So yeah, he teaches Greek because it’s an ancient language that doesn’t require him to engage with the outside world and any changes and updates.
What? Hey, Hemingway’s coming out soon. I’ve tried, I almost finished it last night. It’ll be out today.
Cam: In between civilization sessions?
Rich: I quit civilization. It was detracting from my other duties and responsibilities. It was too good, yeah, I can’t do moderation.
Benny: Terry Tao also got addicted to civilization when he was in grad school, so that makes you feel better.
Rich: Oh, we have a lot in common.
Cam: He relatively struggles with algebra as well, compared to the rest.
Benny: Yeah, the word “relative’s” doing a lot of work there.
Cam: I can’t even remember if it was algebra, it was something there.
Belyakov fumbles the bag with Varenka
Rich: Okay, so the turning point for Belikov — get hyped. A new teacher is assigned to the school named Kovalenko, and he brings with him from the Ukraine his cheerful and lively sister Varenka, who is apparently a bit of a catch. She’s pretty, she’s funny.
Benny: Varenka or Velenka?
Cam: I got Varenka, but I think some of these translations you get a bit of —
Rich: Yeah, the names are often, even Chekhov’s name you can spell with or without an H or without a K.
Cam: You just have to keep the “of” in every Russian name, it’s like the one rule. Konstantin Garnett, I think. I think Konstantin Garnett translated, you know —
Rich: Shut the fuck up about translation.
Cam: We hit the volume limit that one.
Rich: All right. So Belikov — everyone’s fascinated by her and they just start trying to set him up with her, which is crazy. And she even is kind of into him and enjoys hanging out with him. And things are going well. He gets a picture made of her and puts it on his desk, and yeah, it looks like they can finally get him married off, and hopefully he can stop being such a fusty old bore basically.
And then things just start to go wrong for him. The main turning points are, first of all, someone draws a picture of him wearing his galoshes and carrying his trademark umbrella walking around with Varenka. And this is like deeply upsetting to him because it’s so disrespectful. I guess there’s like impropriety there — I don’t even know why, but I guess it’s embarrassing for him. It doesn’t take much to upset this guy.
Benny: It was a deliberately mean caricature, I think. It wasn’t just a picture. I think it was a deliberate distortion — or amplification, rather — of many of his odd features.
Rich: Yeah, you’re right. The key character attribute here is his self-seriousness, right? He can’t see the humor in it or make fun of himself. He’s just absolutely appalled. And then the denouement is when he sees Varenka and her brother cycling, and it honestly fills him with disgust. He thinks it’s such low and scandalous behavior. So he goes to see the brother and gives him this very stern lecture about how it’s not proper for a schoolmaster to be cycling, much less with his sister, a woman, and this kind of thing. And he basically threatens to tell the principal — to like go rat on him to the principal. And Kovalenko is so mad about it, and justifiably so, that he throws him out of his house and like takes him by the collar and pushes him down the stairs, and he tumbles down the stairs. And he’s okay, but he’s just sort of all disheveled and disarrayed. And then at that moment Varenka comes home, and she’s so startled that her instinct is just to laugh. So she just does this piercing wild laugh, peal of laughter. And that just honestly is like the death knell for Belikov.
Cam: That’s a turning point.
Rich: He goes home, and I think he never gets out of bed from that point, and he dies.
Benny: Yeah, it just rolls into bed.
Cam: Dies from the laughter.
Rich: And he won’t talk. The laughter is really interesting, right? Because it’s like, again, the inability to take yourself lightly, to hold things lightly. And also something about a woman laughing at you. I don’t know, there’s something that just punctures the ego about that, right? I can’t quite put my finger on what it is, but like a woman, your love interest, laughing at you in a state of weakness or vulnerability.
Cam: In derision, yeah.
Rich: Yeah, it would be pretty wounding.
Benny: It’s like the ultimate form of emasculation, right? You didn’t intend for this to happen, and things got out of your control, and now she’s laughing at the situation that you found yourself in. That’s, yeah, and it’s humiliating. I think every guy’s got a bit of that in them, whether they want to admit it or not, right? No one wants to find themselves in that situation.
Rich: We would struggle to come back from this, even though we’re not Belikov, I think, right?
Cam: Oh, you’d have to take that person — you have to say goodbye to that. You’re like, yeah, okay, I can’t go back, move town.
Rich: Yeah, you move town, get a new identity. I mean, I wouldn’t go home and stay in bed and die, hopefully, but —
Cam: There’s this — yeah, so I think that showed because he was physically okay, but he was ridiculed and embarrassed. I think that’s what he was so concerned about in life. There’s this kind of irony where someone’s so obsessed with or so scared of being ridiculed or embarrassed or something like that, it becomes self-fulfilling. As you said, if you can sort of take yourself lightly or laugh at yourself sometimes, that’s like the superpower. I mean, it’d be hard falling down the stairs in front of your love interest — that’s a hard one to get away from. But you can think of less extreme examples where if you kind of laugh at yourself or preempt it, then it actually works and it’s fine.
Rich: Yeah, you can lean into it, you can play the fool, there’s a lot of ways you can handle it. But it’s just not in his repertoire, I think.
The other way to think about the laugh is that it was reminding me of Camus for some reason — the laughter that Jean-Baptiste hears echoing in The Fall.
Cam: And there’s a fall, right? There’s a fall as well.
Rich: Yeah. And I think it’s something like laughter is inherently honest because you can do a fake laugh, but this kind of laugh that just bursts out of you, it can’t be faked. And I think in Jean-Baptiste’s case it reveals his hypocrisy, right? This laughter haunts him because it forces him to confront something very ugly about himself. And in this case, maybe it’s just like he is a laughable character and he has not been privy to that information for a long time because of all the armor that he puts up, and because he’s just not a very self-aware guy. And the reason that it pierces is maybe it’s just finally — you realize who or what you are, and it’s extremely jarring to be confronted with that. And he perhaps takes it to heart in some way, which is kind of really sad as well.
Cam: Yeah, no, I think that’s right. I think laughter is a powerful signal because it’s honest. Same as crying and blushing, maybe. Yeah, and then it pierced through his exterior because he’s self-deceived somewhat, right, of how the town looks at him. I mean, it’s funny though, because I was thinking around his role in society, and he upholds norms. And like, there’s a place for that, right? This guy’s too annoying and extreme about it.
Rich: It’s so funny about the bicycles though — like, to remember that there was a time when bicycles were considered scandalous and immodest.
Benny: Yeah, that’s amazing.
Cam: This would have been just after they came, because this was 1890s. I think they hit about 1880, 1870. And yeah, they were like — maybe the way we view electric scooters these days. I think they hated them. They were dangerous for pedestrians walking around, and they were just viewed as probably a bit reckless for themselves as well. It was kind of hard to relate to how negatively Belikov viewed bike riding.
Rich: Yeah, no, people trot out this example as an example of moral panics around new technologies, where every — everything is accompanied by this, even incredibly innocuous things, or things that we now think are incredibly innocuous.
Cam: I do sometimes wonder if there’s a slight revisionist history in these things. It might be not in this case, but I think like one of the first bicycles was called like the Bone Crusher or some shit. Like, the Bone Crusher —
Rich: What, like a war bicycle? That sounds awesome.
Benny: By the manufacturers?
Cam: No, I just buy it from everybody. And maybe that’s the moral panic. But like, I think they didn’t have pedals at first, and then they didn’t have chains, and like — and then of course —
Rich: Yeah, they didn’t have pedals. They were like adult-sized versions of those bikes that tiny little kids have, where they just scoot themselves along on it, like Flintstones style.
Benny: I mean, didn’t the early bicycles have like a huge front wheel and a really small back wheel?
Cam: The penny-farthing ones. Yeah, bring those motherfuckers back.
Benny: Those are sick.
Cam: Imagine just walking — oh man. Only Belikov could ride around in that without self-awareness. I think that’s because — that was before gears, and it was like easier to turn. But they were potentially quite dangerous at first.
So they’ve got the formula right.
Benny: Yeah, Rich, I think that’s a great analysis, honestly. Like, he’s trying to project a certain vision of himself onto the world and create the world in this mold, and he’s doing everything he can to be as strict as possible about it. And he enforces what other people can do and even say by sitting with them in silence and stuff. And then laughter is sort of the one thing that can actually break that spell. And I think Chekhov in the story even describes it as, like, it wasn’t a purposeful laugh, like it just can’t help but escape her, right? She just walks in on the situation, he’s being flung down the stairs and she can’t help but laugh at it. And so there’s something about the innocence of it. And it’s impossible to control that, right? It’s more possible to control people’s words and actions because they have to deliberate about what they’re going to say and do. But something like laughter, where you can’t control it, that’s like the one thing that is sort of beyond his tyranny. So yeah, no, I like that. I like that a lot.
Cam: Even if it was a little snigger — you can sometimes imagine a little snigger, they’re trying to keep it in, and they’re like, you know, they say some snigger — oh, they beep that one out.
Rich: Can you say that?
Benny: I could be — you just cut the S off that and boom.
Cam: It’s the Kiwi accent — well, the Kiwi accent also never says the hard R when you say snigger, because we don’t have rhotic Rs in our accent.
Benny: Yeah, if I was to say it, that’s rough. That’s a recipe for cancellation.
Is everybody trapped in a case of their own making
Rich: All right. So he goes home and dies, which is fair. And the interesting thing is that everyone goes to the funeral and they all are trying to hide how happy they are.
Cam: They’re relieved, right?
Rich: They’re relieved that this oppressive influence is gone. I mean, I think they wish it wouldn’t have turned out that way, but also they’re like, okay, this is another way out of our predicament.
But then the surprising bit is that — so we returned from the cemetery in a good humor, but not more than a week had passed before life went on as in the past, as gloomy, oppressive, and senseless, a life not forbidden by government prohibition but not fully permitted either. It was no better. And indeed, though we had buried Belikov, how many such men in cases were left? How many more of them there will be? Literally many such cases. So yeah, what’s your guys’ reading on that?
Cam: They almost missed them, or at least realized maybe — Belikov is not so unusual.
Rich: That’s, I guess, what we’re meant to take away. He’s a caricatured version of something that must be happening a lot at this particular — is this a human universal, or is this specific to turn of the century Russia, is what I’m wondering?
Benny: I take Ivan to be saying that this is a human universal. So I think either the next paragraph or a couple of paragraphs, he basically makes the case that, like, everyone has cases in some metaphorical way. So he says, “And isn’t living in our town, airless and crowded, our writing useless papers, our playing Vint — isn’t that all a sort of case for us? And are spending our whole lives among trivial, fussy men and silly idle women, our talking and our listening to all sorts of nonsense — isn’t that a case for us too?”
And so what I take him to be saying here is like, we’re all trying to make the world in some way. We’re all trying to impose some sort of condition on it, some sort of regularity, something to make ourselves feel better. We’re trying to exert control, agency, in some way. And Belikov did this in one way, perhaps an overly simplistic or brutish sort of way. But everyone’s trying to do this by playing certain games, right? And this maybe goes back to like The Glass Bead Game and Castalia. And he’d be like, what am I doing? I’m sitting in an academic tower, writing math papers all day. Like, this is my sort of case — trying to shut out the complexity of the world by trying to solve little math puzzles and stuff. And you guys are doing something similar. What are we trying to do with our writing and our podcasting? Like, we’re trying to make ourselves feel better, we’re trying to exert some sort of control on the world.
And then, you know, people have called this an overly pessimistic short story, and I think I’d agree with them if my reading is correct. Like, I don’t think we want to conflate something like agency and wanting to do things in the world with just wanting to control it to make ourselves feel better. I don’t think those are necessarily the same thing. And some ways of interacting with the world are better than other ways of interacting with the world, and aren’t necessarily about just feeding our own egos, etc. But that’s why I took Chekhov to be saying sort of like, we’re all doing this to some extent. And maybe that’s why the gloom didn’t lift from the town, because they realized — Belikov was an extremely obvious example of someone doing this, and sort of easy in some sense to lay all the problems at his feet. But then once he was gone, they realized, oh shit, we’re all doing this to some extent. And maybe this is just part of human nature, and so that’s why we’re not going to escape this gloomy oppressiveness that we were in before.
Cam: I sort of took it slightly differently. I agree there’s a little bit of universality in there, I think, which I’ll talk about in a sec. I sort of took it as maybe Belikov wasn’t impacting them or influencing them as much as they all thought. Like, he was kind of — they projected a little bit on. They’re not as controlled by Belikov as they kind of thought they were, and society has norms and we have our own little cases I suppose, but it wasn’t Belikov — he was annoying and he was a scold, we didn’t like him, but he wasn’t the one ruining all of our lives. And not so much that we all are like Belikov. Like, it’s true to an extent that everyone has certain cases, but it’s kind of like, you know, when you say like everything’s a religion — like, there’s differences, right? And it’s almost like in law when they talk about like, what does a reasonable person think? It’s like, what would a reasonable person do in this situation? It’s like, what’s a reasonable level of neuroticism, right? For a guy, for a girl. So, you know, putting on — you can imagine going out with your friends, you know, “well, I’ve got to put my boot covers on” — it’s like, come on man, we’re going to get the newspaper. And, you know — but yeah, we were, and it’s just stupid. I was like, yeah, sure. And like, sometimes you should have the case as well. It’s like, yeah, someone’s like, oh, they just go off, and it’s like, no, no, no — like, pack, you know, you’re going on a hike or something, make sure you don’t show up to this big hike in jandals — sorry, in sandals.
Rich: Yeah, this is the trouble with universalizing it: it does make it become a little trivial to me. Because sure, everyone — but this is a guy who oppresses himself, basically. And then the thing is that, oh, we all oppress ourselves, but some of us like more so than others, right? Like, this is a big problem. I don’t know how much it’s a universal problem. And this is why the other thing that I’m wondering about is the reference to the government — you know, “a life not forbidden by government prohibition but not fully permitted either” — which was why I was wondering if it was partly contextual. What it was conjuring for me is the way that things were in the USSR later on, when people would self-censor and oppress themselves as a sort of a self-preservation mechanism, or denounce themselves before their neighbor could, or this kind of thing. They would make their lives smaller so that they would survive. And I was thinking maybe it was like a premonition of that somehow. But I don’t really know what life was like at this point in time.
Cam: Yeah, I don’t know that strongly either, but I think that’s probably part of it. And I know in Chekhov’s themes more generally — in The Cherry Orchard, which you guys would have known if you had read it — one of the things, I think, is around this changing time. Like, so Chekhov’s writing in what, late 1800s, and Russia is just moving from the tsarist imperial period to the modern period.
Rich: Yeah, the empire is just about to fall, like literally within years of these stories being published, it’s the end of the empire.
Cam: Yeah. And in a literary sense as well, like, it’s kind of moving from the realist Russian writers, Dostoyevsky and Turgenev, to like maybe more modernist type writers. So a kind of shift there. But I think that, yeah, that sort of context around this kind of oppressive imperial government could be part of it.
Rich: And just the unrest too, right? Like, without knowing the specifics, there’s definitely a lot of dissatisfaction and desire for change. Like, basically what we know is Russia just got its ass kicked in the war against Japan, and there’s been a huge famine that’s killed a lot of people. The serfs have very recently been emancipated, but they are now struggling to survive by their own means — that’s not actually been a great net positive for them. And there’s a revolution coming in literally seven years after this book is published — the first Russian revolution. So a lot of people are very dissatisfied with their lot. The great Russian empire is just about to collapse, basically.
So yeah, I mean, I think whether or not it’s meant to be a human universal or contextual or both, I think that a bit of background will be helpful just to get a sense of the kind of things that Chekhov is writing about and the kind of environment that he is living in.
Cam: But to go back to the truth of the universal thing — it’s true that Belikov isn’t all bad and isn’t all evil, and he had other aspects to him and other contexts to him, and everyone else —
Rich: What were his good qualities? I don’t actually remember any.
Cam: Yeah. He’s the one guy that has no good quality. No, but I suppose it’s like —
Rich: I guess he’s great if you get caught in the rain. Like, can I share your umbrella?
Benny: I think Cam maybe just wants to make the case that there’s room in society for people who try and uphold norms, maybe.
Cam: Well, there’s that as well. Yeah, there’s potentially some of these norms are all right, and some people have to be the scold. You know, no one likes a scold. Someone’s talking in the movie theater and someone else tells them to be quiet — like, that’s good for the theater. But, you know, it’s embarrassing to do yourself, and you know, gets given the Karen treatment, of going to complain to the manager. You need some of that to happen. But I was more just thinking, like, I’m sure Belikov would have had, you know, some humanizing elements to him, maybe — if they weren’t said in the story, you know, it would be there. And it wasn’t him oppressing everyone solely.
Rich: Yeah, I think that’s what becomes clear, right, is that everyone is trying to put their problems onto him, but it’s something broader than him.
Benny: Yeah, I do like the self-censoring angle, like they were projecting onto him a bit. And like, as soon as you assume that other people will react negatively if you start breaking norms, then everyone self-censors and you get these preference falsification situations.
Cam: But I also think it could be the case that almost one person is just having this massive impact. You can imagine like a workspace or a house space, where, you know, just as soon as they left, it would just be like, the weight is lifted.
Rich: Yeah, one person can kill the vibe in a group, no worries, like absolutely. Like, you know, in our book club for instance.
Cam: I took that personally, even though you didn’t say.
Mavra and the tranquil village
Rich: Um, we better just start wrapping this up so we have time for other stories too. So he died, and then Ivan finishes telling his story, and there’s a full moon and they go outside of the barn, and they’re looking at the moon, and we get this really beautiful paragraph where they’re just looking out over the town and the countryside and describing how tranquil it all is. And he says: “A feeling of calm comes over the soul in this peace, wrapped away from care, toil, and sorrow. In the darkness of night it is mild, melancholy, beautiful, and it seems as though the stars look down upon it kindly and with tenderness, and as though there were no evil on earth and all were well.”
So, knowing that Chekhov doesn’t do anything by accident, I think it’d be interesting to try and figure out what these final paragraphs are about. So this is post the story within the story — we’re back in the level one story. And I think maybe just it serves as a nice counterpoint to all the gossip and scuttlebutt and sort of the stifling nature of all the societal restrictions that they’ve been talking about — just to observe the possibility for something calmer and more peaceful and joyful.
The other thing is that it sheds some light on Mavra’s motivations. So Mavra is a character who actually sets up the story. She’s the wife of the elder whose barn they’re staying in, and she is described as being a healthy and not stupid person, but she also has this hermit-like attribute to her where she’s never left the village, so she’s never seen a railroad for instance. And she also only goes outside at night time. And we hear her footsteps — Ivan hears her footsteps approaching the barn and going past, and Birkin says, oh, that’s just Mavra. And that’s interesting too because we never hear from her a single word, we never see her — she’s just purely in the background of the story. But maybe she finds that she just wants to engage with the world when it’s moonlit and beautiful and tranquil, and there’s not a sound, and bypasses all of these messy human interactions that are causing everyone so much trouble.
Yeah, that was my read on the Mavra in the moonlight. I don’t know, I’m not super satisfied with it. I don’t know if you guys have anything to add.
Benny: Yeah, I think it is interesting. So the line or the paragraph that I quoted from Ivan before about, like, don’t we all have our cases too — it’s interesting that that comes right after the paragraph about, you know, it being midnight and describing the village as tranquil and peaceful. I’m kind of tempted by your reading now, that there’s a positive valence to how the village is being described when it’s peaceful. And yeah, perhaps it’s like a world of opportunity in some sense, and it’s what we make of it. And then it’s almost as if Ivan is misreading that silence when he starts going off about everyone having their own cases too. He’s misunderstanding the silence of the village as being about oppression as opposed to about sort of like opportunity, and like, you know, it is what we make of it. So I’m sort of leaning towards your guys’s reading of the whole situation now.
The Mavra stuff, I’m not sure what to make of that. I mostly read that as a sort of foreshadowing of the next story. Because Ivan, they lie down to go to sleep and he says, you know, I could tell you this other story if you want — “I will tell you another edifying story” — and Birkin sort of shuts him down and he says, like, no, I think it’s time that we go to bed. Telling Ivan, maybe also that signifies that Ivan was sort of wrong. Ivan says that “I’ll tell you another story” right after he finishes his paragraph. And maybe this is Birkin saying, like, you’re sort of wrong about your reading, shut up, I don’t want to hear your stories now. Yeah, I mostly meant the Mavra stuff about foreshadowing “Gooseberries,” which is the next story, because Ivan, right before they go to bed, starts talking about, you know, “we do all this stuff for the sake of a crust of bread, for the sake of a warm corner, for the sake of a wretched little worthless rank in the service.” And that’s more about the themes of “Gooseberries,” I think, than the themes of this story.
Rich: Yeah, I think that’s right. But even within this story, we get the glimpse that Ivan is maybe not even wrong, but more like a hypocrite is my reading of him. And so he is complaining about the gossip of women and how people are caught up in all of this. But yeah, as you point out, he misses the beauty of the scene in front of him, and he misses the fact that literally all he and Birkin are doing is gossiping about other people’s lives. And then the two female characters in the story — one of them is like a vivacious person who actually is more living in the moment and quite a joyous character, and the other one completely unseen. All we know about her is that she avoids all of this and only goes out at night when the world is tranquil and beautiful. So yeah, it sets us up.
Gooseberries synopsis
So I think it’d be a good time to just get straight into “Gooseberries.” So Cam, do you want to give a little summary of what that’s about?
Cam: Yeah, so it’s the same characters. So Ivan is walking with Birkin and he tells him he wants to tell him a story — well, he owes him a story. However, it starts to rain before he can tell it, so they seek shelter at a nearby friend, Alyohin. They meet Alyohin’s maid — she’s called Pelageya — and they go for a swim. And Ivan really enjoys his swim, and Alyohin kind of muddies the water — he’s quite dirty, as he’s a farmer. And then they go in and they get cleaned up, get comfortable, and Ivan finally tells the story. And it’s about his brother Nikolai. And Nikolai always desired to own a farm. He kind of saved up, he was extremely frugal, and he ends up marrying a rich woman, which helps him buy the farm. And then this woman dies, and it’s kind of implied that this was partly due to his neglect or frugality. And then that’s the story, and the others don’t really like the story that much.
And then Ivan rails against happiness. He just goes on this big monologue. The only reason people are happy is because they ignore or even maybe exploit unhappy people. And so he’s against happiness and he’s against Nikolai’s happiness. He’s not even sure if Nikolai is happy. And then they go to bed after that story, and Birkin can’t sleep near the end. It’s sort of said, and it’s kind of left ambiguous, if that’s because he’s thinking about the story, or thinking about the happiness, or because Ivan’s left this pipe out and it’s stinking out the house.
And the reason it’s got its name is because Nikolai, Ivan’s brother, who had this desire to own a farm — he wanted to own a farm, an estate sort of thing, and grow gooseberries. That was like this pivotal thing for him. He wanted some gooseberries. That’s the story. Do you guys like this one?
Rich: Yeah, so when I was reading this one — Nikolai’s story about being — so he’s a clerk and he is just obsessed with buying this farmland. And he’s extremely stingy. He puts all his money towards it. He’s always like looking up the newspaper for plots of land that are available for sale. And then years go by, and decades go by, and he’s sort of not really living his life because he’s staking everything on this future dream and the happiness of the gooseberry bush and the little farm. It’s really sad because he has a wife who he basically almost causes to die, because he doesn’t let her live in the manner of her choosing. Like, he forces her to get on his stingy lifestyle level. And also he’s just very subdued at work. He’s like thin and pale, and he just sort of doesn’t really exist. He’s in this kind of like half-life state waiting for his life to begin.
And it reminded me — this is similar to a big beef that I’ve had with the whole concept of early retirement and financial independence, where people live lifestyles very similar to this — Spartan lives where they are kind of like doing deferred gratification gone wild sort of thing. And I think the way that it can go really badly wrong is that you are not living, you’re just sort of existing, but you are waiting for some future point to begin living. Which I think is a big mistake. It can work, but it’s a big mistake if you’re talking about decades of your life. And it’s a doubly big mistake if it’s affecting other people in your life through your stinginess.
So, uh, yeah, this is a really good term called “acting dead,” which I like, which is from the science fiction writer Bruce Sterling, who Venkatesh Rao blogged about once. And the definition is, anytime that you are doing something that your dead great-great-granddad could do better than you. So like your dead great-great-granddad will always be more frugal than you, he will always cause less offense than you, he will always rock the boat less. You know, he will always have a lower household budget because he’s just rotting there in his grave. And if you find yourself being outcompeted in your goals by a literal dead person, then something has gone wrong — you’re like acting dead.
Benny: Do you mean competing with them when they were alive, or like competing with them now that they’re dead?
Rich: Now with their dead body. Yeah, you’re trying to be less — you’re trying to have the smallest impact in the world, and the smallest shadow, and the smallest intake, and exist on the least. And you’ll never outcompete your dead great-great-grandfather, right. And you could compare it to Belikov as well in the last story, that he is kind of acting dead as well, I think. And then it’s quite funny that the only time he’s ever described as being happy and looking contented is when he’s literally dead and he’s achieved like the most streamlined interior existence possible.
Benny: The ultimate case.
Rich: The ultimate case — he’s in a coffin, dead and buried, yeah.
The pitfalls of the ‘early retirement’ movement
Cam: Yeah, I think it’s funny — it’s not even necessarily the hardcore FIRE — financial independence guys that do it, they’re the most extreme. But you know, sometimes you meet someone who’s super frugal, and oftentimes it just feels like, speaking back to like personality traits, it seems like a somewhat genetic personality trait that some people are so frugal. But man, like, it’s just — and so in some sense maybe it doesn’t affect them so much, because that’s just part of their life, they’re just like, “yep, I’d rather spend so much time at the supermarket here saving an extra buck.” I just see these people sometimes and like, they won’t buy a coffee once, even once out with a group, and yeah. I’d find it hard. I’d find it hard to live like that.
Rich: It’s okay to do all this stuff tactically and strategically in service of something. Like, the way I talk about this in my book quite a bit and the way that I think about it is, removing a negative from your life is a good start, but it doesn’t — which is what frugality and minimalism and things like that are about — but they don’t actually fill in for adding a positive. So like the misplaced sense of virtue in leading the leanest possible existence — it’s not virtuous, it’s only useful. It’s similar with the degrowth stuff and all of these kinds of improvements.
Cam: To enable you to do virtuous stuff.
Rich: Exactly. Has to enable you to do something. So usually what happens in this scenario, the worst case scenario, is you die twice. You die once while you’re living this base existence and just merely getting by, because you’re waiting to come alive later on. And then usually you get fucked because you finally get what you want — you get your early retirement, you hit your savings goal or whatever — and then you die again because you realize that it’s not what you wanted after all, or that it doesn’t suddenly make you happy and solve all the problems that you had and give your life a rich sense of meaning. Because again, you need the positive impetus, not merely the absence of a negative. So if you want to quit your shitty job, absolutely, like all power to you — removing the negative impact, that’s great. But there needs to — you need to put something up there in its place.
And so this is why Nikolai’s story actually goes against that. And it’s really interesting that he’s happy. He’s very happy. He got what he wanted, and he seems to be having a fantastic time, gooseberries and all. So yeah, talk about that.
Cam: Well, Ivan questions whether he is happy. But yeah, he does get what he wants. And his wife dies, which seemingly has no impact on him. But Ivan seems to question if he really was happy.
Benny: Does he? I didn’t read that to be honest.
Cam: Well, I was just going to say, I’m not sure if he does that. I think he might be doing it —
Benny: Because I was wondering if there was some like unreliable narration on Ivan’s part, or some motivated reasoning, or something to think his brother’s happy even though he’s not. I mean, because just from the facts of the matter, you know, he’s become this like really fat guy who’s at this kind of remote house being served by this woman who is also described as obese and not pretty to look at, by this dog who’s described as kind of like gross and odd looking.
Rich: It looks like a pig, yeah.
Benny: Yeah, exactly. And so, you know, Ivan’s spinning this as he kind of got what he wanted, he seems to be happy. He finally planted these gooseberry trees and he’s eating the fruit. But the fruit — he even admits the fruit is not ripe, it doesn’t objectively taste good. But the man is just — he must be happy because this is what he wanted all along. And I think maybe as the reader we’re supposed to think, no, there’s no way this guy is actually happy. He’s just this obese old man.
Cam: I think that’s a piece of textual evidence. It’s my fucking gooseberry. I finally got my gooseberry.
Benny: I can’t get on this.
Cam: That doesn’t make anyone happy. I didn’t even really know what a gooseberry was. But that said, I kind of like — there’s a kind of guy who’s into niche things. I’m totally obsessed with that. I like that. It might be gooseberries. But Nikolai’s not really that guy. He’s obsessed with status. But, you know, some guy that knows everything about gooseberries — I like that. And then there’s like Adam Smithian kind of specialization. You know, you might be into shoes or you might be into shoemaking or whatever it is, and you’re a specialist and you know everything about it. That’s kind of cool. But I think, no, I don’t think Nikolai’s like that.
Benny: I don’t think he knew everything about it though. I think it was more like — it was like buying a golden necklace that you’d always had your eye on or something. That’s the equivalent.
Cam: Yeah, no, I think Nikolai’s obsessed with status. Gooseberries is kind of like a synecdoche or something — sort of like the white picket fence. He needs that, and then he’s finally achieved it. And then there’s this question of, what have you achieved? You finally get your gooseberries, your white picket fence, and you — I mean, this is kind of a theme in Wallace’s Infinite Jest, and a thing in his own life when he published his book and he kind of realizes that he’s kind of still as depressed as ever. It’s a Buddhist reading.
Rich: Yeah, this is what’s different, right? Usually you get your gooseberries and they’re hard and sour instead of the tender sweet delight that you imagined, and you’re like, oh fuck, you know, like, I got what I want — you know that Chinese curse, “may you get everything you wanted.” But in this case he gets his gooseberries, they’re hard and sour, but he’s able to maintain the self-deception, which is an interesting twist on it I suppose. So there’s a scene where he’s getting up in the middle of the night and he keeps like sneaking down the corridor, and I’m imagining him like, you know, flapping his hands around — he’s like, oh gooseberries, yummy yummies — like, keeps eating more gooseberries in the middle of the night. And he quotes the Pushkin line, “the falsehood that exalts we cherish more than meaner truths that are a thousand strong.” So yeah, it’s definitely self-delusion. The gooseberries objectively suck, but he’s managed to fool himself otherwise.
And I got thrown off by this twist because — it makes it nice and ambiguous. A little bit of behind the scenes: I saw that Chekhov was originally going to finish the story with Nikolai falling ill and dying in bitter disillusionment after having had all his ambitions fulfilled, which is what I was expecting. And then he apparently chose to go a different, more interesting, ambiguous way.
Cam: He’s kind of dead already. And there’s no difference. But then the nuance is that he is happy.
theorising on happiness
Rich: He’s gone full send in the other way — from not wanting to spend a dime and not wanting to exist, to existing in the most grandiose, opulent way that he can personally envision. And in some sense it has been good for him. But yeah, this sort of ties into Ivan’s rant about happiness and his theorizing on happiness.
Benny: Yeah, so let’s perhaps — so one, maybe the most obvious reading, and the one that Ivan alludes to, is just that, you know, Chekhov wants to now criticize these people who have achieved happiness for forgetting the suffering of everyone else. So you’ve gone, you know, maybe you grew up as a peasant, you knew what it was like to suffer, but as soon as you achieve the status of being basically nobility — which is what Nikolai has done, basically he’s achieved his goals — now he totally lives in this isolated way, content to just eat his unripe gooseberries and pet his piggish dog and his piglet, and is content. He even starts to think of himself as a nobleman.
Rich: Piggy dog.
Benny: And his family is noble, right? He has some slips of speech when he’s talking to Ivan that betray that he’s now very comfortable in his role as someone the peasants sort of look up to. And he clearly views himself as above them in status. And so yeah, so maybe the most obvious reading is just Chekhov wants to criticize people who are elevated through the ranks like that and then forget the suffering of those left behind. So yeah, I guess — is there something more going on?
Cam: Well, I feel like — I couldn’t tell, but there’s a difference with claiming like happiness is built on the suffering of others and like requires that, or kind of exploits them, versus like it’s contingent on remaining ignorant to the suffering of others. So he sometimes sounds like he’s making either claim, and they’re different claims. And I’d probably reject the former — I haven’t thought about it heaps, but it certainly echoes a little bit like thinking that wealth is zero sum and stuff like that, and happiness is zero sum, which I just think, certainly in a Deutschian sense, feels untrue. But you know, status is maybe zero sum, and happiness might depend on that. So certainly Nikolai’s happiness depends on that, so maybe it does depend somewhat. But the second claim, that happiness is contingent on being ignorant of that, I mean, that seems plausible because there’s a lot of suffering, and thinking about it too long, it’s hard to remain chirpy. And we all do. And then there’s kind of this description versus prescription. Descriptively, people seem to do that. We seem to, as Adam Smith talked about in Theory of Moral Sentiments, don’t think about the thousands dying in China. And there’s, you know, there’s an EA take that, you know, the child drowning, we sort of ignore the child drowning. And if you think about it too long, it’s hard to remain happy.
And then going into prescription, you know, maybe Chekhov or Ivan would say, yeah, therefore — well, he even says at one point, he wants an unhappy person with an axe or something outside everyone’s door, reminding people. That’s different.
Rich: A hammer, yeah — an axe. You’re too happy, you get your shit split.
Benny: Cam’s projecting. Burn it down.
Cam: I’m a communist, right? Yeah.
Rich: Yeah, I took it to be your second version, Cam — your second interpretation. I also disagree with the first one, but I think — I was really sympathetic to it, I think he made a good argument. And I think I just mostly agree with it. That yeah, as you say, it’s like a proto-Peter Singer thing of the expanding circles of moral concern, and also maybe having some kind of positive duty to use your position to help less fortunate people, not just in your immediate environment and in your immediate family, but people who are abstracted and far away. And also, whether or not people agree with that, just the sense that there is this vast pit of suffering in the world, which is genuinely horrifying to actually think about and have to confront. And we all turn our backs on it.
Cam: I wonder if we ever truly can — like, even when we’re trying to. Sometimes I wonder if you can really feel it in your nerve endings, because you sometimes can in a micro sense, like when you empathize, you know, you read a book or you watch a movie or hear a story. But to truly grok like all the horrors that are happening right this minute, just almost just quantifying all that — and I feel like it’s hard to feel, to empathize with.
Rich: Yeah, but you can get the sense of like, I don’t know, like the kind of cosmic horror or something of it, right? Like, you can’t — at least for me, I can’t feel that way for a long time, but for a moment I can feel — if I force myself to concentrate, I can feel like how terrifying and awful it is. And that’s enough — that is enough to want to promote some pro-social behaviors. And so I kind of just think Ivan is right, like directionally at least, that we would do well to remember that people are living terrible lives and that there’s something we can do about it. There’s no point thinking about it and then doing nothing, which I think is a common trap for people to fall into — is to read horrible headlines and stories —
Benny: And just feel terrible.
Rich: And just futilely — yeah, there’s no point doing that. I mean, this is why I think effective altruism is actually a really cool and important movement, and I’m a supporter of it through all of the controversy and so on, because I think these central insights are just so powerful and just correct.
Yeah, but the other funny thing is that there’s a fractal here where Ivan wants the man with the hammer to come along and remind happy people of the suffering in the world, and like Ivan is the man with the hammer in the story. And he is reminding Birkin and Alyohin about this, and they don’t like it at all. You know, they’re not enjoying themselves, which is great — it’s like a perfect little example of his point, I guess.
Benny: And he doesn’t really even remind his brother in the story, right? Like, he’s there visiting him and he ends up just kind of leaving and leaving him to his own devices. He doesn’t confront him right there and then and say, like, you know, did you forget where you come from? Like, what’s going on here? You used to be one of these peasants, and then you sort of you follow the American dream and now you have all your gooseberries, but did you forget that you used to be one of the people with a dream? But he doesn’t do that.
Rich: Gooseberries — it’s so funny, like in place of like gold chains and stuff, he’s like, I got my fucking gooseberries. You can imagine his Instagram — it’s just full of bowls of gooseberries.
Cam: I don’t know how much I buy the — I feel like it’s complicated, because I certainly don’t like the idea of, you know, wanting to admonish, like, everybody who’s kind of living a good decent happy life. I mean, one that’s potentially bringing down happiness and flourishing. But yeah, I just don’t know how wrong it is for, you know, some normal person who’s kind of just, you know, is a good person, and you know, isn’t thinking of all the suffering all the time. Like, that doesn’t scream to me as needing to be rectified. But you know, the counter-argument is, how do you fix all this poverty and suffering? I suppose the thing I wrinkle a little bit with EA is this kind of infallibilism, I think, of morality — that if everyone could just see our way and if we could just implement it, a lot of these things we fix. But at the same time, there are, you know, a lot of low-hanging fruit core things that I agree with.
Rich: We don’t need to litigate EA or whatever. We’re pressed for time.
Cam: So that, more so than Ivan — like, I just think, imagine Ivan doing that to, like, everybody, and like, you know, you with your grandma who’s just like nice and like happy, and he’s like, “how do you think?” and you’re like, come on man.
Benny: Yeah, like just reminding them of the suffering is probably not good.
Cam: But let’s say it is important to, you know — even just from thinking about it, acknowledging it, sometimes that’s symbolic, right, as well. You’re like, oh yeah, think of that — and you’re not necessarily doing anything about it.
Ivan the big fat hypocrite
Rich: Well, yeah. Right, so this is the time to mention that Ivan is a big fat hypocrite, right? Or at least he’s not very consistent in his beliefs and how they match his actions. So yeah, he is really enjoying the nice linen at Alyohin’s place, and like getting served tea and cakes, and he’s railing against all this stuff when he hasn’t been doing any work. He’s been out wandering around in the countryside having fun. Meanwhile Alyohin, the owner of the house that they’re visiting, has been working so hard that he’s filthy and covered in dirt. He works alongside his peasants or his hired help. And you want to talk about the George Saunders observations, Cam, about A Swim in the Pond in the Rain?
Cam: Yeah, so I mean, one plug is, I’d recommend it for everybody to read this lovely book. George Saunders, who’s a short story and novel writer himself, analyzes three Chekhov stories and some other — one Tolstoy and one Turgenev. And he calls his book A Swim in the Pond in the Rain after this book because Ivan’s swimming. And yeah, it’s kind of a love letter to Chekhov, and to this story in particular. But he talks about all these kind of layers, which we’ve already talked about somewhat. You know, you’re kind of quite convinced at first by Ivan’s argument, and then you realize, well, maybe Ivan’s a hypocrite. And then you realize, well, maybe Ivan enjoying the swim isn’t a bad thing as well. And like, yeah, what is the role of happiness?
Rich: But just say what happens with the swim, because I don’t think we really mentioned it.
Cam: Oh, sorry. I thought it was in the summary.
Rich: Yeah, but that was like one quick little fleeting thing. So just describe the swim.
Cam: They swim. They swim in the pond in the rain. So they go swimming, and Ivan’s loving it. I think he’s especially loving it. It’s almost like the best moment of his life. And then Alyohin, who’s a farmer — he muddies the water and he drenches it. And it’s kind of shown that he’s working extremely hard, living this — you know, to bring it back to Nikolai, like, maybe living a similar life of toiling. But the difference maybe being that Alyohin is kind of a virtue to it. He’s not doing it for the status or for the gooseberries. He’s sort of doing it seemingly not for the status. And I’d point that as the difference. But he’s kind of suffering in life, right? It seems to be.
Rich: Yeah, but so Saunders’ point about the swim is that Chekhov inserts this like interstitial passage where they take the swim. So instead of just being the frame story, there’s this big section — or, you know, reasonable section — where they go for the swim, and it’s like, why does he do that? And I think he says the point of it is that Ivan is just like reveling in the swim. He keeps diving to the bottom and making the lilies bob around. And then Burkin has to like yell at him to get out — he’s like, all right, that’s enough, you’ve had enough, we’ve got to go in now. So Ivan is capable of just taking a lot of pleasure and joy in simple things like that, and he is capable of happiness, even though he says moments later when he’s warm and dry that happiness shouldn’t exist, and he’s sort of sermonizing and so on.
And then his last observation was that we end on the scene where Ivan and Birkin are tucked up in their nice fancy beds. Ivan is sleeping like a baby, but Birkin can’t sleep. And we don’t know whether it’s because he’s unsettled by what Ivan said, or because the stink of Ivan’s pipe is stinking up the room. Like Ivan, who’s constantly going on about, you should do good and treat others well and so on, has like thoughtlessly caused suffering to his friend and is not letting him sleep. So it just adds another little layer of richness to the portrayal. Because, you know, Ivan makes good points and he’s an interesting character, but he’s clearly, you know, fallible. And I really like the ambiguity — where you don’t really come down strongly on one side or another. And also, Saunders picks up on those things, which I didn’t — I wasn’t — I didn’t understand the pipe reference until I read that, for instance.
Benny: Yeah, you can see why people sort of fall in love with Chekhov’s stories, honestly. There’s a lot of little gems in there. I can imagine on reread and reread you just pick up more and more, and he really packs a lot into these little short stories. Evidenced by the fact that we are talking for a long time — we’ve only gotten through two of the three.
Rich: Yeah, let’s roll into the third one and then we can do some — if we hopefully have time — to just like talk about Chekhov in general and what we like and don’t like. But yeah, do you want to give us a summary on the third story, Benny?
‘About Love’ synopsis
Benny: Sure, yeah, we can do that. Okay, so the third story is about love.
Rich: Well, that’s what it’s about, but what’s it called?
Cam: What’s the code?
Benny: You actually scared me a little bit there. I was like, did I have another title? I don’t know.
Cam: It’s “About.”
Rich: Really funny stuff. Keep going.
Benny: Yeah, we’re on a roll today, holy smokes.
Rich: I’m a dad, I’m allowed to say stuff like that. What’s your excuse, Cam?
Cam: I have the — the Varenka laughter.
Rich: Better than choking on someone else’s spit.
Benny: Well, depends whose spit.
Benny: So, I think you guys were calling him Alyohin or something before, but in my version —
Cam: Yeah, this one says L.U. I assume it’s the same guy. Part of the trilogy. It’s kind of like, you know, like fourth —
Rich: The spelling completely changed on this one.
Cam: Yeah, it’s like third season of Fresh Prince and suddenly it’s like a different mom. You know, I assume it’s the same person.
Benny: So I’m just going to pronounce it “Alihan,” which doesn’t actually sound that Russian to be honest, sounds like Elvish or something. But okay, so Ivan and Birkin are still staying at Alihan’s. So the story opens with him actually talking about Pelageya’s love life. And so it turns out she’s in love with the cook of the house, but the cook has this wild temperament and is violent. So she didn’t want to actually marry him, she just wanted to spend her days with him. But the fact that she didn’t want to marry him bothered him so much and made him even more violent. But he didn’t want to live in sin, you know, just sleeping with her. So he wanted her to marry him, and that has caused a lot of strife and would cause him to actually beat her more.
And then Alihan sort of musing on why Pelageya — I think it’s Pelageya, not Pelagea, but I’m not sure —
Cam: Yeah, the same person as I was talking about before.
Benny: Same person, yeah. Is why — yeah, he’s musing on why she didn’t fall on someone sort of more suitable, more like herself. And he says: “So far, only one incontestable truth has been uttered about love. This is a great mystery.”
And then he launches into a story of his own love. So back in the day, he was elected an honorary justice of the peace in the village where he lived. And he had a friend, Luganovich. And Luganovich and his wife, Anna, had taken sort of a great liking to him. And the wife falls in love with him, basically. And he falls in love with the wife. But neither of them act on it. They just sort of spend a lot of time together. He becomes great friends with the family. He’s spending a lot of time there. Gets to know the kids, gets to know her. He’s often waiting for her to come home, just hanging out in their place, reading their books and stuff and waiting for her to get home from grocery shopping. And he doesn’t want to say anything to her for fear of sort of ruining the family and the relationship. And she also isn’t saying it to him, presumably for the same sort of reason.
Eventually, she actually starts to suffer from sort of low spirits. She gets diagnosed with neurasthenia, which we talked about, I think, during Stoner, because I think Stoner’s wife also got diagnosed with the same thing, which was a common diagnosis, as Rich explained in that episode, for women in sort of the 1800s and 1900s. And seems to be somewhat fake from what I can understand now. But maybe — verdict’s out, you know, we don’t know, who knows.
And so she starts to be a little bit short with him, being a little bit mean. But then Luganovich receives an appointment from somewhere else in the country. He has to move. And Anna, because she’s been diagnosed with this, is encouraged to move to Crimea. And right before she leaves, Anna and Alihan confess their love to each other. And then she hops on the train and peaces out. And that’s it. They never see each other again.
And then the story closes with just some remarks by Ivan and Birkin. And Birkin actually knows Anna — she lives in the town where he lives. And that’s it. And it’s a sort of unrequited love to the end of Alihan’s days. So what did you guys think?
Rich: Yeah, so I think we should talk about the money quote in Alihan’s explanation of this. So at first he says that you can’t universalize love. There’s no pattern for it, there’s no formula. Every single individual case is totally idiosyncratic, and it’s hard to say anything general about it. Then later on, he gives this quote, which is right at the heart of the problem that he has, or the insight that he receives, which is: “I understood that when you love, you must either, in your reasonings about that love, start from what is highest, from what is more important than happiness or unhappiness, or you must not reason at all.”
Did Alyohin make the right decision?
So the big question for me is basically whether he did the right thing. Should he have acted on his feelings and disrupted his family life and her happy marriage, and tried to make something work with her? Or did he do the right thing by sort of suppressing all of that and continuing to live this tortured life where he doesn’t act upon his true authentic feelings? And this one is quite confusing to me, I think, because it’s very different to the two previous stories where I feel it was easy to be judgmental about someone doing something wrong. Actually, they’ve gotten more and more ambiguous. The first one is kind of slam dunk, the second one is a little more ambiguous because Nikolai is happy, or seemingly happy. And then this one, he is trapped by his own hand. He has bound himself like the others have. But I think he’s done the right thing. I mean, yeah, what do you guys think? Like, should he have been a marriage home wrecker and run away with Anna and tried to make this thing work? I think no.
Cam: I wondered about this — and not to universalize the instance, but I did wonder about this in general. You know, it’s a hard one because being — yeah, I think being a homewrecker, there’s something to be said to just not do that.
Rich: Wow, really going out on a limb there.
Cam: No, but when there’s infidelity or love or staying together for the kids, there’s something to be said for that. But there’s also something to be said for following your heart. It’s — yeah, and then it’s this question of —
Rich: On the one hand, on the other hand, on the gripping hand.
Cam: It’s hard, right? I mean, Chekhov’s reading seems to be just follow love, right? He says, have it as the highest good. And like, otherwise don’t think about it at all. Like you can’t analyze. So that’s kind of one thing — like there’s this mystery that can’t be understood. And like, that’s kind of in the Romantics, and Byron, and Woody Allen. Well, by the way, Woody Allen — I think Woody Allen is like super influenced by Chekhov. All these stories in the play reminded me of Woody Allen movies. And this is a major theme as well — love is mysterious.
Rich: Yeah, sometimes it makes you fall in love with your stepdaughter-child.
Cam: Exactly. That’s a strong case where maybe you don’t follow your heart. But you know, he’s been happy with her for 50 years as well, so —
Rich: Oh, yeah, that’s a great test case, right? Because he broke up his own marriage in a hideous fashion, and yeah, it worked out.
Cam: Yeah. And there’s question marks of — there’s a lot of smoke around other stuff with him, and question marks of how young Soon-Yi was. But yeah.
Rich: And isn’t she — is she intellectually disabled or —
Cam: Nah, there’s a bunch of slander around her. Like, I think Mia Farrow is a little bit crazy as well. But there is smoke. It’s complicated. But no, no, she’s not. There’ll probably be a no-go, right? Don’t follow the heart on that one.
But yeah, or even less extreme — whether you divorce for your kids, sorry, stay together for your kids, or don’t home wreck, or in this case maybe there’s just more kind of traditional mores around any sort of improprieties wrong. There’s also something — I remember Tyler Cowen was talking around TV shows in his kind of case. He says, like, don’t watch TV, it’s all rubbish, but he has a few favorites. Like he loves Sopranos, he loves Curb Your Enthusiasm, and he loves a couple Israeli TV shows, and one of the ones Homeland was based on. And this other one — I heard him, I don’t know if I was reading between the lines or projecting myself, but he seemed to be saying there’s something around it being good fiction where there were kind of these norms or taboos around things, and you can create these stories like this Chekhov story about love, of this kind of forbidden love. And these days you maybe don’t have that — like anything goes — and it can be harder to write good fiction and good stories around it. Like there’s something around that dynamic, which is quite strong, which is the theme of this story, of this kind of forbidden love, because, you know, the person you love, she’s married to this other guy, which seems to be a marriage that isn’t any good, right? I think we’re meant to —
Rich: I think the marriage is fine. It’s like not exciting or passionate, but there’s no problems within the marriage.
Benny: They have kids and stuff.
Rich: But why — why wouldn’t you be able to do this today? It seems to me like it’s exactly the same and nothing’s changed. I mean, maybe it’s slightly more permissive to get divorced and things like that, but all the same taboos and questions and trade-offs are still present.
Cam: Yeah, I think maybe Tyler — fair enough that there’s still a massive taboo around cheating on your wife and being a homewrecker.
Rich: Being a homewrecker — as a wise moral sage of our time said, there’s something to be said for not doing it.
Benny: There’s two interesting questions here. There’s one, what Alihan thinks of his own conduct by the end of the story, and two, what Chekhov wants the reader to think at the end. Right? And those could be different things. So I think Alihan regrets his conduct. And the first part of the quote that Rich read is the sentence, “I confess my love for her, and with a burning pain in my heart, I realized how unnecessary, how petty, and how deceptive all that had hindered us from loving was.” And so I think we can say pretty conclusively that Alihan regrets not having just confessed his love for her earlier, and possibly like running away together. Then there’s a question —
Cam: Do you think he regrets talking about her and confronting her at the — so given that first regret, do you then regret confronting her at the train station? Maybe you would have been better off if you hadn’t done that at that time.
Benny: Because like you wouldn’t have realized that you had a regret, you mean?
Cam: Yeah, I was wondering maybe in a meta sense, or in a fractal sense, maybe you regret that. So I wish I hadn’t thrown the matzo ball out there or acted. So if I wasn’t going to act until that point, maybe I shouldn’t have acted at all as well.
Benny: Yeah, possibly. But then there’s also the question, what does Chekhov want us to think? I can’t tell if this is me projecting onto the story, or if this is actually an undertone of the story. So my take on this is really that love is not all that rare an event.
Cam: That’s what love is, Benny. Let me tell you. Love is mysterious. I met this Polish girl —
Benny: Well, it starts at Auschwitz. Um, I did meet this German girl, a little bit. Oh my god.
Cam: That’s —
Benny: Sorry, that’s a true tragedy. That’s a true tragedy. Chekhov should have been writing about that. No, so I think, yeah, like, love is — I mean, it’s extremely special, but I think it’s not all that rare an event in the sense that love is like partially just also constructed with someone, right? Like, often you can develop feelings quickly for someone and sort of fall in love with them. But also it’s a lot of work to maintain love, and you can choose in what direction you put that work in. So you can choose whether to sort of pursue someone in a relationship or not in a relationship. And you can — there’s always someone you can find who’s not in a relationship who, I think, you could love. It’s the very rare person who’s in a circumstance where, like, there’s literally no one.
So anyway, so I guess, yeah, my personal take on this is that there’s, like Cam said, there’s a norm against being a homewrecker for a good reason. And usually it’s pretty unjustifiable to pursue someone who’s in a relationship, or at least a serious relationship already. It does get quite gray, and there’s probably a longer conversation to be had about what to do if someone’s in maybe a more casual relationship or early on in a relationship or something like that, or not married, things like that.
Cam: He wasn’t pursuing it. They kind of fell in love, right? The calculus changes a bit.
Benny: Right, yeah, but I mean, you’re still — you’re still putting in lots of effort to like go see her, and at some point you are sort of choosing to love her, I think. Love is — it’s an active activity. It’s not just this whole Cupid thing. I think it’s a mistake to think of love like that.
Cam: That feels anti-Chekhovian.
Benny: I think Chekhov is trying to highlight this at the beginning of the story when he shows you, like, Pelageya’s in love with the wrong person. If there’s one person she should not love, it is this person who’s beating her, and is totally unlike her and doesn’t really respect her, right? And I think — what’s he trying to say with that? He’s trying to say, you know, she made the wrong choice here, this was a bad idea.
Cam: I think what he’s trying to say there is that —
Rich: No, he’s saying she didn’t make a choice.
Cam: Yeah, she didn’t make the choice, and that’s the bad — sorry, Rich, you go.
Benny: So she can’t help but love him.
Rich: That’s how love works, yeah.
Cam: That’s how love we — yeah, and like that’s the bad thing of love. It’s like sometimes you’re in love with your stepdaughter, or the person who abuses —
Rich: Your intellectually disabled stepdaughter.
Rich: No, I think you’re right, you’re right, Benny. Like, without knowing what Chekhov is getting at, I believe that he shouldn’t have pursued her. So okay, the argument that I want to make is that Chekhov says, or through the voice of Alihan, “from what is more important than happiness, from what is highest, from what is more important than happiness or unhappiness.” Now, I don’t think that there is anything. And so Alihan himself says that, projecting forward, says, what if we ran away together? Well, she could come and live on the farm with me, but she’d be going from one boring, unsatisfying existence to another that’s even worse. He knows that. And we’ve seen how hard he works — he falls asleep in the plow at nights, and he never gets a chance to bathe because he works the land so hard, and he’s just clinging on by his fingernails. He can’t offer her a better life. And he knows that they will become embittered with one another and that they won’t actually be happy together.
So the only appeal you can make at that point is to say, aha, but you don’t think about this rationally, or you don’t think about mere happiness and unhappiness — you have higher values. Which could be something like — the only thing I can think of is like truth, or authenticity, or something like that. And as you guys know, I’m a boring utilitarian. I think everything cashes out in terms of the hedonic calculus, and that things like authenticity and truth and justice and beauty are good, but they’re only good instrumentally insofar as they make, you know, moral patients feel good or not feel bad. So if there’s a hint of pursuing true love for the sake of some aesthetic quality which doesn’t cash out in the happiness of its participants, I do not buy that. I reject that completely. And I think that’s just silly.
Can love be analysed rationally
Cam: Do you think you can kind of analyze love and understand it rationally, or do you think it’s kind of — because to me it feels a little bit like faith in a way, where it just — it sounds so cliched and banal, but it does feel a little bit mysterious. Well, I mean, the problem is when you think about it like an autist, which maybe you can do, that kind of unweaves the rainbow, the Newtonian rainbow sort of thing, and kind of takes the magic away from it. It boils down to a little bit of lust and a little bit of stability.
Rich: But why do we need to define it?
Benny: Do you mean define love, or do you mean explain why you’re in love with someone?
Cam: I think, I mean, both.
Rich: But either way, like, how does it bear on his decision? Because unless she’s the only person in the whole world — are you saying you could love someone and be unhappy, but that would somehow be good or something?
Cam: Well, I suppose I’m saying like, sometimes you might have feelings for someone as Alihan does, and then there’s this tension sometimes — like, is this Pelageya? Like, is this the right person for me? Like, here’s this nice, stable, safe, good job, all these reasons I should be with someone, versus like, but I just feel like, or I have the passion for someone. And it’s kind of hard to weigh those things up. It gets to a point in the extreme, it’s not — you know, if you’re getting beaten every day, but you still have feelings for them, I think you want to intervene there. But certainly in the middle, sometimes it’s hard. And sometimes you get knocked for doing the former, you know, go for the safe option rather than the passion. But sometimes that seems like a respectable thing.
Rich: Yeah, that’s a whole nother can of worms. But like, I think I used to think that you could reason about love, and that basically no one is your ideal person — you have to make trade-offs. And I’ve even gone to the points of trying to list out attributes that I’m sort of willing to trade off, or ones that I’m not willing to. You know, people will say like, deal breakers.
Cam: Big ears or something like that.
Rich: Yeah. Or, you can go full sperg — I think Charles Darwin wrote down like a pros and cons list for marrying his cousin. And I used to think you kind of had to do that. But then now I think I just hadn’t met the right person, and like — I don’t know, maybe this is naive — but also because I feel like I don’t have to trade anything off in particular. Yeah, I’ve been in relationships where I was like trying to convince myself, oh, do the analysis, do the pros and cons, is it worth it. And then I think if you’re doing that at all, then that’s not love. If you have to do that, then that ain’t it.
And the weird thing is I still feel in some sense maybe for some people that is the best that there’s going to be. And also most people throughout history have definitely had to just settle, basically. And just do some kind of calculus like that, even if it’s much more simple. It’s like, I need a man who will provide income for the family and be a reasonably good husband or father or whatever.
Cam: Yeah, and that kind of goes back to Benny’s point before, when you’re kind of implying there’s someone for everyone, and like, maybe there is if you settle and you kind of — but I think it’s, you know, it’s not even out there for options.
Rich: You could plausibly not meet the person. Like, I feel like — of course I would say this, but I feel like I hadn’t met the person.
Cam: Yeah, especially with all this —
Benny: But even saying “the person” is begging the question.
Rich: Or a person, a person.
Cam: Well, okay, you know, one that meets this kind of criteria. And especially if you’re influenced by kind of Alihan’s sort of neurosis — or, not even neurosis, but just, you know, whether it’s your colleague, or you know, the friend of the wife of your friend, or like all these reasons. Like, “here’s a person” — and you’re like, well, I can’t because of all these issues. And he was, or he also gets so worked up of like, how would I — yeah, I didn’t have enough money, or I don’t want to live in this country, or like all these other things, and you’re like, it just makes it harder.
I do want to say another thing as well. There’s something around this story where there’s that thing of sometimes there’s the idea of someone — you can love the idea of someone. And especially in these cases where they haven’t acted on it and they haven’t been romantic — you know, he —
Rich: Yeah, well, he doesn’t know about her micropene yet, for instance.
Cam: But yeah, you actually don’t know — you haven’t been romantic or sexual, or just even enough time has passed maybe. And yeah, there’s this irony where if you don’t actually test it, like he might be stuck with us for life, you know, because it’s like the idea of her — she talked to him this way, but he doesn’t know all the issues with her, or how that would be in a relationship. And they can like never get past her.
Rich: But again, you can’t outthink Chekhov, because he already thought of that. And he already included a little line about that, where Alyohin himself considers that and is like, oh, maybe if we were actually together, we’d grow resigned to each other and harden ourselves to each other and so on. He knows that he might just be chasing a fantasy that he’s never had to actually test up against the cold, hard reality. And that it’s easier for it to stay in the mind before you learn about how shitty people can be when you actually share your whole life with them.
Benny: And then I guess the question at that point is, maybe it’s all to the good that he didn’t act on it, in the sense that the fantasy of it might be as good as it ever gets. And something about them having this sort of secretive love affair in their life that — well, I was going to say can’t be spoiled, but it sort of does get spoiled. I’m a little confused by the part of the story where she turns a little bit sour and gets sick and starts being a little mean to him, because that seems out of place a bit, right? She’s just nagging him hard.
Cam: I thought she was just nagging him. With my accent.
Cam: What was some of her — she was like —
Benny: He was supposed to bring something to the opera or whatever.
Rich: Every time he said something, she’d be like, no, that’s wrong. Or she’d side with whoever’s arguing against him.
Benny: Oh yeah, yeah, she’d disagree with him.
Cam: Yeah, to be honest, I interpreted a bit of that as flirtier — of like, “oh nah, that’s wrong,” or —
Benny: Cam’s like, she likes me, I think she likes me.
Cam: I mean, I thought there were hints of jealousy in Alyohin in the way he was — her and the husband. And then I even wondered if there was hints of jealousy when he was describing Pelageya, because he says how could she be with this brute, and I’m kind of like, is this the intellectual guy who can’t understand the more carnal aspects of female sexuality, just want to get railed by a roadie — and just being above it? But then I thought, sometimes you are confused, right? And it’s not out of jealousy, you’re just like, yeah man, like, why is this person with that person? Like, they have all these issues. And it’s confusing.
We’ve lost Rich. Not sure if you can hear us. Yeah, Rich ran away.
Cam: Rich, we talked for two hours for you. You’ve left us.
Rich: We’re not done yet.
Benny: Bladders.
Cam: Um, yeah, I was just saying there were hints of jealousy. But yeah, should we move to the whole “what do we think of Chekhov in general”?
Rich: I mean, I’m not on the timeline, but I assume you guys need to go pretty soon.
Cam: I probably need to go in the next 10-ish minutes. I’ve got about five messages coming in.
Rich: Oh yeah, I’d love to just wrap up the trilogy as a whole then. Yeah, like what are the — okay, well, I might as well just get into it. So we’ve kind of talked about it, but I think the big one is people oppressing themselves, or like not allowing themselves to be true to their authentic nature and not living life fully in an unconstrained way. Yeah. And then that last story just doesn’t quite fit the mold for me. And I don’t know if it’s because I disagree with Chekhov about the moral of that story, or if it just isn’t a direct match onto the theme. I don’t actually think Alyohin did anything wrong.
Benny: Wait, can you explain how the second story fits that theme for you? “Gooseberries” — like, who’s oppressing themselves there?
Cam: Nikolai early on when he was —
Rich: Yeah, he spends the majority of his life just not —
Cam: Not buying the coffee.
Benny: I guess — I see, I see. In service of this larger — yeah, okay.
Cam: I wondered if you didn’t even need a Belikov — but there’s kind of this idealization, or this love of an ideal. The first one is this ideal society maybe, and the second one is like this ideal bucolic life, and then the third one is like this ideal woman. There’s maybe one connection. And then like, what are the pitfalls of that, and what are the benefits?
Rich: Yeah, that’s nice.
Benny: That is nice.
our favourite story of the trilogy
Rich: I’m dying to know which was your guys’ favorite story of the three.
Benny: I think upon first read, I think “About Love” was my favorite. I think it was sort of what you said earlier, Rich, about the ambiguity of it, where I really came away without a firm sense of who exactly is in the right and the wrong here, if anyone. Whereas the other ones, I had a stronger moral sense of the characters, and it was a little easier to pass judgment. But I do like your point that each story gets a little more ambiguous — that’s also a very nice reading of it. So yeah, upon first read, “About Love.” But upon discussion, now maybe “Man in the Case.” Yeah, I think there was more there than I got when I first read it myself, so that was nice. What about you?
Cam: “Man in the Case” was my least favorite, easily. I think “About Love” for me. We’ll see — I mean, it would be interesting to think about this in a year or two. I can imagine “About Love” stays with me, and what it does for me is — it distills in a story this kind of thing that’s kind of banal to talk around. And it’s like, it’s within all like romantic fiction, right, these themes — like love is mysterious, and like, do you act on it, like trading off these other things. And it’s all very cliche to talk about, but like, what I loved about it in the story, it didn’t feel yuck, and it felt pure and soulful, and it is about these themes. Chekhov’s stories are quite relatable in the sense of — love is this thing that everyone can relate to. Love and sex and food. And in a lot of literature, maybe you don’t have necessarily these things, more high-minded things. Yeah, and I think — although I did love the second one as well. That’s a bit influenced by Saunders. Saunders did a treatment of all three.
Rich: Well, that one kind of was ruined for me because I read it first, I think, as well. And I loved it. And I read the Saunders stuff. And then when I got to “The Man in the Case,” I went backwards. For some reason, I didn’t actually love having the same characters. I didn’t care that much for continuity of characters, and I don’t really want to know their backstories or what they were talking about previously or what they’re going to talk about next. I would have been fine if it was three different sets of characters. Yeah, well, that was my take at the time.
Cam: I suppose what the same characters do is, it connects them. Like, we’re forced to connect the three stories. Which I think —
Rich: As we were talking about it, I’ve grown to like these guys, and I like having the touchstone to talk about who they are. So actually, yeah, I don’t know — like, maybe as a trilogy. I don’t know if there’s like 12 stories — I don’t know if I want to read like the adventures of Ivan and Birkin, you know? Three was enough. But yeah, “Gooseberries” is brilliant, I think. Though I would say “About Love” was maybe my least favorite, only because it was all story within story, as far as I remember. There was no exterior scene.
Benny: No Pelageya, dude. But it’s still a story — I guess it’s still a story about her.
Rich: It wasn’t like a nice descriptive or nature scene or metaphorical scene, whereas the others have like the nice scenes outside of the story being told.
Benny: No nature. He was all over it.
Rich: Yeah.
Benny: No strawberries.
Cam: Yeah, I think I took the story of Alyohin’s love as that was kind of the main story. There is a risk sometimes, I wonder, of thinking too much of how they’re connected, rather than just thinking of, you know, to quote Chekhov in the third story, like, you know, everyone talking about love — you don’t want to explain every case, attempting to generalize. So you can kind of take these stories on their own as well and get a lot of value. What do you say — the doctor takes each individual case?
Rich: Yeah, yeah. I think these three stories were great. Like, quite beginner friendly to us compared to some other Chekhov stories or other stories in general, in that the device of having a person lay out some idea or philosophical problem or social problem directly is like kind of like cheating — just lay out a problem or parable and call it a short story — rather than having it be heavily plot driven, or like iceberg-method driven, where you have to come up with everything yourself, which I know other Chekhov stories are more like. But I think it was a nice — yeah, it made it nice for us because there are still multiple layers. There’s the thing which is directly being exposited by whoever’s speaking, and then there’s also the background cues, context, behavioral stuff, scene and setting stuff, which just enriches it. So I thought that was good for us dum-dums to just have something to grab onto, that’s very concrete to talk about. Not just like there’s this other story in the Saunders book where you just have to figure out what everything means yourself, and you kind of need Saunders to — well, I needed Saunders to bring me along and explain it. Quite different to this one.
Benny: We’ll get there. A couple years, we’ll be expert literary critics.
Cam: Yeah, I can imagine coming back to the stories and just noticing the details, like as Nabokov sort of says, to fondle the details. But it seems — it has these big themes, this theme of what is love, what is happiness, what is the good life. But then you kind of notice — and that’s what Saunders, I feel like Saunders has done over his life — and you just notice all these little details, and why has Chekhov put that in there, and to think what that means. And it’s kind of nice to have all of that. You have the big discussion, and then you can have the small discussion, and then you have the discussion about stories.
Benny: I’m keen to read more Chekhov for sure. Perhaps not his plays.
Cam: Apparently, he’s really funny. He was known as humorous. There’s humor in here. I think there’s a little bit of that humor dies over time.
Rich: The other Chekhov’s was kind of a comic character, I think.
Cam: Yeah, he was. I keep bringing him up, but he was kind of a Woody Allen type.
accessibility of chekhov
Rich: Is there — since this comes up for us a lot — is there like a term of art for how accessible a story is? As in, how much of it is text that is easily analyzable, and how much of it is like context clues, or even like specific cultural knowledge or literary allusion knowledge that you need in order to appreciate a work of art? Because it seems like it’s an important thing that often leads to whether or not we like something, and how much homework we have to do. And like, sometimes you get a story that’s just entertaining and interesting or moving on the face of it, and you don’t need to know anything else. And sometimes you get something that’s basically impenetrable, but I’m sure it’s still a good work of art. But like, maybe you get to a point where only like a George Saunders figure could actually be the only one to get all the juice out of it. I guess accessibility or something. I like it when it’s both, basically.
Cam: Yeah. But the more I read, the more I — yeah, no, definitely.
Rich: When you can straightforwardly read and enjoy it, and you can really dig into it. And I’m less keen on the ones where it’s more just like for boffins.
Cam: Well, in a film context, I kind of even wonder, is that — if you can’t just enjoy it on itself, and if you don’t rewatch it lots, like, is that just evidence against it that it’s not very good? Even if some pretentious person could talk all day about it. Maybe that’s wrong.
Rich: I don’t know if it’s not — it’s more like it’s very narrow. It’s only for X, you know, a small subset of people who are equipped with the tools to get something out of it.
Cam: Yeah, that could be the case. The more we read and going through these authors, the more I’m noticing like influences on others. Like Virginia Woolf on Wallace, and Chekhov on Woody Allen, and probably on Woolf as well.
Rich: Dostoevsky on Chekhov, almost certainly.
Cam: Yeah, and even that, you can — there’s kind of a humanism in that. And sometimes when I read like Harold Bloom or someone like that, you know, some literary critic, they’re always just like referencing this seems like this person, this seems like that author. Which is fun and I think important, and colors your understanding. But you can kind of get caught up too much in that and not just talk around the story.
Rich: Yeah, right. You end up like those hardcore Jews who just study the Torah constantly, but like, less worried about, you know, the Kabbalah and stuff.
Cam: Yeah, I suppose. I think that analogy holds.
Rich: Don’t think about it too much, just agree.
Cam: Freedom, light, love, and faith.
Benny: All right, what are we reading next, fellas?
Rich: So we’re doing volume one of Mein Kampf.
Cam: Min Kamp. Min Kamp.
Rich: Is it called Min Kamp?
Cam: That’s Norwegian for “my struggle.”
Rich: Okay. Min Kamp, My Struggle, by Karl Ove Knausgaard. So this is a very famous autofictional — or is it a six-part — I think it might be a six-part series of fictionalized memoir, still going —
Cam: And running, maybe. I’m not sure. He’s still alive.
Rich: Yeah, right. The first volume weighs in at 400 pages, so my man has a lot to say about himself. Yeah, so get hyped for that. And if you have any feedback or commentary on Chekhov or any other episode, you can email us at doyouevenlit@gmail.com — D-O-U-E-V-E-N-L-I-T at gmail.com — with comments, questions, and yeah, we’ll see you next time. Bye.
Cam: See you guys. Good to see you.
Benny: Boom.
