I was happily ambling up a hill in Santa Clarita, north of Los Angeles, relishing my good fortune—since I’d just flown from gray, wintry Cleveland, where the sky resembled frozen cement, while here the sky was so blue it seemed like a lake, and the sun felt like summer—when I received Mark’s text canceling our dinner. His family, he wrote, had just evacuated from their longtime home in Altadena, and, in his words “there’s a pretty good chance our house is on fire right now.” The Eaton Fire had begun raging, fueled by the whipping Santa Ana winds, and was now turning houses into massive matchboxes, reducing them to smoking ash. I was just a few miles away, teaching at a creative writing residency and basking happily.
Just a few days before, we’d been texting.
Mark: “How’s CA so far? Sorry the weather is so ugly…” We’d lived together in college, and I always admired Mark, a red-haired whirlwind of artistic and intellectual talent who’d made the leap from skate-punk-drummer-dreamer to Hollywood screenwriter.
Me: “I don’t know where to put all the happiness.” I’d just got back from a run, tee shirt and shorts.
Me: “Usually at this time of year I’m dealing with unendurable depression, likely weather related.”
Even for the most stoic soul, Cleveland in winter is a kind of spiritual test, casting a gray cloak over the sky, often for months, shaking down lake effect snows, one after the other, until you feel that some part of you may be buried forever.
Mark replied with a rainbow emoji.
Me: “It feels like I’m cheating on Cleveland.”
And: “Is it okay to be depressed in California.”
Mark: “We all find a way.”
I laughed out loud. Joy rippled through me every time I began my jog, ecstatic breaths as I pumped my legs in the sunniness. Even if I was running in parking lots in Santa Clarita, I kept passing thick thyme bushes bursting with small purple flowers, their scent rich and deep and incense-smoky.
“Is it okay to be depressed in California.”I’d visited Mark’s house only once, and all I really remember was the living room bookshelf lined with the complete Chekhov—thirteen volumes, translated by Constance Garnett a century ago. A longtime Chekhovphile, I must have pointed it out in envy. Mark shared that he read a Chekhov story every day for a year, giving him courage as he struggled to sell screenplays to Hollywood studios.
When Mark told me about the fire, I thought first of the fate of those Chekhov tomes. All those stories, all those ordinary characters, each book becoming a small pyre, alongside the flaming photo albums and memories of a family’s life—and not just his family’s, but many families’ lives.
*
A few days earlier, I’d gotten a WhatsApp message from Shahd Alnaami, a young writer living in central Gaza. In late fall, as part of the We Are Not Numbers organization, I’d helped her revise a poem for publication. When we Zoomed, I’d been struck by the brightness of her face, her ebullience, her curiosity. She was so hungry to learn, to write all her stories, and I asked her to record an address to my students. Though her university had been bombed, she was not giving up, she told them. She said:
I’m trying to rebuild my future, despite everything—despite the bombs, despite the distractions, the constant threat. We. Never. Stop. Dreaming. Our passion can never be crushed. It’s this fire that I want you to feel too. Your dreams should have no limits…. In Gaza, every day is a fight—a fight of survival, a fight for justice, a fight for freedom. The world may try to turn its back on us, but we will not stay silent. We will use every opportunity to make our voices heard and I want you to do the same. Your dreams should not be smaller than the obstacles you face.
It occurred to me, suddenly, that Shahd was freer than my students, struggling to fit into an American dream that required their silent submission. She may be living in destitution, threatened by war and genocide, but she did not bow her head to the grim reality outside her door in Gaza.
Like some dog that insists on sniffing at the same cherry tree during his evening walk, I keep returning to Chekhov. At night, seeking comfort from a familiar story, I’ll pull out his stories, to find myself in the tight compartment of one of his dreamworlds. Like a train compartment, shared with strangers heading into a Russian night, a Chekhov story feels close, strange, yet curiously ordinary. You wade carefully into the waters of mysterious lives, as you settle yourself into a small bunk, then gently reach across the boundaries of silence to share what you have—a little bread and cheese, a bottle of some spirits.
Once, my girlfriend and I found ourselves on a train to St. Petersburg, sharing a compartment with a Ukrainian couple. We had the bread and cheese, they had the vodka. We were on our way to Kizhi, the great wooden Church of the Transfiguration, its glorious cupolas made with no nails. The other couple were seeking medical help for their daughter who had a rare form of cancer, possibly due to Chernobyl. Outside, all night, sleepless after their story, we watched villages fly by, with a thousand stories impossible to know.
*
Then on December 31st, I received a WhatsApp from Shahd:
I was planning to send you a message filled with hope and gratitude for your presence in my life this year. But I lost all that hope on Saturday at 4am. They bombed by uncle’s house, which is right next to ours. All my cousins and my only sister have become martyrs. They pulled me out from under the rubble, and I have injuries in my legs. Alhamdulillah, please keep us in your prayers. I hope that 2025 will bring more peace to us and happiness to you.
She wished me happiness! I couldn’t help but think of Ivan’s speech in Chekhov’s story “Gooseberries”: “at the door of every contented, happy man somebody should stand with a little hammer, constantly knocking, to remind him that unhappy people exist.”
*
It began with Chekhov, my obsessive love of literature, and all the ways a story can be understood only partially. Specifically, I was unhappy with my classmates’ analysis of Chekhov’s “Gooseberries.” We’d gathered in a dorm room, a group of premed students and I, to cram for our final exam for the fearsome Robert Cording. He’d given us “Gooseberries” and a blue book to stuff full of ink and a close reading.
The world does seem full of unhappiness and tragedy, much of it human-caused, either through outright cruelty or through the indolence of our illusions.That night, staring down the barrel of the exam the next morning, my classmates had concluded that it was a deeply pessimistic story, about the unhappiness of man in the face of exploitation and cruelty. That’s one way to read “Gooseberries.” But that conclusion seemed wrong to me.
“Gooseberries” is a story-within-a-story. Ivan Ivanich, a veterinarian from the city, travels the countryside with his friend Burkin, taking cover at the house of a friend; during their stay, Ivan tells the story of his brother’s miserably deluded existence as a gentleman farmer—in which he finds even his sour gooseberries to be sweet—and argues that we must accept the fundamental unhappiness of life and be freed of our illusions. “At the door of every contented, happy man,” Ivan says, as if appending a moral to the end of his story, “somebody should stand with a little hammer, constantly tapping, to remind him that unhappy people exist, that however unhappy he may be, sooner or later life will show him its claws, some calamity will befall him—illness, poverty, loss—and nobody will hear or see, just as he doesn’t hear or see others now. But there is nobody with a little hammer.”
Ah, that hammer. Ivan makes a very good point, as did my classmates. The world does seem full of unhappiness and tragedy, much of it human-caused, either through outright cruelty or through the indolence of our illusions.
But I was unhappy with the unhappiness thesis. That wasn’t the whole story. Our cram session broke up, and as I walked back to my dorm room under a moonless night, I couldn’t help but think that something was missing from that interpretation. It was too easy.
*
I chased that unhappiness, the peculiar Russian pleasure of unhappiness, all the way to Russia, where I would live for a year on a fellowship to study Russian poetry shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, gaining an unofficial master’s degree in masochistic dysphoria.
“When I was in Russia,” Vladimir Ivanoff says in the film Moscow on the Hudson, “I did not love my life… but I loved my misery. You know why? Because it was my misery.” In Russia, just out of college and suddenly in another country that I’d been obsessed with, I got to possess my own misery. I carried it wherever I went, adding to it every time I encountered another lost or blasted soul on the cold streets of Moscow. I wanted to “live like a Russian,” to endure the unendurable, imagining that Russian life would teach me what my comfortable American life could not: how to face suffering—and how, in facing it, to encounter reality stripped of bourgeois gloss.
But the Russians I met wanted nothing to do with such masochism. They could endure, for sure, but they were too busy trying to find the same comforts that I had fled in America. Possessing my own misery, I saw then, choosing it, giving myself to it, was also a kind of privilege. By the end, bowed before the weight of it, I finally learned to give misery up, before it owned me.
*
My classmates’ reading of “Gooseberries” makes sense. After all, Ivan is not entirely wrong—there is much to be unhappy about, and much of our happiness seems dependent on the suffering of others. On MLK, Jr. Day, I read the transcript of Martin Luther King’s Christmas sermon on peace in 1967, in which he invites us to see our fundamental connectedness. He said:
You get up in the morning and go to the bathroom and reach over for the sponge, and that’s handed to you by a Pacific islander. You reach for a bar of soap, and that’s given to you at the hands of a Frenchman. And then you go into the kitchen to drink your coffee for the morning, and that’s poured into your cup by a South American. And maybe you want tea: that’s poured into your cup by a Chinese. Or maybe you’re desirous of having cocoa for breakfast, and that’s poured into your cup by a West African…. And before you finish eating breakfast in the morning, you’ve depended on more than half of the world…. We aren’t going to have peace on earth until we recognize this basic fact of the interrelated structure of all reality.
King’s assessment of our dependence on the labor (and exploitation) of the world has only grown more severe. To think of the cobalt miners in the Congo, or the coffee growers in Colombia, the sneaker makers in Vietnam—one’s morning coffee and Instagram reels involve a measure of exploitation that would be completely shocking if it were visible to us all the time, as the war in Gaza has been.
Of course, because Chekhov will Chekhov, rain immediately begins to fall. Hard. And they will lose that loving feeling.Let’s look one more time at Ivan’s moralizing speech. As he sees his brother eating sour gooseberries from his land and pretending that they are tasty, Ivan tells us that it caused him to feel oppressed by his so-called happiness:
… how many satisfied, happy people there really are! What a suffocating force it is! You look at life: the insolence and idleness of the strong, the ignorance and brutishness of the weak, incredible poverty all about us, overcrowding, degeneration, drunkenness, hypocrisy, lying…. Yet all is calm and stillness in the houses and in the streets; of the fifty thousand living in a town, there is not one who would cry out, who would give vent to his indignation aloud. We see the people going to market for provisions, eating by day, sleeping by night, talking their silly nonsense, getting married, growing old, serenely escorting their dead to the cemetery; but we do not see and we do not hear those who suffer, and what is terrible in life goes on somewhere behind the scenes…. Everything is quiet and peaceful, and nothing protests but mute statistics: so many people gone out of their minds, so many gallons of vodka drunk, so many children dead from malnutrition…. And this order of things is evidently necessary; evidently the happy man only feels at ease because the unhappy bear their burdens in silence, and without that silence happiness would be impossible. It’s a case of general hypnotism. There ought to be behind the door of every happy, contented man some one standing with a hammer continually reminding him with a tap that there are unhappy people; that however happy he may be, life will show him her laws sooner or later, trouble will come for him — disease, poverty, losses, and no one will see or hear, just as now he neither sees nor hears others. But there is no man with a hammer; the happy man lives at his ease, and trivial daily cares faintly agitate him like the wind in the aspen-tree — and all goes well.
It’s terrifying, really, man’s cruelty to man, where the starvation of some seems to be required by the those who grow fat on their wealth. But the translator, Constance Garnett, has lessened the blow. In Chekhov’s Russian, the happy man should get a стук, a knock, on the head. That’s hardly a tap. He should be knocked with a hammer.
So, Ivan is correct, then! Every happy person should be knocked upside the head to be reminded of human misery.
Except…
*
“Except, what?” you ask.
Except the story is peppered with moments of joy. Undeniable joy. From the very start. Consider the opening:
Since early morning the whole sky had been covered with dark clouds; it was not hot, but still and dull, as usual on gray, bleak days, when clouds hang over the fields for a long time, you wait for rain, but it does not come. The veterinarian Ivan Ivanych and the high-school teacher Burkin were tired of walking, and the fields seemed endless to them. Far ahead the windmills of the village of Mironositskoe were barely visible, to the right a line of hills stretched away and then disappeared far beyond the village, and they both knew that this was the bank of the river, with meadows, green willows, country houses, and if you stood on one of the hills, from there you could see equally vast fields, telegraph poles, and the train, which in the distance looked like a crawling caterpillar, and in clear weather, when all nature seemed meek and pensive, Ivan Ivanych and Burkin were imbued with love for these fields, and both thought how great, how beautiful this land was.
The day, despite its dark clouds and dull grayness, is full of moments where, suddenly, from a certain vantage, one is filled with love, overcome by beauty. This paragraph is full of rich, syntactically complex sentences, drawn together with the “ands,” where the plenitude of things piles up. Chekhov’s word, here translated as “imbued,” is “проникнуты / proniknutyi”—which means to be filled with, penetrated by, imbued with; the “pro” prefix in Russian suggests “through.”
Of course, because Chekhov will Chekhov, rain immediately begins to fall. Hard. And they will lose that loving feeling. But this first paragraph provides a great height from which to fall—they are soaked to the skin. In Chekhov, the land soaks you with love, and then with mud. To imbue, in its secondary meaning, is “to saturate or impregnate with moisture, color, etc.”
And the scene before his speech embracing disillusionment and unhappiness, Ivan utterly loses himself in the joy of bathing in the little river, ridding himself of the mud of that rain-slogged journey to Alyokhin’s house. He splashes around so long that even his friends grow annoyed with him.
If Chekhov has no style, then why is there such an embarrassing number of translations of Chekhov?And, as they dried themselves, they were astonished to silence by one of the servants of the house, whom the narrator refers to as the beautiful Pelagaya, who offered them towels as they emerged from their bathing.
All of which to say: Ivan has been happy, multiple times, over the course of the story, and has forgotten that happiness in making a brief in the state’s case for disillusionment.
*
How does one translate happiness? Here’s Constance Garnett’s translation:
Ivan Ivanovitch went outside, plunged into the water with a loud splash, and swam in the rain, flinging his arms out wide. He stirred the water into waves which set the white lilies bobbing up and down; he swam to the very middle of the millpond and dived, and came up a minute later in another place, and swam on, and kept on diving, trying to touch the bottom.
“Oh, my goodness!” he repeated continually, enjoying himself thoroughly. “Oh, my goodness!” He swam to the mill, talked to the peasants there, then returned and lay on his back in the middle of the pond, turning his face to the rain. Burkin and Alehin were dressed and ready to go, but he still went on swimming and diving. “Oh, my goodness! …” he said. ”Oh, Lord, have mercy on me! …”
“That’s enough!” Burkin shouted to him.
Like a child swimming on the first hot day of the year, Ivan is carried away by the physical pleasure of the water, diving and floating and exclaiming. So much so that he’s drawn the ire of his companions. To translate happiness, it turns out, you must also be ready to translate other people’s annoyance at your happiness.
*
Modern American realist short stores are, in some sense, translations of Chekhov: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Cheever, Carver, and then everyone who has imitated Carver imitating Chekhov. And that plaintive cry for a hammer to wake up the happy person—didn’t Flannery O’Connor steal it and turn it into a gun in her “A Good Man is Hard to Find”? She went from Garnett’s tap to Chekhov’s knock to full-on bullet. It is the homicidal Misfit, after all, who says, “She would’ve been a good woman…if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”
Yet compared to the bombastic Romanticism of Dostoyevsky or the painterly Realism of Tolstoy, Chekhov’s voice is so understated, so impressionistic, it feels almost a willful resistance to style. It’s as if he wants to disappear in the stories, blend in with gray ordinary people, who nonetheless, like us, have these sudden sparks of joy.
If Chekhov has no style, then why is there such an embarrassing number of translations of Chekhov? It is as if Chekhov’s linguistic subtlety paradoxically renders him an object of fascination for each generation of translators—as if the previous versions hadn’t quite found the pulse of Chekhov’s corpus. Chekhov himself noted to a fellow writer: “When you want to touch a reader’s heart, try to be colder. It gives their grief, as it were, a background against which it stands out in greater relief.”
Even if, as the Russian language translation duo Pevear and Volokhonsky note, Chekhov was not verbally inventive, his rhythm was something that they sought to capture; in particular, Chekhov’s “preference …for stringing clauses and sentences together with the conjunction ‘and’” suggests that Chekhov may, in fact, have something of a style.
*
I’ve found that, like translation, the joys and sorrows seem almost inextricable; as with most berries, in “Gooseberries,” you can’t have the sweet without the sour.
A story is not a moral, yet Ivan wants it otherwise. What is the moral of the joy of splashing about in a river? For his friend Burkin, the narrative suggests, Ivan’s own illusions, captured in his one-sided story, leave a stench as vile as the burnt tobacco that irks Burkin as he tries to go to sleep after hearing Ivan’s depressing story. I hold with Burkin, who knew the truth of Ivan enough to see the limits of his worldview.
*
I puzzled over the ending of this story for years. Like so many stories by Chekhov, it abjures the epiphanic and instead offers us a subtle, ambiguous ellipsis. What’s unfortunate about the translations of “Gooseberries” is that they lose an interesting echo in the final sentence. This is the last sentence of the story:
Дождь стучал в окна всю ночь.
The rain was pattering on the windowpanes all night. (Garnett)
The rain beat against the windowpanes all night. (Yarmolinsky)
Rain beat on the windows all night. (Pevear-Volokhonsky)
“Pattering” is entirely too wan a word, too painterly. And it fails to draw us back to Ivan’s pivotal speech as it does in the Russian, since the words Chekhov uses are of the same root: стук (knock) and стучал (knocked). The rain is doing the thing that Ivan wished the hammer to do—to knock some sense in us, to knock us awake. One might prefer “tapped,” as Garnett used in the earlier moment with the hammer, since it feels subtle in its personification, as if the rain wanted to get inside, or even the more dramatic “beat”—but neither rhyme with the earlier hammer-related verb. In the comforts of suburbia, I could not see how the weather itself could be that herald of the Real. A brutal Russian winter in Moscow, walking the icy streets, taught me otherwise—how vulnerable we are to the elements. Climate change is now waking us up again.
*
“Gooseberries” is the middle story in what has been called Chekhov’s Little Trilogy, a linked group of stories that begins with “The Man in a Case” and ends with “About Love.” In “The Man in a Case,” a rule-bound teacher named Belikov terrifies a small town with his awkward, judgmental presence. But when a vivacious young female teacher arrives, and the townspeople begin imagining a romantic match, his life comes apart. His shell, or case (in Russian, the футляр/futliar), is broken forever, and he dies. In “Gooseberries,” the rain, at the beginning and ending of the story—like all good Chekhov stories—penetrates or knocks apart what is the футлярнoсть / futliarnost’, the en-cased-ness, the envelope of our illusions, our dreams. The translations of that final line miss this resonant echo.
*
I thought this was an essay about the question of happiness in a world with such grotesque human suffering, often caused by human cruelty or indifference. Perhaps the question is not, can I—or ought I—be happy at all when such suffering exists, a suffering which implicates me, but rather: what does one do with that happiness? Isn’t it also grotesque to fail to recognize the wonder and delights that attend even the most difficult, grueling life?
In his letters, Chekhov could sound like Ivan, lambasting the blinkered privilege of Russia’s aristocracy and the state of poverty in which most of the people were mired in. In 1891, Chekhov writes to his editor that “God’s world is good. Only one thing isn’t good: ourselves. How little there is in us of justice and humility, how poor is our conception of patriotism…. Instead of knowledge—inordinate brazenness and conceit, instead of hard work—laziness and swinishness; there is no justice; the concept of honor does not go beyond ‘the honor of the uniform,’ the uniform which is the everyday adornment of the prisoners’ dock.”
It’s okay to be unhappy at the great unhappiness, and it’s also understandable to want to forget about the unhappiness.But the character Ivan may also be drawn from an encounter in 1895 between Chekhov and Leo Tolstoy. The first time they met, Tolstoy invited Chekhov to go swimming, and they talked together while plashing in neck-deep water. Later, Tolstoy read to him from his new novel, a moralistic screed, and said that he liked Chekhov’s stories but not his plays. I’m not suggesting that we read the story as autofiction or that Ivan is simply a fictional version of Tolstoy. Chekhov’s imagination is too wise and subtle for that. Ivan is that part of us who see and lament the terrible injustices of our world and decide we ought to be reminded at every moment that we forget it. Burkin, on the other hand, notices how Ivan can’t help but occasionally forget this moralistic vision and luxuriate in the momentary pleasures of being alive.
It’s okay to be unhappy at the great unhappiness, and it’s also understandable to want to forget about the unhappiness, to seek a shell to protect ourselves from the chaos and cruelty of our world. But life will have its way with us, one way or another. And those who hide in a shell, risking nothing, may be losing what’s most beautiful about existence—those moments of utter self-abandoning joyfulness that come despite our ideas and feelings.
That’s what struck me most about Shahd’s address to my students. She did not ask to be saved or protected from our imperial weaponry—which, in the end, was what killed her family members. She did not ask them to be sad for her, or to stop living. She asked them to dream bigger. To use their voices. To become freer.
Was it our failure, as Americans, to dream bigger that led to those bombs?
*
I read Chekhov again and again, not because he’s a revolutionary or because he offers a vision where life is redeemed, but because he accompanies his characters (and us) into the place of life’s narrowing, where we become pressed in on every side. To tunnel inside a Chekhov story is to feel a narrowing that confounds and vexes us—whether through poverty, despair, indolence, or self-delusion—and, simultaneously, to taste the boundlessness of human longing.
And then, slowly, to be aware of some kindness that stands with us, beside us, in that narrow place, in all our vexation. Read almost any Chekhov story, and you feel simultaneously the poverty of life, the vanities of human being, and the dilatory power of imaginative empathy.
I find his work heartening precisely because each character—naturally and humanly—bridles against their suffocating fates. God remains silent. Yet Chekhov’s attentive, observant witness of these souls struggling feels like a kind of a divine love. If God were like Chekhov, I would be consoled.
*
The week after hearing the news of the fire and Mark’s family’s displacement from their home, I texted him to say that I was thinking about him, but I didn’t ask him for specifics. It felt wrong to pry around his suffering.
I carried the image of that burned set of Chekhov stories with me, and all the other stories of the family, for that week, along all my other concerns—Shahd and my friends in Gaza, my daughter’s chronic illness, my parents’ aging, etc.—saying prayers to bring them—all of them, and myself alongside them—strength. I imagined that he was too embroiled in the realities of dealing with homelessness to deal with my endless questions. What did my sadness for him do for him? But I couldn’t help myself. I kept imagining my own house gone, all my books translated to ash.
*
After a week, I finally reached out to our other roommate, his cousin and co-writer, Brian, to hear the latest. He texted back with the news.
The house did not burn down. The garage burned to the ground, but the firefighters had finally turned back the flames AT HIS HOUSE.
Mark and his family would not be able to return for some time, as the neighborhood had no power, and was full of toxic chemicals that had blown in a busted window. All the houses to the east had been destroyed. It was the end, but it wasn’t. Suddenly, those Chekhov stories—that line of books in Mark’s living room—that observant witnessing to all we will face and cannot abide, yet must live through—rose again in my mind.
While Mark passes this hard interim in a series of hotels and rentals around Los Angeles, Shahd awakens in her Gaza home, with the deaths of her sister and cousins right next door. The people around her are just trying to start over. Just the other day, she took some photographs of three girls, sitting next to a house reduced to rubble. Up close, we can see they’re kneeling on a rug, huddled together in pink fleece hoodies, translating purple and pink colored paper into decorative designs. It’s a simple, fugitive moment of beauty that Shahd had to share. In beauty is a kind of hope. No one knows the future of Gaza, or of Palestine, for that matter. But that moment of those three girls is closer to Chekhov than Trump’s recent AI-enhanced vision of Trump/Gaza, a golden calf extravaganza of self-deification and over-conspicuous consumption, with few, if any Palestinians in sight.
Chekhov’s stories remind me of the futility of holding onto stories that hold rigidly onto a bygone past. It’s not surprising that so many people nostalgically wish to turn the clock back to some sentimental, fictionalized past, as a bulwark from the future—a future of wildfires and rising oceans, of mass migration and haunted borders, of rising inequality and violent alienation. In many respects our age is like Chekhov’s at the end of the Tsars. An old order seems to be in its last throes, and too many of us are living in its dream-simulation, a virtual shell. Too many of us just aren’t ready to let it go, and the hammer has not yet knocked us awake, or cracked us completely open.
