Gooseberries
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Gooseberries
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About this listen
What is the price of a personal paradise? Join host Lev Lesokhin for the second installment of our Chekhov trilogy as we explore "Gooseberries" (1898). In this episode, we follow the story of a man obsessed with buying a country estate, partly to grow his own gooseberries, and the brother who watches this "success" with a mixture of pity and disgust.
This story explores the notion of happiness and its flipside - suffering. Some of the questions it raises are deeply personal and philosophical. Can anyone truly be happy? Is happiness an illusion of the mind? Does happiness require those who are afflicted with suffering to suffer in silence? The story displays a postmodern self-reflectiveness, decades before Postmodernism comes into fashion. It leaves us with more questions than answers as a result, wondering whether we have our own secret version the gooseberry bush.