The gooseberries

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The gooseberries ( Russian Крыжовник , Kryschownik) is a short story by the Russian writer Anton Chekhov , which appeared in the August 1898 issue of the Moscow magazine Russkaja Mysl . The author wrote the text in the early summer of 1898 at his Melichowo country estate near Moscow. A translation came onto the German-speaking market in 1904.

Anton Chekhov

The gooseberries is the second of the three internal narratives from the Little Trilogy .

content

The narrator Ivan Ivanytsch Tschimscha-Glimalaiski distances himself from his brother, the two years younger landowner Nikolai Ivanytsch Tschimscha-Glimalaiski - mainly because he emphasizes his inherited nobility and his landed property. A grandfather was a farmer. The father had risen from soldier to officer and was finally ennobled. Ivan, now an old man, looks back decades when his brother Nikolai was already over forty, but was still eagerly looking around in newspaper advertisements for an estate with gooseberry bushes in it. The father had left his own estate to his sons. However, after the death of their father, the brothers had been “litigated” because of excessive indebtedness.

Basically, the narrating vet Iwan puts two life paths up for discussion - that of the doctor and that of brother Nikolai, a tax officer who has been a loyal tax officer for decades and who has saved on new land. Nikolai had done all the means to fulfill his dream. He had even married an "ugly widow" with a little money. This - accustomed to modest luxury - had unfortunately only survived the brother's iron austerity program for a few years.

After all, Nikolai had bought a good that did not correspond to his dream at all. Even the gooseberry bushes were missing. But the new owner had his obedient farmers replace them. Speaking of obedient farmers - the story is pure social criticism. The landed aristocracy, who parasitized the working people in the tsar's Russia , was sharply condemned. Chekhov castigates "the brazenness and idleness of the strong, ignorance and animal likeness of the weak, all around unbelievable poverty, narrowness, degeneration, drunkenness, hypocrisy, lies ..." The author lets the narrator Ivan recognize: Brother Nikolai owes his happiness as a new landlord to his brother Nikolai the fact that "the unfortunate ones carry their burden in silence". Despite such clear convictions, the brother's conviction finally stagnates. Both sit together on the new estate - Brother Nikolai chews one sour gooseberry after the other and thinks the fruit is tasty - and weep for their gray hair. Dying is apparently the next item on the agenda.

reception

March 23, 1950, André Maurois admires Chekhov's conciseness based on the text and mentions comparatively more verbose authors such as Maupassant and Thomas Hardy .

German-language editions

  • The gooseberries in: Anton Pawlowitsch Chekhov: The lady with the dog and other stories . With drawings and an afterword by Werner Berthel. Andras Karakas in Romanian. Insel, 1977, 2nd edition, 385 pages

Used edition

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Russian Мелихово (усадьба)
  2. ↑ Russian. The gooseberries. Origin of the story
  3. ↑ Düwel in the follow-up to the edition used, pp. 593–594
  4. ↑ Russian The Small Trilogy ( Memento of the original from March 20, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. in the Russian State Library  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.rsl.ru
  5. ↑ Edition used, p. 361, 4th Zvo
  6. ↑ Edition used, p. 361, 17th Zvu
  7. ↑ Maurois, quoted in Urban, p. 220 middle