A while ago I posted a reflection on “problems with the love of comfort,” as inspired by a scene in Crime in Punishment in which Razumikhin ridicules Zossimov for letting himself get slack in the desire for comforts.
Chekhov’s “Gooseberries” seems to go in the same direction — though it doesn’t name the problem as love of comfort, but rather as “happiness.” It’s chilling to hear Ivan Ivanovitch say,
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 . . .
Well, it seems to me that there is a man with a hammer, and he taps at my heart in every satisfied moment, but that is another matter.
Ivan describes the “quiet and peaceful” — or at least unremarkable and placid — existence that we see day to day versus the hiddenness of “those who suffer, and [how] what is terrible in life goes on somewhere behind the scenes.” I understand this sentiment as well as the sense of illusion and frustration that it excites. I understand the distrust of this apparent comfort and happiness and how it would bring Ivan to exclaim, “There is no happiness, and there ought not to be” — yet I think happiness is an inadequate way to refer to it, at least by my understanding of happiness. Perhaps he means satisfaction? The full quote is as follows:
Pavel Konstantinovich . . . don’t be calm and contented, don’t let yourself be put to sleep! While you are young, strong, confident, be not weary in well-doing! There is no happiness, and there ought not to be; but if there is a meaning and an object in life, that meaning and object is not our happiness, but something greater and more rational. Do good!
I don’t know if I would tack the words “more rational” onto “something greater,” but I think Ivan is on to something here insofar as he states that our meaning and object and life (which I contend is more than an “if” question) must be more than personal contentment. We cannot let ourselves fall asleep, or “get slack,” as the case was for Zossimov.
“Be not weary in well-doing!”
