Gooseberries

Today’s passage is from one of Anton Chekhov’s many short stories. Notice how Chekhov focuses on a description of the lush scenery outside of a Russian village. The village, which is located below the hills, is notably set apart from the fields that surround it. This gives a reader the impression that the people who live there are physically separated from nature—and perhaps even from Russian society. Rather than providing detail expositions about Ivanovitch and Burkin, Chekhov makes nature the focal point of the story.

“The whole sky had been overcast with rain-clouds from early morning; it was still day, not hot, but heavy, as it is in grey dull weather when the clouds have been hanging over the country for a long while, when one expects rain and it does not come. Ivan Ivanovitch, the veterinary surgeon, and Burkin, the high-school teacher, were already tired from walking, and the fields seemed to them endless. Far ahead of them they could just see the windmills of the village of Mironositskoe; on the right stretched a row of hillocks which disappeared in the distance behind the village, and the both knew that this was the bank of the river, that there were meadows, green willows, homesteads there, and that if one stood on one of the hillocks one could see from it the same vast plain, telegraph-wires, and a train which in the distance looked like a crawling caterpillar, and that in clear weather one could even see the town. Now, in still weather, when all nature seemed mild and dreamy, Ivan Ivanovitch and Burkin were filled with love of that countryside, and both thought how great, how beautiful a land it was.”

                                                    Apparel for the Enlightened Reader