Gooseberries

Anton Chekhov

Jan 2017 · Interactive Media · Narrated by Max Bollinger

About this audiobook

"Gooseberries" by Anton Chekhov is a short story about Ivan Ivanovich, a man who visits his brother and reflects on his own life. While picking gooseberries, Ivan compares his unsatisfied life to the abundant berries and realizes that he has been living for material wealth and social status, instead of finding true happiness and fulfillment. He also reflects on the futility of life and the inevitability of death. Through Ivan's musings and introspection, Chekhov explores themes of mortality, materialism, and the search for meaning in life. The story ends with Ivan feeling a sense of contentment and appreciation for the simple joys of life, such as the taste of ripe gooseberries. Read in English, unabridged.

About the author

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born in the provincial town of Taganrog, Ukraine, in 1860. In the mid-1880s, Chekhov became a physician, and shortly thereafter he began to write short stories. Chekhov started writing plays a few years later, mainly short comic sketches he called vaudvilles. The first collection of his humorous writings, Motley Stories, appeared in 1886, and his first play, Ivanov, was produced in Moscow the next year. In 1896, the Alexandrinsky Theater in St. Petersburg performed his first full- length drama, The Seagull. Some of Chekhov's most successful plays include The Cherry Orchard, Uncle Vanya, and Three Sisters. Chekhov brought believable but complex personalizations to his characters, while exploring the conflict between the landed gentry and the oppressed peasant classes. Chekhov voiced a need for serious, even revolutionary, action, and the social stresses he described prefigured the Communist Revolution in Russia by twenty years. He is considered one of Russia's greatest playwrights. Chekhov contracted tuberculosis in 1884, and was certain he would die an early death. In 1901, he married Olga Knipper, an actress who had played leading roles in several of his plays. Chekhov died in 1904, spending his final years in Yalta.