Wealth and Status Theme Analysis

In “Gooseberries,” Ivan Ivanych tells his friends the story of Nikolai Ivanych, his younger brother who lives an extremely frugal lifestyle for decades in order to save up for a plot of land in the countryside. Nikolai does this at the expense of his own well-being and his relationships, and once he’s achieved his goal, he becomes pompous and entitled. Watching his brother transform from a civil servant of modest means to a “fat landowner” who not only eschews his peasant roots but also treats other peasants badly leads Ivan to believe that upward mobility—that is, increased wealth and social status—tends to corrupt people, making them arrogant and insensitive. However, the story also offers up Ivan’s wealthy but kind and generous friend Alekhin as a foil to Nikolai’s character, showing that a person’s attitude toward what they have is more indicative of their character than money and status themselves.

As Ivan tells Nikolai’s story to his friends Burkin and Alekhin, he makes the case that money has a morally perverse or even maddening effect on people. “Money, like vodka, does strange things to a man,” Ivan says. He gives the example of a man in his village who desperately ate all of his money and lottery tickets before he died, so that no one else could have them. Ivan also shares an anecdote of a man who lost his foot in a train accident—but rather than being concerned about his bleeding wound, he begged his rescuers (Ivan among them) to find his amputated foot, so that he wouldn’t lose the 20 rubles he hid in his boot. In both cases, the men in question were so possessed by money that they were driven to irrational behavior, valuing wealth above all else. Furthermore, Ivan shares how Nikolai deprived himself for over 20 years: he lived so frugally that he dressed in rags and rarely ate, and he married a widow for money rather than love. He proceeded to deprive his wife of basic needs (like enough food to eat), to the point that she died three years into their marriage. Ivan bitterly reflects that Nikolai “never thought for a moment that he was guilty of her death.” In this way, Nikolai is so single-mindedly obsessed with saving money for his future estate that he sacrifices his wife’s well-being in the process, prioritizing wealth over relationships to a deadly degree.

After decades of saving, when Nikolai is finally able to purchase the country home of his dreams, his newfound wealth and higher status among the local peasants makes him pompous and out of touch with his own peasant-class roots. Ivan tells Burkin and Alekhin about his recent visit to Nikolai’s estate: his brother had become fat and lazy, a stark contrast to the scarcity and undernourishment that defined his life for so long. He was now “living like a landowner,” suggesting that a gluttonous, indolent lifestyle is characteristic of everyone wealthy enough to own land. Nikolai is so immersed in this newfound identity as a nobleman that he becomes angry when local peasants fail to address him as “Your Honor”—conveniently forgetting the fact that “[Nikolai and Ivan’s] grandfather was a peasant and our father a soldier.” Indeed, Nikolai is adamant that “I know the people and know how to handle them […] The people like me. I have only to move a finger, and the people do whatever I want.” He’s convinced that he’s inherently superior to the peasant class despite his own common roots, and he alternately abuses his power over them and bribes them with alcohol to keep their favor. Wealth, in Nikolai’s case, has indeed gone to his head.

But Ivan’s friend Alekhin is also a well-off landowner, yet he’s the exact opposite of Nikolai—suggesting that wealth and high social status aren’t inherently corruptive. Alekhin seems to be even wealthier than Nikolai: his estate features multiple barns, a large pond, a bathing house, and a large two-story main house. It’s also situated on a clean river, whereas the one bordering Nikolai’s land is contaminated by factory runoff. Yet despite being a man of means, Alekhin is notably modest. While Nikolai is too lazy to do manual labor, Alekhin is doing the hard, messy work of processing grain when Ivan and Burkin arrive at his estate. He shows his humility when he admits to his friends that “I don’t think I’ve bathed since spring.” Alekhin is also kind, welcoming, and generous, greeting his friends warmly and allowing them to bathe, change into clean clothes, and sleep at his home—a stark contrast to Nikolai’s selfishness and entitlement. Indeed, after Ivan tells Nikolai’s story, Alekhin doesn’t even understand the point Ivan is trying to make about landowners: “Whether what Ivan Ivanych had said was intelligent or correct, [Alekhin] did not try to figure out; his guests were not talking of grain, or hay, or tar, but about something that had no direct bearing on his life, and he was glad and wanted them to go on.” Although Alekhin is certainly successful and affluent, he lives more like a peasant than the “squire” Nikolai has become, working hard and not concerning himself with anything but practical matters of farming. With this, the story seems to suggest that, while money can certainly do “strange things” to people, achieving wealth and land ownership doesn’t guarantee that a person will become morally corrupt. Alekhin’s generosity and modesty, in contrast with Nikolai’s arrogance and cruelty, indicates that whether one has more or less than others, their attitude toward what they have is what matters.