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| − | Do you play any instruments? http://www.woodfamilyvineyards.com/new/lithobid-300-mg/ lithobid 300 mg Ivan's behaviour irritates Burkin and Alekhin, who find it "boring to hear a story about a wretched official who ate gooseberries". They understandably don't want to hear about inequality and hardship, cosily swaddled as they are. But there is another, more enigmatic layer to Chekhov's story, one that perhaps only rereading unearths. Ivan calls happiness, just like the perceived succulence his brother's gooseberries, an illusion; and yet a suspicion grows that it is Nikolai's happiness, pure and simple, that angers Ivan, and that perhaps his impassioned argument has been constructed retrospectively in order to justify his position. We then consider that earlier, when the men were bathing, only Ivan swam in the pond, which when the men first entered the farmyard was described as "cold, malevolent". As Ivan splashes about his two friends stand moodily at the pond's edge, urging him to hurry up so they can go inside. Is the pond, then, a symbol intended to rhyme with the gooseberries? Are Nikolai's happiness on his farm and, in a smaller way, Ivan's happiness in the pond related? As is so often the case in Chekhov, the story poses questions but supplies no definite answers; in a letter of 1888 to his publisher Suvorin he writes:
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