A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life

Saunders remembers a formative encounter: hearing the writer Tobias Wolff read a series of Chekhov stories aloud when Saunders was a graduate student at Syracuse. Saunders had previously been underwhelmed by Chekhov, but the reading changed his mind: “It was like having Chekhov himself there in the room with us: a charming, beloved person who thought highly of us and wanted, in his quiet way, to engage us” (409).

Saunders discusses the apparent digressiveness of “A Swim in the Pond in the Rain,” and shows us how digression is necessary to the story’s meaning. At the story’s opening, Ivan is on the verge of telling Burkin a story about his brother; his anecdote is then interrupted by a rainstorm. Only after they take shelter at the farmhouse of their friend Alyohin, go for a swim, and retire to Alyohin’s parlor, does Ivan resume his story.

Ivan’s story is a passionate diatribe against complacency, one which is stirring to the reader. Alyohin and Burkin, however, react to Ivan’s story with bemusement and boredom. Moreover, other events and details in the story complicate Ivan’s stance against happiness. For instance, Ivan leaves a pipe burning in an ashtray, the stench of which keeps Burkin awake: “So, Ivan, that great moral thinker with whom we’ve been siding, has done a thoughtless thing with a consequence for his friend” (414). This small detail makes us see Ivan in a slightly different light; his story in the parlor seems one-sided and didactic, while his obliviousness to his friends’ boredom seems rude.

The friends’ swim in the pond is another complicating factor. Ivan swims joyously—even passionately—which makes us wonder if he is as against the idea of happiness as he claims to be. Saunders shows us how each of the characters in the story contains similar contradictions, enriching the story’s theme about the morality of happiness. The maid Pelageya, for example, described solely in terms of her beauty, seems to represent the undeniability of happiness, in whatever form it takes. At the same time, she is a servant; with all of the invisible work that she does, she could equally be seen as one of the silenced unhappy souls in Ivan’s story.

Chekhov’s story—and fiction in general—is an argument against dogmatism and certainty. As with Chekhov’s characters, we all contain many different people within ourselves; it is the job of the fiction writer to listen to these multiple voices: “Our inner orchestra has been instructed that certain instruments are to dominate, others to play softly or not at all. Writing, we get a chance to change the mix” (429). He recalls beginning a story in imitation of Chekhov, about a teenage girl waiting for her mother; the story was unpromising, until he was able to access “my arrogant sixteen-year-old self” (428).

Saunders ends the essay with an anecdote about Chekhov visiting Tolstoy at his country estate. Chekhov had been intimidated to meet the great older writer, whose passionate hectoring sensibility was very different from his own. However, Tolstoy disarmed Chekhov by asking him, as soon as he arrived at his house, if he wanted to go for a swim:

We might imagine the whole of ‘Gooseberries’ contained in that swim; Tolstoy playing a kind of condensed Ivan, making grand, strict, moral pronouncements while also delightedly paddling around naked; Chekhov playing Burkin (resisting Tolstoy’s passionate generalizing); both of them playing Alyohin (hard workers taking a break) (431).

Saunders tells us that Chekhov wrote “Gooseberries” three years after this encounter.