The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories · Chapter
Strawberries explained
A hot June day contrasts the lives of the gentry and the peasants.
What happens
A hot June day contrasts the lives of the gentry and the peasants. At the estate of Nicholas Semyónovitch, a Liberal Petersburg visitor engages in lengthy political debates while the family worries over their son Gógo's stomach ailment, blamed on strawberries. Meanwhile, peasant girls like Ólga and her family work, pick strawberries to sell, and navigate their own simple, strenuous lives. The chapter juxtaposes the idle, intellectual concerns of the landowners with the immediate, physical realities of the rural poor.
Themes in this chapter
Social Class and Hierarchy
The chapter is built on the contrast between the gentry's leisurely, intellectual life in their 'pretentious bungalows' and the peasants' strenuous, physical work. Their worlds intersect only through economic transactions (selling strawberries) and service.
Rural Life and the Landowner
Vividly portrays the rhythms of rural summer: peasants carting manure, pasturing cattle, and picking berries. The landowner's family life, with its concerns over health and political debate, is central, showing their insulated existence within the rural setting.
Hypocrisy and Social Pretense
The Petersburg visitor's radicalism is undercut by his comfortable salary and forgetfulness to tip the footman. The political debates among the gentry are portrayed as abstract and self-congratulatory, disconnected from the immediate physical suffering (Gógo's stomach) and the labor of the peasants around them.
Characters to notice
- Nikíta Sierpukhovskoï
Referred to as 'Nicholas Semyónovitch', the landowner hosting the Petersburg gentleman. He engages in political debate, worries about his son's health, and represents the Orthodox, Slavophil landowning class.
- Márya
Referred to as 'Marie', Nicholas Semyónovitch's nervous wife. She is intensely preoccupied with the health of their youngest son, Gógo, and blames the strawberries her husband gave him for his digestive troubles.
- The Doctor
A Liberal doctor present at the dinner and debates. He is called to examine Gógo, prescribes bismuth, and is satisfied when the medicine appears successful.
- Akoulína
A peasant woman whose son, Míshka, is found sleeping in the woods by Ólga while picking strawberries. She represents the off-stage peasant life.
- Ólga
A young peasant girl who picks strawberries to sell to the gentry. She finds Akoulína's sleeping son in the woods and later sells the strawberries to the landowner's son, Vólya.
- Vassily Dmitritch
Referred to as 'Vólya', the twelve-year-old son of Nicholas Semyónovitch and Marie. He buys strawberries from the peasant girls with money from his nurse after his mother refuses them.
Key passages
“These summer inhabitants of ornamented, architecturally pretentious bungalows, strolled with open sunshades, in light, clean, costly clothes, along sand-strewn paths...”
The wealthy gentry, vacationing in the countryside, live in ornate comfort, leisurely strolling in expensive clothes along manicured paths.
Highlights the aesthetic and economic distance between the landowners and the natural, labor-intensive environment they inhabit temporarily.
“‘What of the strawberries? … It’s you that fed him on them, and here am I, not having a wink of sleep all night … and the child will die!’”
Marie angrily blames her husband for giving their son strawberries, claiming it will cause the child's death and her sleepless night.
Illustrates the intense, almost hysterical domestic anxiety of the gentry, which contrasts with the more pragmatic hardships of peasant life.
“This globe, as well as many other things, did not surprise them, because they expected to see the most wonderful things in this mysterious, and to them incomprehensible, gentlefolks’ world.”
The peasant girls were not amazed by the decorative globe because they assumed the gentry's world was full of such incomprehensible marvels.
Emphasizes the peasants' view of the gentry as inhabiting a separate, alien realm of privilege and mystery.
