Ivan Ivanych tells his friends about his brother, who spent his whole life dreaming of owning an estate with gooseberry bushes, and who finally achieved it, and who sat eating sour gooseberries and calling them delicious. The story is about self-deception, about happiness that blinds us to others' suffering, about the gooseberries we all cultivate while the world burns. Chekhov delivers no verdict; the rain falls, the characters go to sleep, and the reader is left with the image of a man made stupid by his own contentment. The prose is quiet. The indictment is total.