Reading Chekhov

The three encased men of the trilogy are not the first (or the last) such in Chekhov's work. A predecessor is Dr. An-drey Yefimitch Ragin, the hero of "Ward No. 6," written six years earlier. Ragin is a much more fully developed example of a man who insulates himself from reality, and "Ward No. 6" is a masterpiece. But Chekhov was habitually reluctant to let go of a theme, and his compulsion to rework it in many variations is a signature of his work. It is also an aid to the critic. The ceaseless amplifications are a kind of message about meaning.

The meaning of "Ward No. 6" expands when the story is read in the light of the trilogy. Conventionally, it is read as a work of powerful social protest, a political fable whose horrifying mental ward stands for the repressive czarist state. In its rendering of suffering, this short work of fiction achieves what Chekhov's wordy factual book about Sakhalin (which he was still trying to write when he wrote "Ward No. 6") cannot. The factual work is like a photograph of a person taken from far away; "Ward No. 6" is a close-up, with all the pores and lines showing. The Island of Sakhalin prods and pokes; "Ward No. 6" stabs.

The story begins with a description of the repulsive outbuilding in which five lunatics are imprisoned. With a few strokes, Chekhov creates a place of such disgusting squalor and stench that the reader himself wants to flee from it. The lunatics receive no treatment. Their only human contact is with a guard named Nikita, who "belongs to the class of simple-hearted, practical, and dull-witted people, prompt in carrying out orders, who like discipline better than anything in the world, and so are convinced that it is their duty to beat people." Nikita's "fists are vigorous" and he "showers blows on the face, on the chest, on the back, on whatever comes first." The ward is part of a provincial hospital that is itself a hell. Ragin has been the chief of the hospital for some years. He is intelligent and decent but helplessly ineffectual, yet another of Chekhov's good men who cannot make good. He "had no strength of will nor belief in his right to organize an intelligent and honest life around him. He was absolutely unable to give orders, to forbid things, or to insist." Although Ragin immediately realizes that the hospital is a place of evil and should be closed down, he takes no action. He sinks into a life of escape from life. He has less and less to do with the hospital and never goes into the mental ward. He does almost nothing at all, in fact. He reads and talks to the town's postmaster, Mihail Averyanitch, "the only man in town whose society did not bore [him]" but who is actually a bore and a cheat. Then one day chance brings Ragin to Ward 6 and into conversation with a thirty-three-year-old paranoid inmate named Ivan Dmitritch Gromov, who (unlike the four other inmates) is of noble birth.