July 15 is Anton Chekhov's death anniversary.

"Then all was silent. The thin moonlight filtered through the bars and a network of shadows lay on the floor. It was terrifying. Ragin lay down and held his breath in terror, waiting for the next blow. It was as if someone had thrust a sickle into him and twisted it several times in his chest and guts. The pain made him bite the pillow and grind his teeth. Suddenly, amidst all the chaos, a terrifying, unbearable thought flashed through his mind: it must be precisely this kind of pain that was suffered every day, year in year out, by those people who now appeared like black shadows in the moonlight? How could it be that for more than twenty years he had not known and did not want to know this?...Gasping for breath, he tugged at his smock and his shirt on his chest, ripped them and fell unconscious onto the bed."

Near the end of Anton Chekhov’s novella Ward No 6, Dr Andrey Yefimych Ragin, the doctor in charge of a crummy little hospital in a bleak little town in the back of beyond, finds himself hustled into the hospital’s mental patients’ ward – as an inmate. A stunned Ragin remonstrates, convinced that it was all a terrible mistake. But the heavy doors of ward no 6 have shut on his face and will now stay shut, for good.

"Ragin went to the window and looked out on to the open country. It was getting dark now and on the horizon a cold crimson moon was rising. Near the hospital fence, no more than eight yards away, stood a tall white building surrounded by a stone wall. This was the prison."

Soon enough, though, Ragin realises that the prison was not a place out there: it was exactly where he stood now in his hospital clothing. The walls of the prison had closed in around him. The clothes he stood up in were the prisoner’s grubby uniform. The smock reeked of smoked fish. Ragin’s heart ached for a breath of fresh air. He craved a mug of beer, a quiet smoke. Desperately, he pushed against the heavy door, pleading that he needed to go out for a little walk in the yard – only to be shoved in roughly by the warder who, till the day before, had always leapt up from his seat and stood to attention as Dr Ragin entered the lunatics’ ward. Ragin begged to be allowed out, briefly, and now the furious warder took a mighty swing and smashed his fist into the doctor’s face, leaving him bleeding. As Ragin staggered back to his allotted bed inside ward no 6, the warder hit him hard on the back, twice. Some one howled. And then everything fell quiet inside ward no 6. 

Ragin died of a stroke towards evening the following day. As he lay dying, 

"A herd of exceptionally beautiful and graceful deer, of which he had been reading the day before, darted past him; then a peasant woman held out a registered letter to him…Then everything disappeared and Ragin fell into everlasting oblivion."

First published in November 1892 in the magazine Russkaya Misi (‘Russian Thought’), Ward No 6 was shaped in no small measure by Chekhov’s travel to the prison colony of Sakhalin island, in far-eastern Siberia, in the summer and autumn of 1890. In Sakhalin, he wrote, “(T)here were times I felt that I saw before me the extreme limits of man’s degradation”. That degradation is in full view inside the hospital.

"In the wards, corridors and hospital yard one could hardly breathe for the stench. The male orderlies, the nurses and their children slept in the wards with the patients. They complained that the cockroaches, bed-bugs and mice made their lives a misery. Erysipelas was rampant in the surgical department. There were only two scalpels and not one thermometer in the whole hospital, and the baths were used for storing potatoes. The superintendent, matron, the assistant doctor robbed the patients, and the previous doctor, Ragin’s predecessor, was said to have sold surgical spirits on the quiet and to have set up an entire harem recruited from nurses and female patients."

 The reader would think that even those limits are being pushed when, after Ragin’s violent and ignominious death,

"(T)he male nurses came in, grabbed his feet and hands and carried him to the chapel. There he lay on the table with his eyes open, and at night the moon shone on him."

Here lay the corpse of a man once looked up to by the whole town, a decent, cultivated man who neither robbed the hospital store, nor shouted at people, nor even had liaisons with nurses or female patients. For all that, however, it now looked as though the town never knew that such a man as Dr Ragin had ever existed.

Also read: Anton Chekhovs Plays Pivot on New Relationships, Not Grand Narratives

But, if you were to read Ward No 6 after reading Sakhalin Island, Chekhov’s meticulously-researched ‘travel notes’ (published between 1893 and 1895 in Russkaya Misl and compiled in a book in 1895), you will become aware of not only tonal congruities but also common themes. Often acclaimed as the greatest work of journalism to have come out of the 19th century, and revered by, among others, Arthur Miller and Heinrich Boll, Sakhalin Island records in painstaking detail nearly every aspect of life in Czarist Russia’s most feared penal colony. Chapter 23 of the book takes a searching look at how medical service was organised across Sakhalin, and here you will hear strong echoes from the hospital that had been placed under Dr Ragin’s charge. The supreme unconcern with which the mentally ill were, as a rule, treated at Sakhalin – with such patients often being quartered in the infirmary with syphilitics – anticipates the dystopia that is ward no 6. It was with this sense of the dystopian that Lenin must have emerged from a reading of the story, for he is known to have said: "I absolutely had the feeling that I was shut up in ward no 6 myself."

There’s no question that much of Ward No 6 can only be read as an allegory, a metaphor of the Russian state as it looked like in the eighties and the nineties of the 19th century. The massive iniquities, the pervasive institutional apathy, the cynicism, corruption, ignorance, and poverty that blighted Russian society are present in the story in stark detail. And here, for once, Chekhov doesn’t write as the master of understatement and oblique detail that he is widely acknowledged to be. Dropping his delicate paint brush, he wields here the heavy hammer. He has no longer any use for Tolstoy’s celebrated credo of nn-resistance to evil. Or for the Dostoyevskyian belief that evil is made possible by the exercise of freedom. Indeed, Ward No 6 can in some sense be seen as an ironic pastiche of Dostoyevsky’s weltanschaung.) This is far and away Chekhov’s most searing critique of Tsarist Russian society. And yet, it passed the censors with barely a cut, while Sakhalin Island had been horribly mauled by the same censors when it was published for the first time. No doubt this was because a fictionalised story was considered far less dangerous than a journalistic document, even if the latter happened to have been authored by one of Russia’s most prominent writers of the time.

However, what was even more sharply in Chekhov’s crosshairs in Ward No 6 than the Russian state is the Russian literati, its intellectual class, represented on the one hand by Dr Ragin himself and, on the other, by Gromov, a patient of paranoia and long-term hospital inmate. Though they come from very different social and family backgrounds, the two have one thing in common: wide readings in ontological questions, and a taste for endless, extravagant, indeed obsessive, discussions around the meaning and purpose of human life.

For Ragin in particular, such discussions, for all their avowed earnestness, are essentially vapid chatter that makes it possible for the good doctor to justify inaction and indifference to society’s ills. He has read deeply in Marcus Aurelius, and is imbued with the pessimism and indifferentism that are Aurelius’s stand-out features and which, incidentally, were quite fashinable with the Russian intelligentsia at that point. Ragin is exasperated with the inefficiencies, neglect and corruption that plague his work-place, but he never joins the battle to change things, because, at the end of the day, so he believes, nothing really changes for the better. Russia’s educated classes, Chekhov suggests, were giving up on their fundamental duty: which, Chekhov believes, was to try and improve, through their own work, the quality of their fellow countrymen’s lives.

Ragin is well-meaning, but his honesty, as he himself realises, is neither here nor there, because he is unwilling to do his job, that of running the hospital with a modicum of efficiency. The terrifying irony of Ragin’s fate – of he turning from being a doctor into an inmate of the very same mental patients’ ward he had been charged to oversee in the first place – carries a grim message: if Russia’s educated classes, with all their privilege of a liberal education and a settled existence – fail to contribute to the society they are a part of, they deserve no better than sharing their countrymen’s fate.

V.S. Pritchett tells us that Lenin believed that it was his reading of Ward No 6 that had made him a revolutionary. It is not difficult to see what Lenin was talking about.

Anjan Basu can be reached at basuanjan52@gmail.com.

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