Title: Ward No. 6 / Ward Number Six
Genre: Short Story
Year: 1892
Pages: 60
Origin: read on the Short Stories app
Nod Rating: 4 nods out of 5
Life is a vexatious trap; when a thinking man reaches maturity and attains to full consciousness he cannot help feeling that he is in a trap from which there is no escape.Like many nineteenth-century Russian writers, Anton Chekhov was a master in examining the above mentioned “trap” of the human mind and condition. Although primarily a playwright, his short story – Ward No.6 – is widely celebrated. A man of many talents – including being a practicing physician – he once remarked: ‘Medicine is my lawful wife and literature is my mistress.’
Anton Chekov – Ward No.6 (1892)
Ward No. 6 (also spelt Ward Number Six in many publications) centres on a lunatic asylum in a rural, provincial hospital; in which Chekhov writes that ‘probably no other place is life so monotonous as in this ward’. There are few inmates, including the quarrelsome Ivan Dmitritch, the thuggish porter Nikita, and the Jew Moiseka, ‘a peasant so rolling in fat that he is almost spherical, with a blankly stupid face, utterly devoid of thought. This is a motionless, gluttonous, unclean animal who has long ago lost all powers of thought or feeling’.
Having briefly outlined these characters, the story focuses on the doctor, Andrei Yefimich: a man who spends half his salary on books, and worries about his purpose at the hospital. He has little affection for the dull town in which he lives, spending his time slowly reading the pages of his books and discussing matters with his supercilious friend Mihail Averyanitch. However, his attitudes change having engaged the inmate Ivan Dmitritch in conversation, leading his eventual removal from his post as doctor.
Yefimich ends up without a job and in debt, becoming all the more isolated from the world around him and the futility of life. He begins to think that all is ‘trivial and nonsense’, realising that all will:
‘sooner or later perish without leaving any trace on the world. If one imagined some spirit flying by the earthly globe in space in a million years he would see nothing but clay and bare rocks. Everything – culture and the moral law – would pass away and not even a burdock would grow out of them.’Those around him – including his friend and replacement doctor – believe him to be insane. But the doctor asks himself: ‘Which of us is the madman?’ for not wishing to be a part of society’s rules and regulations. All of which consigns him to become an inmate of Ward No.6, where he suffers a savage and beating at the hands of the porter, before accepting his ‘Hamlet-like dread of death’ and seeing a vision of ‘a herd of deer, extraordinarily beautiful and graceful’.
Like many Russian novels and stories of the nineteenth-century, Ward No.6 carries an implicit message about the state of Russian society as a whole. It is a path well trodden by earlier writers, including the likes of Turgenev and Chernyshevsky; who used fiction as a well to veil their attacks and commentary to avoid being targeted by the authorities in Tsarist Russia. The character Ivan Dmitritch best fits the political soap-box mode:
‘Yes, I am ill. But you know dozens, hundreds of madmen are walking about in freedom because your ignorance is incapable of distinguishing them from the sane. Why am I and these poor wretches to be shut up here like scapegoats for all the rest?’Other connections to Russian literature abound, including fear of death (Tolstoy), as well as a seemingly unhealthy obsession with the look of coats and jackets (including Gogol’s influential short story The Overcoat).
Literature may have been Chekhov’s mistress; but it was a mistress he loved well. Ward No.6 is a strong, descriptive story – and a story that has hidden depths for any reader willing to enter its world.
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