Mice swarmed in the house. Chekhov trapped them and went out into the woods to set them free. He loathed killing animals and had given up shooting years before. His sister gave up her art classes in Moscow, and they were soon out planting hundreds of trees and she managed the large kitchen gardens. In the first year there were “mountains of cucumbers, marvelous cabbages,” and the corn harvest was excellent. The disasters were enjoyable:
Our gander [Chekhov wrote to his friends in the South] jumped on the back of a farm woman and hung on to her kerchief. Our cook, Darya, drunk as usual, dropped the eggs from under the geese, so that only three hatched out. Our pig has a nasty habit of biting people and eating our Indian corn. We’ve bought a calf for six rubles and she keeps on serenading us in a low bass voice.
All he knows about agriculture, he says, is that the earth is black. His debt depresses him, but he forgets it as he puzzles over the proper way to sow wheat and clover. The snow gives way to the mud of the thaw, the starlings return, the nightingales sing, the frogs are croaking. Soon his brothers and their families and a predatory crowd of visitors arrive, and just as he had had to do in Moscow, he is eventually obliged to leave the house and write in a one-room chalet he has rigged up. Among the visitors is a friend of his sister’s from Moscow, Lika Mizinova, to whom he writes teasing notes.
Ah, lovely Lika! when you bedewed my right shoulder with your tears (I have taken out the spots with benzine), and when slice after slice you ate our bread and meat, we greedily devoured your face and head with our eyes…. Ah, Lika, Lika, diabolical beauty! … When you are at the Alhambra with Trofimov [an imaginary lover], I hope you may accidentally jab out his eye with your fork.
Other visitors are Lydia Yavorskaya, a young actress whom he called a “hussy,” and a sentimental young novelist, Lydia Avilova, whose manuscript he had read. He gave her sound and very Chekhovian advice on writing:
When you want to touch the reader’s heart, try to be colder. It gives their grief as it were, a background, against which it stands out in greater relief. As it is, your heroes weep and you sigh.
At Melikhovo he was soon appointed “cholera superintendent doctor” (for twenty-five villages, which included four factories and one monastery)—also “sanitary attendant” for the zemstvo (district council) without remuneration. He drives about in a scurvy carriage. He has begged lime, vitriol and “all sorts of stinking stuff” from the manufacturers, necessary when cholera comes nearer.
It was important to him that this work was a matter of private conscience. When cholera creeps as near as twenty miles from the place, he goes begging for money from his rich neighbors. On one of his begging missions he goes to a rich landowner’s house where he is treated de haut en bas as a tiresome official, and he puts the rich man and his wife at a loss by pretending to be a millionaire. He had little respect for the country gentry, who had no sense of public obligation and who, as we see in The Wife, passed their days and nights in gluttonous eating, heavy drinking and playing cards, patronizing everyone, especially doctors, as being beyond the pale. They dismissed the peasants as cadgers and thieves.
Chekhov complains that his doctoring in this period has stopped him from writing. What he meant was that he was not finishing what he wrote. In his letters he says that he is kept going financially by the royalties from a one-act “Vaudeville,” The Bear, which he had scribbled out years before. Now he turns to an unfinished story, one in which Sakhalin becomes Russia itself. The story, Ward 6, is one of the most intense, powerful and claustrophobic he ever wrote. He was eight months writing it and it runs to fifty pages. When Lenin read it in his youth he said it had made him a revolutionary: for ourselves it may seem to foretell Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward.
We are struck first by the plain austerity of Chekhov’s style. The narrator investigates the dreadful condition of an out-of-date hospital (such as many Chekhov must have seen when he was organizing resistance to the cholera). The hospital stands in a barren wilderness outside the town: the only other building in sight is the prison. We see the patients in the crowded wards, hear of the corrupt sale of drugs and medicines. Then the outside narrator slips away and the scene moves into the close-up of a particular room, Ward 6, in which five lunatics are isolated. Dr. Ragin, in charge of the hospital, is visiting them. All except one of the lunatics belong to the artisan class. There is a laborer who simply stares at the floor all day; another is a post-office sorter who gazes secretively from time to time at a medal under his shirt. He believes he has been awarded the Stanislas Medal and that he will shortly get the Swedish medal of the Golden Star. Another is a harmless Jew who went mad when his hat factory was destroyed in a fire—the only patient who is allowed out into the town, where he begs for a ruble or two and is the butt of the shopkeepers. The fifth, Gromov, is an educated paranoiac who gradually went mad after his father was imprisoned for fraud. Gromov believes he is guilty of murder. They are supervised by a warder, a brutal ex-soldier, who beats the lunatics when they become restive.
Dr. Ragin strikes us at first as being a concerned and humane man. He is aware that the hospital is scandalously out-of-date and offers nothing from the great advances in medicine of the last thirty years. He is drawn to Gromov, who has a sharp intellect and is a good talker in a destructive way, even if he will, in the end, fly into a paranoiac rage. To Ragin he is the only man in the hospital with whom he can discuss serious subjects, or indeed in the self-satisfied little town outside. He has stopped going out into local “society.” He consoles himself with serious philosophical reading, and he and Gromov have arguments about Marcus Aurelius and stoicism and dispute the necessity of suffering. Gromov is mad and Ragin is trying to calm him. Conversation is the spell. At one point he makes the distinctly Chekhovian remark that “books are the printed score, while talk is the singing.” Gromov will attack Ragin’s arguments savagely one day and the next he will be languid. Ragin likes Gromov’s voice, his young intelligent face, and he even admires the man’s anger when he admits his mania and cries out that there are moments when he is overwhelmed by the thirst for life and begs for news of the outside world. Ragin makes regular visits to the Ward. Gromov suddenly asks him what will turn out to be a disturbing question:
“Have you any idea of suffering? Allow me to ask you, were you ever thrashed in your childhood?”
(This is, of course, one of Chekhov’s own obsessive memories.) Ragin says he was not. Gromov pounces:
“No one has laid a finger on you all your life…. You grew up under your father’s wing and studied at his expense, and then you dropped at once into a sinecure. For more than twenty years you have lived rent-free with heating, lighting and service all provided…. You have handed over your work to the assistant and the rest of the rabble while you sit in peace and warmth, save money, read, amuse yourself with reflections, with all sorts of lofty nonsense, and [looking at Ragin’s florid peasant face] with boozing.”
Yes, in his self-isolated life in the hospital, Ragin has become a tippling conformist, his mind closed to change. Hospital regulations are a cocoon or simply a convenient private study.