The drama now is reversed. An ambitious young doctor, Khobotov, is intriguing to climb into Ragin’s job. The rumor is spread that Ragin’s visits to Ward 6 are suspect, a sign of “tiredness,” “illness,” or perhaps worse. He is summoned before a small informal commission of local doctors and officials (essentially a trial of his sanity), after which it is suggested that he should go on holiday. He gladly does so with the only friend he has in the town, an amiable, irresponsible postmaster, who takes him on a trip to Petersburg, Moscow and Warsaw. The postmaster is an average lazy, unreliable “good fellow,” a genial liar, who is eager for a spree and thinks the trip will do Ragin good. This is the necessary “moment of rest” in the story, the point at which it will turn. Halfway through the holiday Ragin is bored by “the real world of pleasure.” His will goes. While the postmaster goes out looking for women, gambling, losing his money and borrowing heavily from Ragin—money he will never repay—Ragin lies all day in the hotel, his face turned to the wall. “Real happiness,” he says, “is impossible without solitude.” When he returns to the hospital he finds that Khobotov has taken his job. Ragin utters an alarming phrase: “I have got into an enchanted circle.” Indeed he has: Khobotov slyly puts Ragin into Ward 6 and Gromov is triumphant.
“So they have put you in here too. You sucked the blood of others, and now they will suck yours.”
And, sarcastically,
“You should be philosophical.”
When Ragin goes to the door to leave the ward, and complains, the warder knocks him out. Mad or not, Ragin dies of a stroke. Chekhov took pride in evoking this death in detail and is as effective in the last visions of the dying as he was in the death scene in Gusev:
[Gromov] and millions of people believed in immortality…. But [Ragin] did not want immortality, and he thought of it only for one instant. A herd of deer, extraordinarily beautiful and graceful, of which he had been reading the day before, ran by him; then a peasant woman stretched out her hand to him with a registered letter.
That registered letter! How perfect that random, final item of his vision is.
In his letters Chekhov was surprisingly offhand or defensive about Ward 6. This is partly due to his modesty or perhaps also to his awareness that to create characters whose opinions are simplifications of a conflict in his own nature was no more than analysis and derived from his reading. The contrast between the man who believes in a gospel of endurance derived from Marcus Aurelius (whose Meditations were very influential reading all over Europe at that time) and the man who rebels against his chains is a matter of fruidess debate. To judge from Chekhov’s reply to a letter from Suvorin—who seems to have suggested the story was “lemonade” and needed more “alcohol”—Chekhov was almost submissive when he replied that this was an illness of his generation. In short, for Suvorin the story was a passive allegory when it ought to have had the dramatic force of parable. The great masters of the past not merely were good writers, but, Chekhov said, make one feel that
they are going towards something… have some object, just like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, who did not come and disturb the imagination for nothing…. And we? … We paint life as it is, but beyond that—nothing at all.
He also agreed that the story stinks of the hospital and the mortuary.
And he writes, perhaps slyly, to the incurably sentimental and pursuing Lydia Avilova:
I am finishing a story (“Ward No. 6”), a very dull one, owing to a complete absence of woman and the element of love. I can’t endure such stories.
The truth remains that if Chekhov has projected a frightening and sterile universe, the line-by-line events of the story are powerful and blasting. Perhaps he felt that the irony of a situation in which a prison governor himself becomes voluntary prisoner was too neat. Ragin is a portrait of a governor who has come to think the real criminals are outside the walls. The truth is that the story is a study of the nightmare of absolute solitude.
One more story closes what has been called the “clinical” period of Chekhov’s writing at Melikhovo, The Black Monk, and it is much weaker. It sprang, according to his sister, from a dream that had excited Chekhov one afternoon at Melikhovo. Here, Kovrin, the dreamer, is suffering from nervous exhaustion. He is staying on the enormous estate of a certain Pesotsky, who has barbered his trees into bizarre shapes, as if in mockery of Nature. Kovrin marries Tanya, the daughter of the house, and becomes a university professor, all the while feeling that he has betrayed his genius by keeping healthy and leading a normal life. This obsession is strengthened by hallucinations when he comes to imagine himself being visited by the Black Monk of the tide. This visionary figure comes gliding over the grounds and tells Kovrin that he is ill because his genius puts him above the common herd and is incompatible with mortal love and that he will soon the. Kovrin is in a state of nervous breakdown, and on the monk’s final visit he falls to the ground spitting blood: “his frail human body could no longer serve as the mortal garb of genius.” He dies with “a blissful smile … upon his face.”
An allegory of Chekhov’s inner life at Melikhovo? A passing, visiting intuition of what Chekhov knows about his own dilemma as a sick man, an artist and an evasive lover? Or, at the lowest, a neat fantasy the writer is turning to account? There are poetical moments—particularly when the monk comes softly as a shadow passing over the miles of fields, taking away the light from the grasses and trees—that are as evocative as the strange sight of the deer that passes before the eyes of Dr. Ragin in Ward 6. But until that moment, the narrative in The Black Monk is far too mannered and bookish. Chekhov himself spoke of it as a study of megalomania, but he has forgotten his own rule: the essential thing, when one is writing about strong or strange feelings, is to be ice-cold.
We may be guessing, for good stories do not come straight from real experience but evolve from contemplating an essence of it, but this story could very well spring from a precise instance of self-isolation in Chekhov’s life. We remember that his sister’s friend Lika Mizinova often stayed at Melikhovo. She was fascinated by his talk. Did he see that the girl was in love with him? Did he fall back on his usual fantastic jokes in self-defense? Again, he pretends she is captivated by “the Circassian Levitan” and that he has just had a charming letter from the artist containing expressions like “The devil flay you: the devil choke you.” To Levitan he has supposedly answered:
If you don’t stop pursuing Lika I’ll shove a corkscrew into you, cheap riff-raff. Don’t you know that Lika belongs to me and that we already have two children.
Lika would write back with annoyance, accusing him of egoism. Eventually she wrote him plainly in 1893:
You know quite well how I feel about you and I am not ashamed to write about it. I know also that your behaviour to me is condescending and indifferent.
In the summer of 1893 Potapenko, a young journalist from Odessa, came to stay at Melikhovo. He was a good singer and Lika accompanied him on the piano. She had notions of becoming an actress or opera singer and she may have turned to him in order to make Chekhov jealous. She went back to Moscow and wrote to him:
I must know whether you are coming to Moscow, and when, or not at all. It is all the same but I have to know. Only two months remain to me in which to see you, after that perhaps never.
Chekhov wrote to her:
Lika, when will it be spring? Accept [this] question literally and do not seek for a hidden meaning in it. Alas, I am already an old young man, my love is no sun and does not make a spring for me. … It is not you whom I so ardently love. I love in you my sufferings of the past and my now perished youth.