Ward No. 6 and Other Stories

by Anton Chekhov

  The vegetable plots were called ‘widows’ because they were kept by two widows, mother and daughter. A bonfire was burning fiercely, crackling and lighting up the ploughed land far around. Widow Vasilisa, a tall, plump old woman in a man’s sheepskin coat, was standing gazing pensively at the fire. Her short, pock-marked, stupid-faced daughter Lukerya was sitting on the ground washing a copper pot and some spoons. Clearly they had just finished supper. Men’s voices could be heard – some local farm-workers were watering their horses at the river.

  ‘So, winter’s here again’, the student said as he approached the bonfire. ‘Good evening.’

  Vasilisa shuddered, but then she recognized the student and gave him a welcoming smile.

  ‘Heavens, I didn’t know it was you’, she said. ‘That means you’ll be a rich man one day.’

  They started talking. Vasilisa, a woman of the world, once a wet-nurse to some gentry and then a nanny, had a delicate way of speaking and she always smiled gently, demurely. But her daughter Lukerya, a peasant woman who had been beaten by her husband, only screwed up her eyes at the student and said nothing. She had a strange expression, as if she were a deaf-mute.

  ‘It was on a cold night like this that the Apostle Peter warmed himself by a fire’, the student said, stretching his hands towards the flames. ‘That is to say, it was cold then as well. Oh, what a terrible night that was, Grandma! A dreadfully sad, never-ending night!’

  He peered into the surrounding darkness, violently jerked his head and asked, ‘I suppose you were at the Twelve Readings from the Gospels yesterday?’

  ‘Yes’, Vasilisa replied.

  ‘You’ll remember, during the Last Supper, Peter said to Jesus, “I am ready to go with Thee, both into prison and to death.” And the Lord replied, “I tell thee, Peter, the cock shall not crow this day, before that thou shalt thrice deny that thou knowest me.”2 After the Supper, Jesus prayed in the garden, in mortal agony, while poor Peter was downhearted and his eyes grew heavy. He couldn’t fight off sleep, and he slept. Then, as you know, Judas kissed Jesus on that night and betrayed him to the torturers. They led him bound to the High Priest and they beat him, while Peter, exhausted and sorely troubled by anguish and fear – he didn’t have enough sleep, you understand – and in expectation of something dreadful taking place on earth at any moment, followed them. He loved Jesus passionately, to distraction, and now, from afar, he could see them beating him.’

  Lukerya put the spoons down and stared intently at the student.

  ‘They went to the High Priest’, he continued, ‘they started questioning Jesus and meanwhile the workmen,3 as it was so cold, had made a fire in the middle of the hall and were warming themselves. Peter stood with them by the fire, warming himself as well, as I am now. One woman who saw him said, “This man was also with Jesus.”4 So she really meant that this man too had to be led away for questioning. And all the workmen around the fire must have looked at him suspiciously and sternly, as he was taken aback and said, “I know him not.”5 Soon afterwards someone recognized him as one of Jesus’s disciples and said, “Thou also wast with Him.” But again he denied it and for the third time someone turned to him and asked, “Did I not see you in the garden with Him this day?”6 He denied him for the third time. And straight after that a cock crowed and as he looked on Jesus from afar Peter remembered the words he had spoken to him at supper. He remembered, his eyes were opened, he left the hall and wept bitterly.7 As it is said in the Gospels, “And he went out, and wept bitterly.” I can imagine that quiet, terribly dark garden, those dull sobs, barely audible in the silence…’

  The student sighed and became deeply pensive. Still smiling, Vasilisa suddenly broke into sobs and large, copious tears streamed down her cheeks. She shielded her face from the fire with her sleeve as if ashamed of her tears, while Lukerya stared at the student and blushed. Her face became anguished and tense, like someone stifling a dreadful pain.

  The workmen were returning from the river and one of them, on horseback, was quite near and the light from the bonfire flickered on him. The student wished the widows goodnight and moved on. Again darkness descended and his hands began to freeze. A cruel wind was blowing – winter had really returned with a vengeance and it did not seem as if Easter Sunday was only the day after tomorrow.

  Now the student thought of Vasilisa: she had wept, so everything that had happened to Peter on that terrible night must have had some special significance for her.

  He glanced back. The solitary fire calmly flickered in the darkness and no one was visible near it. Once again the student reflected that, since Vasilisa had wept and her daughter had been deeply touched, then obviously what he had just been telling them about events centuries ago had some significance for the present, for both women, for this village, for himself and for all people. That old woman had wept, but not at his moving narrative: it was because Peter was close to her and because she was concerned, from the bottom of her heart, with his most intimate feelings.

  His heart suddenly thrilled with joy and he even stopped for a moment to catch his breath. ‘The past’, he thought, ‘is linked to the present by an unbroken chain of events, each flowing from the other.’ He felt that he had just witnessed both ends of this chain. When he touched one end, the other started shaking.

  After crossing the river by ferry and climbing the hill, he looked at his native village and towards the west, where a narrow strip of cold crimson sunset was glimmering. And he reflected how truth and beauty, which had guided human life there in the garden and the High Priest’s palace and had continued unbroken to the present, were the most important parts of the life of man, and of the whole of terrestrial life. A feeling of youthfulness, health, strength – he was only twenty-two – and an inexpressibly sweet anticipation of happiness, of a mysterious unfamiliar happiness, gradually took possession of him. And life seemed entrancing, wonderful and endowed with sublime meaning.

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  AND NOTES

  The Grasshopper

  First published in the journal North in 1892, then in Tales and Stories of 1894. For some reason Chekhov had difficulty in finding a suitable title. He wrote to V. A. Tikhonov, the editor, when sending the story: ‘I’m sending you a small sensitive novel for family reading. This is The Philistines, but after writing this story I’ve given it, as you can see, another name’ (letter of 30 November 1891). (This was A Great Man.) Neither of these satisfied Chekhov (he had also suggested simply A Story) and he finally settled on ‘The Grasshopper’. Ivan Bunin, who greatly admired the story, considered the title ‘awful’.

  This story served to create a long rift between Chekhov and the painter Isaak Levitan (1861–1900), who saw the story as an attack on his affair with a certain lady called S. P. Kuvshinnikova, a doctor’s wife, whose Moscow salon was attended by many artists, painters, actors and writers, some of whom may well have served as prototypes for Olga’s guests in ‘The Grasshopper’: in a letter of 29 April 1892 to Lidiya Avilova, Chekhov wrote that ‘the whole of Moscow is accusing me of libel’.

  1. Kineshma: Small town on the Volga, about 200 miles north-east of Moscow.

  2. Masini: Angelo Masini (1844–1926), Italian tenor. Toured Italy, Spain, sang in St Petersburg. Sang tenor role in Verdi’s Requiem in London and Vienna.

  3. Show me that abode…: From the poem Reflections at a Main Entrance by the civic poet N. A. Nekrasov (1821–78). This poem was very popular amongst the young intelligentsia of the 1860s; later, it was often sung by young doctors at Chikino hospital, where Chekhov worked in 1883.

  4. Polenov: V. D. Polenov (1844–1927), leading Russian landscape painter, influenced by Barbizon plein air school. Taught at Moscow School of Painting; among his pupils was Isaak Levitan, satirized in the person of Ryabovsky in this story.

  5. Barnay: Ludwig Barnay (1842–1924), German actor. Toured Russia with the Meiningen Troupe in 1890 and met with a rapturous reception.

  6. Gogol’s Osip: Khlestakov’s
comic servant in N. V. Gogol’s The Inspector General. In Russian the play upon words is Osip khrip, a Arkhip osip, lit. ‘Osip wheezed, but Arkhip went hoarse.’

  Ward No. 6

  ‘Ward No. 6’ was first published in Russian Thought, 1892, and then in a collection entitled Ward No. 6 (1893). Originally the story was offered to the journal Russian Review, but long delays in payment of fees compelled Chekhov to take the story back and in June 1892 Chekhov was invited to become a contributor to V. M. Lavrov’s21 Russian Thought.

  First details of work on the story appear in a letter to A. S. Suvorin (1834–1912) of 31 March 1892, where Chekhov states: ‘I’m writing a story. Before having it printed I wanted to send it to you regarding the censorship as your opinion is like gold for me, but I must hurry, as I don’t have any money… There is much argumentation in the story, but no love element…’ And to Lidiya Avilova: ‘I’m completing a story which is very boring, as there’s a complete absence of women and any love interest. I can’t stand such stories and I wrote it rather at random, flippantly’ (29 April 1892). P. A. Arkhangelsky, whom Chekhov had assisted in his rural hospital at Chikino, recalled that in the late eighties and early nineties Chekhov had shown great interest in his Account of an Inspection of Russian Psychiatric Institutions (1887), of which Chekhov had seen proofs at Babkino. In this book there was mention of the use of fists to discipline inmates of lunatic asylums that resembled prisons, where doctors only occasionally visited the inmates – who were at the ‘full disposal’ of the warder.

  The description of conditions in the hospital in ‘Ward No. 6’ is very close to that of the prison sickbays in chapter 23 of The Island of Sakhalin (1893–5), where Chekhov paints a dreadful picture of the insane being kept in the same wards as syphilitics and of the appallingly unhygienic conditions. One commentator remarks: ‘One can speak of “Ward No. 6” as being dictated by Sakhalin… the warder Nikita, the people behind bars and much else that Chekhov first saw on Sakhalin’ (A. Roskin: A. P. Chekhov: Articles and Sketches, Moscow, 1959). In a letter to Lavrov of 25 November 1892 Chekhov stresses his own distaste for the story which ‘reeks of the hospital and morgue’.

  At the time of writing Chekhov was extremely interested in the Stoic philosophers, especially Marcus Aurelius, whose name is mentioned in ‘A Dreary Story’ and three times in letters of this period. His copy of the Meditations, in Prince L. Urusov’s translation (Tula, 1882) was very heavily annotated.

  1. Order of St Stanislas: Awarded for merit in peace or war, first introduced by Peter the Great.

  2. Pushkin: Aleksandr Pushkin (1799–1837) suffered for two days after being fatally wounded in the stomach, in a duel with Georges D’Anthès.

  3. Heine: Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) suffered for the last eight years of his life from a crippling spinal disease.

  4. white tie: Normally worn by doctors at this time (cf. also ‘A Dreary Story’).

  5. Svyatogorsk Monastery: Near Pskov. Burial place of Pushkin.

  6. The Physician: At the back of this medical magazine (published from 1880) was a chronicle of events, small news items, obituaries, etc.

  7. isn’t it time for your beer?: According to the short story writer A. I. Kuprin, the mistress of the bibulous poet and friend of Chekhov’s, L. I. Palmin, would use this phrase. Chekhov was apparently annoyed when Kuprin tactlessly remarked that this was the origin of the phrase in ‘Ward No. 6’.

  8. Pirogov: N. I. Pirogov (1810–81), famous surgeon, Professor at St Petersburg Medico-Surgical Academy (cf. ‘A Dreary Story’).

  9. Pasteur: Louis Pasteur (1822–95), French chemist and biologist. Discovered role of microorganisms in human and animal disease.

  10. Koch: Robert Koch (1843–1910), German bacteriologist, established bacterial origin of anthrax, tuberculosis and cholera.

  11. psychiatry with its current classification…: In Chekhov’s library was A Course in Psychiatry (1893) by S. S. Korsakov. In this book Korsakov advocated the latest diagnostic methods and the establishment of psychiatric clinics. Korsakov strongly opposed straitjackets.

  12. Someone in Voltaire or Dostoyevsky…: Voltaire’s famous phrase is quoted in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1879–80), book 5, chapter 3. The original phrase occurs in Voltaire’s Epîtres, xcvi: A l’Auteur du Livre des Trois Imposteurs: ‘Si Dieu n’existait pas, il faudrait l’inventer.’

  13. Diogenes: Diogenes (born c. 412 BC), celebrated Cynic philosopher, frequently mentioned by Chekhov. He was distinguished for his asceticism and austerity of life. He was said to have rolled in hot sand in summer, to have embraced snow-covered statues in winter, to have lived on the simplest food and to have finally taken up residence in a tub. In an amusing letter to A. S. Suvorin of September 1891, Chekhov accuses the great philosophers, convinced of their own impunity, of being ‘as despotic as generals’. In this respect he calls Tolstoy a ‘latter-day Diogenes’.

  14. Marcus Aurelius: Marcus Aurelius (AD 121–180), Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher who gave his view of life in his famous Meditations. Chekhov frequently quotes Aurelius (especially in ‘A Dreary Story’) and had a much-used Russian translation in his library (and see ‘The Black Monk’, note 14, p. 325).

  15.… but prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane…: The biblical reference is: ‘O my Father, if this cup may not pass away from me, except I drink it, thy will be done’, Matthew 26:42.

  16. Pripet marshes: In southern Belorus. The River Pripet is a tributary of the Dnieper, flowing through an extensive area of forest and marsh.

  17. Iverian Madonna: Situated in the Iverian Chapel, near Red Square. Most celebrated icon in Moscow.

  18. Tsar-Cannon and the Tsar-Bell: Both in Moscow Kremlin. The Tsar-Cannon, one of the largest cannon ever made. Cast in 1586, it has never been fired. The Tsar-Bell, weighing 200 tons, is the largest in the world.

  19. St Saviour’s Temple and the Rumyantsev Museum: St Saviour’s Temple, a memorial to the Napoleonic Wars (1812–14: Napoleon had invaded Russia in 1812); Rumyantsev Museum, a famous museum and art gallery, founded through the beneficence of Count N. Rumyantsev in 1787.

  20. Testov’s: A well-known restaurant.

  21. V. M. Lavrov (1852–1912), editor of radical journal Russian Thought. Chekhov met him in the mid eighties.

  Ariadna

  ‘Ariadna’ was first published in Russian Thought, 1895. In revising this story for his collected works Chekhov made significant cuts of what he considered superfluous detail that interfered with the development of the main story. It was originally written for the journal The Artist, but when the editor of Russian Thought, Lavrov, informed Chekhov that The Artist had ‘crashed’ Chekhov asked for the story to be printed in Russian Thought. Although Chekhov did not think this story was suitable for Russian Thought and had strong reservations, Lavrov was very pleased with it and ‘Ariadna’ was printed in his journal in December of that year.

  1. Sevastopol: Port and naval base in Crimea. The scene of the famous siege of 1854–5.

  2. Volochisk: Frontier station in north-west Ukraine, on the border with Austria.

  3. Max Nordau: Hungarian philosopher and publicist (1849–1923). In a letter to Suvorin (27 March 1894) Chekhov writes: ‘I’m sick and tired of arguments and I read such idle loud-mouths as Nordau with revulsion.’ Chekhov had possibly read in the early nineties some of Nordau’s works in Russian translation: Degeneration (1893) and The Disease of the Age (1893).

  4. Veltman: A. F. Veltman (or Weltman) (1800–70), minor author of historical novels of great length. Chekhov here refers to the story ‘Salome’ (1848), from the first volume of a five-volume epic, Adventures Drawn from the Sea of Life, which took twenty-five years to write.

  5. Novodevichy Convent: In southern Moscow.

  6. Slav Fair Hotel: Large hotel in central Moscow, where Chekhov often stayed. It is mentioned in ‘Peasants’ as the hotel where Chikildeyev worked as a waiter.

  7. Hermitage: Well-known restaurant in Trubny Square, Moscow.<
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  8. Tiflis: Tbilisi, capital of Georgia, a favourite watering-place famous for its warm sulphur springs and with many literary associations.

  9. Abbazia: Opatiya, seaside resort on Bay of Fiume; now in Croatia, it belonged to Austria before 1914. In letters of 3 and 4 October 1894 to the architect F. O. Shekhtel, Chekhov first calls Abbazia ‘splendid’ and then ‘boring’, infinitely preferring the French Riviera.

  10. Fiume: Rijeka, chief port of Croatia. Austro-Hungarian before First World War, it was seized by Italy and then passed to Yugoslavia.

  11. Merano: Alpine spa town in northern Italy. Very popular with nineteenth-century aristocracy.

  12. Boleslav Markevich: Minor reactionary novelist (1822–84) and, as it happened, an inveterate enemy of Turgenev. Had been guest of the Kiselevs at Babkino, where Chekhov met him, considering him pompous and a third-rate writer.

  13. non habeo: ‘I don’t have any.’

  14. Addio, bella Napoli: ‘Farewell, beautiful Naples.’

  15. Yalta: Seaside resort on Crimean coast, home of Chekhov for many years.

  16.… don’t go telling them…: In K. A. Skalkovsky’s compilation Of Women (1886–95), well known to Chekhov, there had appeared a chapter headed: ‘Of female intellect and erudition.’ Skalkovsky had tried to show, with allusions to Schopenhauer and Nicolas Chamfort, that women were inferior to men because their skulls and brains were smaller. Chekhov had earlier ridiculed this book in 1886 in his humorous piece: ‘Oh, women!’