This is a didactic tale of a doctor, Korolyov, caring for a neurasthenic young woman, the daughter of a now-deceased factory owner.
The lesson of the story is simple: Factory towns are horrible. Ill health and even death cling to them. You must escape them at any cost.
Here are the doctor’s observations of the factory workers when he first sees them: “in their faces, their caps, their walk, he read physical impurity, drunkenness, nervous exhaustion, bewilderment.”
And here is the factory itself, by which Chekhov is really discussing the entire ecosystem, the factory and the housing attached to it, all enclosed within gates: “It was a wide courtyard without grass, with five immense blocks of buildings with tall chimneys… warehouses and barracks, and over everything a sort of grey powder as though from dust.” The gardens are pitiful; even a lilac bush is covered in dust.
In the doctor’s view, the factory–any factory–is an accursed place. And it doesn’t matter what “improvements” may be offered to the workers–entertainments, staff doctors. They won’t make any difference. It’s like applying a bandage to someone with an “incurable illness.”
I don’t doubt that Russian factories (and pretty much any factory anywhere in the world at that moment in time) were pretty bad places. But is a story like this the best way to describe it?
The patient’s mother begs the doctor to spend the night, and the experience grows steadily more nightmarish. At dinner, the family’s self-satisfied governess guzzles wine and wipes her face with her hands (weirdly, she is represented as the face of evil in the pyramid of power that is the factory hierarchy, not the factory owners themselves!) Machinery throbs throughout the night, keeping the doctor from sleep. When he steps outside, someone calls after him, asking who he is, and his thought is, “It’s just like being in prison.”
And in the end, the doctor has a prescription for young Liza, the factory owner’s daughter: Get out of there! There are lots of nice places for a good, intelligent person to go! And then the doctor himself makes his own escape, imagining some vague future where things will be better.
I suppose this story could be read as a criticism of the doctor’s bland dismissal of the lives of all the poor factory workers, but it doesn’t feel like that to me. It reads like a kind of kindergarten treatise: Factories bad, nature good! That’s a philosophical argument, not a story.
One more thing: This is a peculiar, sloppy story. The first paragraph of the story seems to suggest the author had something else in mind when he started. It begins like this:
“The professor received a telegram from the Lyalikov’s factory; he was asked to come as quickly as possible…The professor did not go himself, but sent instead his assistant, Korolyov.”
What? Who is this professor? Why in the world do we begin the tale with this irrelevant information? It’s very odd and leads me to think that, whatever “A Doctor’s Visit” is, it isn’t really a finished piece.
READ THIS? READ THAT!
An extremely interesting companion to “A Doctor’s Visit” is “A Woman’s Kingdom,” in which we get a nuanced and fascinating portrait of a young woman who has been forced to take on the responsibility of running a factory, a job (or many jobs, really) that she takes with utmost seriousness. It’s a far more subtle portrait of life in a factory town, not shying away from the ugliness but recognizing the humanity of everyone in the whole system. Oddly, “A Woman’s Kingdom,” by far the richer, better story, appeared in 1894, four years before the stilted, simplistic “Doctor’s Visit,” which reads as if it were written by a very young man who has just gotten his first taste of the real world.
A Chekhov Circus 