This longish story, like some of Chekhov’s other long works, feels like a misfire to me.
It starts off as a piece of reportage – a look at the goings on in a mental hospital. Like “The Cattle Dealers,” which reads more like a reporter-at-large than a piece of fiction, “Ward No. 6” begins in the present tense, with an omniscient narrator guiding us through the hospital grounds to the separate structure that houses the mental patients. There we meet the porter, Nikita, who uses his fists to bludgeon the inmates when they get out of line. The second, third and fourth chapters introduce us to several of the patients, their lives sketched briefly.
So far, so good. Or, good enough, in any case.
But then the tale shifts gears, refocusing on a doctor, Andrey Yefimitch, who takes an interest in mental illness and, in the end, is felled by mental illness himself.
Or is he?
I really have no idea. Reading back over the story, it’s hard to understand the progression of events. The doctor has long conversations with one of the patients, which seems suspicious to other medical professionals. He is temperamental and sometimes flares up with his friends. He grows impatient with officials who aren’t up to date on the causes and treatment of mental illness.
And then he finds himself committed to the hospital himself, where he does behave somewhat erratically, but mainly he seems defeated by this occurrence, fading into his life of incarceration.
I have read a number of deeply respectful commentaries about “Ward No. 6” but I don’t see this as a major work. For me, the greatest failure is structural: There is really no stylistic connection between the first four sections and the remainder of the story. We begin in the present tense, then shift to the past tense to tell the story of Andrey Yefimitch. It’s as if Chekhov suddenly became more interested in Andrey’s story and just decided, midway, to make that his focus.
But the new focus of the story can hardly be said to be truly focused: There are passages that seem sort of domestic – how Andrey passes his time at home. Others feel didactic: conversations with his friends. And still others seem to be investigations of the question of sanity and reality.
When I came to the point where Andrey discovers that he is now being held as a prisoner/patient, I had to go back and read the preceding pages over. Wait, what? How did this happen? Who or what caused this? I could not see any real sequence of events.
I reread the story yet again, while trying to organize my thoughts for this little commentary, and still feel mystified. The most I can say is that “Ward No. 6” is interesting insofar as it describes the life of the patients at a mental hospital in 19th Century Russia. But it’s not a terribly involving or credible story otherwise.
Mine is not a mainstream opinion, though! Nikolai Leskov, who was in essence Chekhov’s predecessor as the top short-story writer in 19th Century Russia, wrote, “Ward No. 6 is Russia.” And here in America, the author, editor and eminence grise William Maxwell was a great admirer of the story, saying, “The reader who has lived through ‘Ward No. 6’ knows forever after that his own sanity is only provisional.”
That’s not how I felt. Then again, I am not a terribly generous reader!
READ THIS? READ THAT!
Chekhov took a professional interest in the fledgling medical specialty of psychiatry, even working on an overview of Russian psychiatric institutions in the 1880s, which I assume underpinned the creation of “Ward No. 6.” Fortunately (for readers who don’t find stories about insanity engaging), he mainly confined that interest to his medical work, and left it out of his fiction. But you can get another look at the world of mental illness and its treatment in “A Nervous Breakdown.”
A Chekhov Circus 