“Enemies” begins, like half-a-dozen other Chekhov stories, with a doctor being summoned to attend to a sick patient. In this case, though, the doctor, Kirilin, has just suffered a devastating loss: The death of his son, at age six, of diphtheria.
In a miasma of grief, the doctor is visited by a stranger, Abogin, from outside the town. Abogin’s wife is deathly ill. Won’t he come to attend to her? Dr. Kirilin resists but ultimately is persuaded to make the trip to see the patient, who may die without him.
That’s the setup; I’ll say no more about the plot except Abogin’s wife’s condition is not what had been expected.
This is a brilliant story with tidal shifts of tone that would seem not to work in such a short tale. Kirilin’s sorrow is incredibly well described; we feel drawn down into the depths with him. Abogin’s desperate worry about his wife is similarly well played; he knows he shouldn’t be begging the doctor to leave his home on such a night, but he has no choice. The reader is tense for both men, wishing almost simultaneously for Kirilin to throw Abogin out of his house but also for Kirilin to quickly, quickly get to the sick woman’s side, lest another person die that same evening.
The twist of the story is wrenching and amazing; our conflicted, sympathetic views of both men are stretched to the breaking point. Wow!
READ THIS? READ THAT!
I can think of only one aspect of Chekhov’s writing that seems naive, and it is this: His elevated view of doctors. His doctor characters generally (not always) verge on the saintly, to the point of absurdity in some cases (“Late Blooming Flowers,” which isn’t included in the Garnett translations) or melodrama (“The Doctor”). He really seemed to love the medical profession and he couldn’t help creating stories about brilliant, admired, generous and hard-working doctors.
As a result, the stories explicitly about doctors tend not to be Chekhov’s strong suit. “Enemies” is a bit of an exception, and I hate to point toward a lesser story just to make the point. I would suggest, then, a story that features a doctor in only a passing role: Try the haunting tale “The Runaway,” a harsh and presumably realistic portrait of the workings of a rural clinic. The doctors here are brusque even to the point of cruelty, but also attentive and hard-working.
A Chekhov Circus 