Ward No. 6

The English is made fresh from the Russian, keeping close to Chekhov's own words in the key scenes; in places it follows the public-domain translation by Constance Garnett. Some descriptive passages are shortened.*

In the hospital yard stands a small annexe, surrounded by a whole forest of burdock, nettles and wild hemp. Its roof is rusty, the chimney half fallen down, the steps of the porch rotting and overgrown with grass, and of the plaster only traces remain. Its front faces the hospital, its back looks out on the fields, from which it is separated by the grey hospital fence with nails along the top. These nails, with their points upwards, and the fence, and the annexe itself, have that peculiar, melancholy, God-forsaken look that among us belongs only to hospital and prison buildings.

Come along the narrow path through the nettles, and look inside. In the entry, along the walls and by the stove, lie whole mountains of hospital rubbish — mattresses, tattered gowns, worn-out boots — rotting and giving off a stifling smell.

On the rubbish, always with a pipe in his teeth, lies the watchman Nikita, an old retired soldier with faded stripes on his coat. He has a stern, worn-out face, overhanging eyebrows that give him the look of a steppe sheepdog, and a red nose; he is short, lean and sinewy, but there is something impressive about his bearing, and his fists are large. He belongs to that class of simple, practical, dull, reliable people who love order above everything in the world, and are therefore convinced that people must be beaten. He beats them in the face, in the chest, in the back, wherever he can, and is convinced that without this there would be no order.

The violence in the ward is described by Chekhov plainly; this retelling reports it without dwelling on it.

Next you come into a large, spacious room, which takes up the whole annexe, apart from the entry. Here the walls are daubed a dirty blue, the ceiling is black with smoke, as in a peasant hut without a chimney — clearly the stoves smoke in winter, and the place is full of fumes. The windows are disfigured inside by iron bars. The floor is grey and splintery. It stinks of sour cabbage, of burnt wicks, of bugs and of ammonia, and the stink at first gives you the impression that you have come into a menagerie.

In the room there are beds, screwed to the floor. On them, sitting or lying, are people in blue hospital gowns and old-fashioned nightcaps. These are the madmen.

There are five of them. Only one is of gentle birth; the rest are all tradespeople and peasants. The first from the door, a tall, thin man with a red, shining moustache and tearful eyes, sits with his head propped on his hand and stares at one point. Day and night he grieves, shaking his head, sighing and smiling bitterly; he seldom takes part in conversation and usually makes no answer to questions. He eats and drinks mechanically when food is offered him. From his agonising, racking cough, his thinness and the flush on his cheeks, one may judge that he is in the first stage of consumption.

Next to him is a little, lively, nimble old man with a pointed beard and curly black hair, who whistles and sings softly all day like a bullfinch. This is Moiseika, a Jewish hatmaker who went out of his mind twenty years ago, when his workshop burned down. He is the only inmate allowed out into the street, a harmless town fool followed by boys and dogs, begging at gates and shops for a kopek; he comes back well fed and rich, and Nikita turns his pockets inside out and takes everything, swearing he will never let him out again.

Moiseika likes to be useful: he brings the others water, covers them when they sleep, feeds the paralytic beside him with a spoon — not from compassion, but in imitation of his neighbour on the right.

Ivan Dmitrich Gromov, a man of thirty-three, of good family, who was once a court usher and provincial secretary, suffers from persecution mania. He either lies curled up in bed, or walks from corner to corner as though for exercise; he very rarely sits down. He is always excited, agitated, and strained by some vague, undefined expectation. The slightest rustle in the entry, or a shout in the yard, is enough to make him raise his head and begin listening: are they coming for him? Are they looking for him? And his face then expresses the utmost uneasiness and repugnance.

I like his broad face with its high cheekbones, always pale and unhappy, and reflecting, as in a mirror, a soul tormented by conflict and long-continued terror. His grimaces are strange and morbid, but the delicate lines traced on his face by profound, genuine suffering show intelligence and sense, and there is a warm and healthy light in his eyes. I like the man himself, courteous, anxious to be of use, and extraordinarily gentle to everyone except Nikita. When anyone drops a button or a spoon, he jumps up from his bed quickly and picks it up; every day he says good morning to his companions, and when he goes to bed he wishes them good night.

Sometimes in the evenings he wraps himself in his gown and, trembling all over, paces between the beds as if in a fever; then the longing to speak overcomes him, and he talks, passionately and disconnectedly, of the baseness of mankind, of violence trampling on justice, of the glorious life that will one day be on earth, and of the window bars, which remind him every minute of the stupidity and cruelty of oppressors. In his talk you recognise both the madman and the man.

The fourth is a fat, almost round peasant with a senseless face, who has long since lost all capacity for thought or feeling. Nikita beats him with all his strength; and what is dreadful is that the creature does not respond to the blows at all, but only rocks slightly, like a heavy barrel.

The fifth and last inhabitant of Ward No. 6 was a man who had once sorted letters in the post office, a thin, fair little man with a good-natured but rather sly face. To judge by his clear, cheerful eyes, which had a calm and intelligent look, he had some pleasant and important secret of his own. Under his pillow and under his mattress he kept something that he showed to no one, not from fear of its being taken from him, but from modesty. Sometimes he went to the window, and, turning his back to his companions, put something on his breast and looked at it, bending his head; if you went up to him at that moment, he was embarrassed and snatched it off. But it was not difficult to guess his secret.

"Congratulate me," he would often say to Ivan Dmitrich; "I have been presented with the Stanislav order of the second degree with the star. The second degree with the star is only given to foreigners, but for some reason they want to make an exception for me." He smiled, shrugging his shoulders in perplexity. "That, I must confess, I did not expect."

Gromov's story.

Ivan Dmitrich's father had been a minor official in the town, a man of some standing; his elder brother, Sergei, a fourth-year student, had died of galloping consumption; and soon afterwards the father was put on trial for forgery and embezzlement, and died of typhus in the prison hospital. The house and all their belongings were sold, and Ivan Dmitrich and his mother were left without means.

He had been studying at the university in Petersburg; now he had to give it up, and come home. Here, through influence, he got a post as a teacher in the district school, but did not get on with his colleagues, was not liked by the boys, and soon gave it up. His mother died. He was for half a year without work, living on bread and water; then he became a court usher. He kept this post until he was dismissed owing to his illness.

He had never been healthy: pale, thin, sleepless, irritable and suspicious, he had no friends. He spoke with contempt of his fellow-townsmen, of their coarse ignorance and sleepy animal existence; whatever one talked to him about, he brought it round to the same subject — that life in the town was stifling, that scoundrels were well fed and honest men starved, that they needed schools, a progressive newspaper, a theatre, public lectures. Mankind was divided for him into honest men and scoundrels, with nothing in between.

Even so, people liked him, and called him Vanya behind his back; he was well read, and in the townspeople's eyes something like a walking reference book.

One autumn morning, splashing through the mud on court business, Ivan Dmitrich met two convicts in fetters, with four soldiers guarding them. He had often met convicts before, and felt pity for them; but now it suddenly seemed to him that he too might be put in fetters and led through the mud to prison like that. He had done nothing wrong; but was it not easy to commit a crime by accident, and was not false witness always possible, and judicial error? Judges, police officers and doctors, he reflected, grow so callous through habit that they cannot take any but a formal view of other men's suffering . . .

From that day he was in terror. Every knock at the door made him tremble; he did not sleep, but snored loudly so that his landlady would think he was asleep.

In the spring the bodies of an old woman and a boy, victims of a murder, were found in a ravine near the cemetery, and the whole town talked of nothing else. Ivan Dmitrich, so that no one should suspect him, smiled at people in the streets; then he hid in his landlady's cellar for a day and a night. Early one morning workmen came to repair the stove, and terror told him they were police in disguise. He ran out of the house without cap or coat, and dogs raced after him barking, and it seemed to him that all the violence of the world was chasing at his back.

He was stopped and brought home, and his landlady sent for a doctor. Doctor Andrei Yefimych, of whom we shall speak hereafter, prescribed cold compresses on his head and laurel-cherry drops, shook his head, and went away, telling the landlady he should not come again, as one should not interfere with people who are going out of their minds. As he had not the means to live at home and be nursed, Ivan Dmitrich was soon sent to the hospital, and was there put into the ward for venereal patients. He could not sleep at night, was full of whims and fancies, and disturbed the patients, and was soon afterwards, by Andrei Yefimych's orders, transferred to Ward No. 6.

Within a year Ivan Dmitrich was completely forgotten in the town, and his books, heaped up by his landlady in a sledge in the barn, were pulled to pieces by boys.

The doctor.

Doctor Andrei Yefimych Ragin was a remarkable man in his way. They say that in his early youth he was very religious, and prepared himself for a clerical career, and that when he had finished his studies at the high school in 1863 he intended to enter a theological academy; but that his father, a surgeon and doctor of medicine, jeered at him, and declared point-blank that he would disown him if he became a priest. How far this is true I don't know, but Andrei Yefimych himself has more than once confessed that he has never had a natural bent for medicine or science in general.