and protect him from external influences. Reality irritated him, frightened him, kept him in continual agitation, and, perhaps to justify his timidity, his aversion for the actual, he always praised the past and what had never existed; and even the classical languages which he taught were in reality for him galoshes and umbrellas in which he sheltered himself from real life.' When a bit of actuality-a small loss of face-penetrates his defenses, Byelikov cannot survive it. He takes to his bed and dies within a month.
In 'Gooseberries,' the aversion for the actual is illustrated by Ivan Ivanovitch's younger brother, Nikolai, a government clerk, who lives wrapped in a cocoon of longing for a small country estate, fitted out not only with the usual amenities-kitchen garden, duck pond, servants' quarters-but with a stand of gooseberry bushes. Achieving this gemutlich fantasy becomes an obsession, driving him to extremes of miserliness and avarice. He marries an elderly and ugly widow for her money, and keeps her on such short rations that she dies three years later. Now, at last, he can buy his estate, a charmless place without a gooseberry on it. However, he plants twenty gooseberry bushes and settles into the life of a country squire. Ivan Ivanovitch comes for a visit and finds his brother living like an escapee from Dead Souls-fat, uncouth, complacent, putting on airs, spouting platitudes about the management of the peasants. A servant brings a plate of sour, unripe berries-the first harvest from the new bushes-and Nikolai greedily eats them, as though they were the finest fruit of ancient bushes. Watching him, Ivan Ivanovitch has an epiphany, which he relates to Burkin and Alehin: Like Nikolai, he says, we are all insulated against reality. 'We do not see and we do not hear those who suffer, and what is terrible in life goes on somewhere behind the scenes… Everything is quiet and peaceful, and nothing protests but mute statistics: so many people gone out of their minds, so many gallons of vodka drunk, so many children dead from malnutrition. And this order of things is evidently necessary; evidently the happy man feels at ease only because the unhappy bear their burdens in silence, and without that silence happiness would be impossible.' He goes on: There ought to be behind the door of every happy, contented man someone standing with a hammer continually reminding him with a tap that there are unhappy people; that however happy he may be, life will show her laws sooner or later, trouble will come for him- disease, poverty, losses, and no one will see or hear, just as now he neither sees nor hears others. Ivan Ivanovitch goes on in this didactic vein, ending with a plea for activism: 'Do good,' he says. Then Chekhov, as if anticipating the reader's reaction, writes, 'Ivan Ivanovitch's story had not satisfied either Burkin or Alehin… It was dreary to listen to the story of the poor clerk who ate gooseberries. They felt inclined, for some reason, to talk about elegant people, about women.'
The final story, 'About Love,' narrated the next day by Alehin during lunch, satisfies this inclination. This time, the aversion for the actual takes the form of renunciation. It is a fragment of Alehin's autobiography. Several years before, he and a young woman named Anna Alexyevna, who was married to a good but dull man, had met and fallen in love. However, unlike Gurov and Anna Sergeyevna (whom, in her delicate charm, Anna Alexyevna resembles), Alehin and Anna Alexyevna did not act on their feelings. For years they suppressed them, Alehin playing the part of the friend of the family, the bachelor uncle to the children, and Anna maintaining the appearance of the devoted wife. Only when the husband was taking up a new post in a distant region and Alehin came to say good-bye to Anna Alexyevna on the train did they finally acknowledge their love. When our eyes met in the compartment, our spiritual fortitude deserted us both; I took her in my arms, she pressed her face to my breast, and tears flowed from her eyes. Kissing her face, her shoulders, her hands, wet with tears-oh, how unhappy we were-I confessed my love for her, and with a burning pain in my heart I realized how unnecessary, how petty, and how deceptive all that had hindered us from loving was. I understood that when you love you must either, in your reasonings about that love, start from what is highest-from what is more important than happiness and unhappiness, sin or virtue in their accepted meaning-or you must not reason at all.
I kissed her for the last time, pressed her hand, and parted forever. The train had already started. I went into the next compartment-it was empty-and until I reached the next station I sat there crying. Alehin, though hardly a caricature like the Greek master or the squire brother, shares their existential malady. Like the coat and galoshes in which Byelikov encases himself and the fantasy with which the brother protects himself from the real, his attachment to conventional morality condemns him to his life of quiet desperation. A fourth desperate life- Anna Alexyevna's-is shown encasing itself in the padding of nervous illness; the train that bears her away is taking her to a transitional rest cure in the Crimea. When Chekhov wrote 'The Lady with the Dog,' he doubtless remembered her.
The three encased men of the trilogy are not the first (or the last) such in Chekhov's work. A predecessor is Dr. An-drey Yefimitch Ragin, the hero of 'Ward No. 6,' written six years earlier. Ragin is a much more fully developed example of a man who insulates himself from reality, and 'Ward No. 6' is a masterpiece. But Chekhov was habitually reluctant to let go of a theme, and his compulsion to rework it in many variations is a signature of his work. It is also an aid to the critic. The ceaseless amplifications are a kind of message about meaning.
The meaning of 'Ward No. 6' expands when the story is read in the light of the trilogy. Conventionally, it is read as a work of powerful social protest, a political fable whose horrifying mental ward stands for the repressive czarist state. In its rendering of suffering, this short work of fiction achieves what Chekhov's wordy factual book about Sakhalin (which he was still trying to write when he wrote 'Ward No. 6') cannot. The factual work is like a photograph of a person taken from far away; 'Ward No. 6' is a close-up, with all the pores and lines showing. The Island of Sakhalin prods and pokes; 'Ward No. 6' stabs.
The story begins with a description of the repulsive outbuilding in which five lunatics are imprisoned. With a few strokes, Chekhov creates a place of such disgusting squalor and stench that the reader himself wants to flee from it. The lunatics receive no treatment. Their only human contact is with a guard named Nikita, who 'belongs to the class of simple-hearted, practical, and dull-witted people, prompt in carrying out orders, who like discipline better than anything in the world, and so are convinced that it is their duty to beat people.' Nikita's 'fists are vigorous' and he 'showers blows on the face, on the chest, on the back, on whatever comes first.' The ward is part of a provincial hospital that is itself a hell. Ragin has been the chief of the hospital for some years. He is intelligent and decent but helplessly ineffectual, yet another of Chekhov's good men who cannot make good. He 'had no strength of will nor belief in his right to organize an intelligent and honest life around him. He was absolutely unable to give orders, to forbid things, or to insist.' Although Ragin immediately realizes that the hospital is a place of evil and should be closed down, he takes no action. He sinks into a life of escape from life. He has less and less to do with the hospital and never goes into the mental ward. He does almost nothing at all, in fact. He reads and talks to the town's postmaster, Mihail Averyanitch, 'the only man in town whose society did not bore [him]' but who is actually a bore and a cheat. Then one day chance brings Ragin to Ward 6 and into conversation with a thirty-three- year-old paranoid inmate named Ivan Dmitritch Gromov, who (unlike the four other inmates) is of noble birth.
In April 1892, Chekhov described 'Ward No. 6' to Avilova-surely not without irony-as 'very boring… since woman and the element of love are entirely absent from it.' (He added, 'I can't bear such tales, and as for writing this one, I did it inadvertently somehow, and frivolously.') In fact, however, the element of love is very much present in the story. How else to describe the pleasure and excitement aroused in Ragin by his encounter with Gromov, a genuinely interesting and appealing man, someone with whom he can finally engage? Ragin starts coming regularly to Ward 6 and holding philosophical debates with Gromov. He comes alive. Gromov is a precursor of R. D. Laing's sane madman in a mad world. His paranoia is a too acute awareness of the wrongs of the world. Ragin takes the position that active efforts to alleviate the wrongs of the world are useless and pointless, since we all will die. He advocates a stoic indifference to external reality. 'There is no real difference between a warm, snug study and this ward,' he says. 'A man's peace and contentment do not lie outside a man, but in himself.' The cold and starved and beaten Gromov wonderfully replies, 'You should go and preach that philosophy in Greece, where it's warm and fragrant with the scent of pomegranates, but here it is not suited to the climate… Diogenes did not need a study or a warm habitation; it's hot there without. You can lie in your tub and eat oranges and olives. But bring him to Russia to live: he'd be begging to be let indoors in May, let alone December. He'd be doubled up with the cold.' As the conversation continues, the madman eloquently challenges the sane doctor's quietism, and draws a devastating portrait of him: 'You are naturally a flabby, lazy man, and so you have tried to arrange your life so that nothing should disturb you or make you move. You have handed over your work to the assistant and the rest of the rabble while you sit in peace and warmth, save money, read, amuse yourself with reflections, with all sorts of lofty nonsense… in fact you have seen nothing of life, you know absolutely nothing of it, and are only theoretically acquainted with reality… You see a peasant beating his wife, for instance. Why interfere? Let him beat her, they will both die sooner or later, anyway… A peasant woman comes with toothache… well, what of it? Pain is the idea of pain, and besides 'there is no living in this world without illness; we shall all die, and so, go away, woman, don't hinder me from thinking and drinking vodka.'… We are kept here behind barred windows, tortured, left to rot; but
