that is very good and reasonable, because there is no difference at all between this ward and a warm snug study. A convenient philosophy. You can do nothing, and your conscience is clear, and you feel you are wise… No sir, it is not philosophy, it's not thinking, it's not breadth of vision, but laziness, fakirism, drowsy stupefaction…'
None of this penetrates. Ragin can only laugh with pleasure at having found such an interesting and intelligent man to talk to. 'That's original,' he says to Gromov of his harsh portrait. Only when he is himself thrown into the ward- this is the story's incredible plot twist, which Chekhov succeeds in making believable-does he at last confront reality. Here is the form the confrontation takes: Nikita opened the door quickly, and roughly, with both his hands and his knee, shoved Andrey Yefimitch back, then swung his arm and punched him in the face with his fist. It seemed to Andrey Yefimitch as though a huge salt wave enveloped him from his head downwards and dragged him to the bed; there really was a salt taste in his mouth: most likely the blood was running from his teeth. He waved his arms as though he were trying to swim out and clutched at a bedstead, and at the same moment felt Nikita hit him twice on the back… Then all was still, the faint moonlight came through the grating, and a shadow like a net lay on the floor. It was terrible. Andrey Yefimitch lay and held his breath: he was expecting with horror to be struck again. He felt as though someone had taken a sickle, thrust it into him, and turned it round several times in his breast and bowels. He bit the pillow from pain and clenched his teeth, and all at once through the chaos in his brain there flashed the terrible, unbearable thought that these people, who seemed now like black shadows in the moonlight, had to endure such pain day after day for years. How could it have happened that for more than twenty years he had known it and had refused to know it? The next day, Ragin dies of a stroke, and the story ends.
Reading 'Ward No. 6' as a political parable is not adequate to its power. One puts it down feeling that in writing it Chekhov had in mind nothing so local as the condition of the Russian empire. As always, it is with the human condition that he is preoccupied. 'Life will show her laws sooner or later, trouble will come for [the happy, contented man]- disease, poverty, losses, and no one will see or hear, just as now he neither sees nor hears others.' Nikita embodies the brutality of life itself coming at us all with its big fists. Chekhov condemns Ragin for his refusal to bestir himself on behalf of his suffering fellow men, but he also understands him. As a nonbeliever, he, too, has felt the absurdity of it all in the light of our ineluctable permanent extinction beneath the cold stars of a ten-billion-year-old universe.
In 'Lights,' he puts into the mouth of his reformed rake, Ananyev, a speech about the philosophy of absurdism that at once satirizes it and gives it its due. 'I was no more than twenty-six at the time [when he seduced and betrayed the trusting Kisochka], but I knew perfectly well that life was aimless and had no meaning, that everything was a deception and an illusion, that in its essential nature and results a life of penal servitude in Sakhalin was not in any way different from a life spent in Nice, that the difference between the brain of a Kant and the brain of a fly was of no real significance… I lived as though I were doing a favor to some unseen power which compelled me to live… The philosophy of which we are speaking has something alluring, narcotic in its nature, like tobacco or morphia. It becomes a habit, a craving. You take advantage of every minute of solitude to gloat over thoughts of the aimlessness of life and the darkness of the grave.' To a young listener, who himself finds life absurd, and challenges a distinction that Ananyev makes between the pessimism of the old and the pessimism of the young, Ananyev replies: The pessimism of old thinkers does not take the form of idle talk, as it does with you and me, but of Weltschmerz, of suffering; it rests in them on a Christian foundation because it is derived from love for humanity and from thoughts about humanity, and is entirely free from the egotism which is noticeable in dilettantes. You despise life because its meaning and its object are hidden from you alone, and you are afraid only of your own death, while the real thinker is unhappy because the truth is hidden from all, and he is afraid for all men.
In his stories and plays, Chekhov is afraid for all men. He was only in his twenties and thirties when he wrote most of them, but like other geniuses-especially those who die prematurely-he wrote as if he were old. Toward the end of 'Ward No. 6,' he veers off-as he does in other dark and terrible works, such as 'Peasants' and 'In the Ravine'-to rejoice for all men in the beauty of the world. There is always this amazing movement in Chekhov from the difficult and fearful to the simple and beautiful. As Ragin lies dying, Chekhov tells us, he sees 'a greenness before his eyes'; then 'a herd of deer, extraordinarily beautiful and graceful, of which he had been reading the day before, ran by him.'
'Life is given to us only once.' The line (or a variant) appears in story after story and is delivered so quietly and offhandedly that we almost miss its terror. Chekhov was never one to insist on anything. He didn't preach, or even teach. He is our poet of the provisional and fragmentary. When a story or play ends, nothing seems to be settled. 'Ward No. 6,' for instance, does not end with the image of the beautiful deer. Before Ragin dies another thought passes through his mind: 'A peasant woman stretched out her hand to him with a registered letter… Mihail Averyanitch said something, then it all vanished, and Andrey Yefimitch sank into oblivion forever.' The registered letter-there is a bit of theatricality in its not being an ordinary letter-glints with meaning. What does it say? Who sent it? The ending of 'Ward No. 6' inevitably evokes (and was surely influenced by) the ending of 'The Death of Ivan Ilyich,' but Chekhov declines to report the mystical experience that Tolstoy confidently reports his hero to have had. Chekhov enters the dying Ragin's mind, but emerges with the most laconic and incomplete of reports. Tolstoy's audacious authorial omniscience gives him his position as the greatest of the nineteenth-century Russian realists. Chekhov's experiments with authorial reticence-equally audacious in their way- point toward twentieth-century modernism. Thirteen
I
n my room at the Hotel Yalta, I tried to turn on the TV, to get the news (during a telephone call to New York, I had heard that Yeltsin was about to be impeached), but could not. I called the front desk, and was told, 'There is a woman on your floor. She will help you.' 'What woman?'
'There is a woman on every floor, near the elevator. She will help you.'
I walked down the long corridor and eventually found a room where a fat, slatternly woman with long blond hair was sitting. The room was astonishing. It had been commandeered by grape ivy vines, which trailed and twined over the walls and ceiling, forming a kind of canopy and giving everything in the room a green tinge. The vines grew from two incongruously small plastic pots on a windowsill. The paucity of soil gave the plants a leggy and slightly deprived look, but in no way diminished their will to push on and cover the world with themselves. Earlier in the day, Nina and I had seen indoor plants living under the most luxurious conditions imaginable, in the conservatory of a palace built by a Prince Volkonsky-plants with glossy dark green leaves, set in large clay pots filled with dark, rich soil. But the leggy grape ivy tended by the slatternly woman belonged to the same universe of horticulture as the glossy plants tended by professional gardeners. 'All Russia is a garden,' begins Trofimov's great speech in The Cherry Orchard about his intimations of the happiness the future will bring to his country-a speech one doesn't quite know how to listen to in the light of the catastrophe that actually befell Russia.
I told the woman my problem with the television. She nodded and went to a corner cupboard, from which she withdrew a key. She used it to lock her room before following me to my room, where she pointed out a switch I had missed. I gave her a tip, for which she thanked me profusely. 1 reflected that my telephone call to New York, which cost fifteen dollars, was more than a week's pay for her-and for most of the people I had met in Russia. The comparison was the sort of trite and useless rhetoric Chekhov would sometimes put in the mouth of a character whose reformist views excited his skepticism. One such reformer is the narrator of 'An Anonymous Story,' a confused revolutionary nobleman, who compares a dress costing four hundred rubles to the pitiful wages in kopecks of poor women. 'An Anonymous Story' is a strange, febrile work that reads as if it had been written nonstop in the state of heightened consciousness that tuberculosis has been said to induce in artists. (In actuality, the story was set aside for several years after it was started.) It begins arrestingly: Through causes which it is not the time to go into in detail, I had to enter the service of a Petersburg official called Orlov, in the capacity of a footman… I entered the service of this Orlov on account of his father, a prominent political man, whom I looked upon as a serious enemy of my cause. I reckoned that, living with the son, I should-from the conversations I would hear, and from the letters and papers I would find on the table-learn every detail of the father's plans and intentions. But the story does not live up to its promise. For reasons one can attribute only to Chekhov's own lack of enthusiasm for revolution, the narrator loses interest in his cause, becoming exclusively preoccupied with the predicament of Orlov's beautiful young mistress, Zinaida (to whom Orlov is behaving with typical Petersburg swinishness). But the opening scenes, retailing the upper-class revolutionary's masquerade as a servant-scenes that perhaps only someone who had himself been on both sides of the class divide could have written-have a special sardonic sparkle. Chekhov wrote easily about the upper classes-the term 'Chekhovian' evokes faded nobility on decaying estates- but he evidently never forgot that he himself had not been gently reared. In a letter to Suvorin written in January 1889, he speaks of a 'feeling of personal freedom' that 'only recently began to develop in me,' and continues: What writers belonging to
