'Ward No. 6' is set in the psychiatric ward of a run-down provincial hospital, whose brutal regime resembles that of a prison rather than a place of treatment. It is an asylum in which sane people are incarcerated if they start to question the status quo too closely. One such inmate is Ivan Gromov, a sensitive and impoverished young student in the Dostoevskian mould who, one day in the street, comes across a couple of shackled convicts being marched along by four police guards. Since violence is condoned almost as an act of mercy in the town in which Gromov lives, and the local authorities seem quite impervious to people's suffering, he comes to the reasonable conclusion that innocent citizens might easily be wrongly arrested, and then starts to develop a paranoia that he too might be clapped in irons. Judges, police and doctors, he reasons, have become so inured to corruption and injustice 'that they are no different to the peasant who slaughters sheep and cattle in the backyard and does not notice the blood'. When Gromov realizes there can be no justice in this 'filthy little town a hundred miles from the railway' he becomes increasingly disturbed. It is no surprise, therefore, when Andrei Ragin, the doctor called out to visit him before he is committed, merely prescribes some drops and declares that 'people should not be prevented from going mad'. But this, ironically, is the fate meted out to Ragin when his conscience is finally awakened by Ivan's unrelenting voice of protest during lengthy conversations they hold during his ward visits. Ragin exemplifies much of the pessimistic stoicism of the second-century Roman philosopher Marcus Aurelius, to whose writings Chekhov devoted much time. 'There is no logic or morality in the fact that I am a doctor and you are insane; it's just pure chance,' he tells Gromov one day. Soon he too is locked up and beaten by Nikita, the retired soldier employed as a guard, who uses violence to keep order in the ward. Ragin's own vigorous protest against his incarceration is an eloquent vindication of Gromov's belief that people should never just stand by when witness to human suffering; evil needs to be fought.2
Chekhov wrote 'Ward No. 6' when he was still under the strong impression of his visit to Sakhalin. When it was published in 1892, the story was immediately hailed by the liberal intelligentsia as allegorical
of the corruption and stifling reaction of Russian society after ten years of Alexander Ill's rule. 'Ward No. 6 is everywhere. It's Russia!' exclaimed the writer Leskov. The young Lenin felt he had been shut up in 'Ward No. 6' himself when he finished reading the story. Readers in Taganrog, meanwhile, believed with some justification that Ward No. 6 was based on their own lunatic asylum. A hundred years later it seems that, apart from extending the trolleybus line to the cemetery, Sergei Shilo's main achievement as mayor of Taganrog was the building of a new maternity hospital. It was when he went to talk to Evgenia Konopliova, director of the Chekhov Museum located in the building of Taganrog's former gymnasium, that Andrei Sedov discovered that this maternity hospital had been built right opposite the asylum, which still stands to this day on the edge of town. Before the new hospital was built, he was told that mothers used to give birth in the asylum itself, so that the whole of Taganrog had actually gone through 'Ward No. 6' before even being born.3
Apart from gauging local opinion, Sedov's assignment in Taganrog was to investigate the circumstances surrounding the death of its late mayor, who was shot as he got out of his chauffeured car late one evening in October 2002 by a gunman using a converted stun gun fitted with a silencer. The first few hours of his visit were not exactly auspicious:
I arrived in Taganrog an hour before the funeral of the former town boss. Instead of a city guide all I had rolling around in my bag was a volume of Chekhov's stories. 'To the high street!' I shouted at the taxi driver, fearing I would be late. He stepped on the accelerator and. . . immediately drove into a pothole. The wheel of his little Zhiguli gave a mournful screech and fell off. The taxi driver slumped into a numbed silence. 'I hear your mayor was murdered,' I said in an attempt to distract him; 'why was that?' 'I would have murdered himself myself for roads like these. With my bare hands,' he snapped. Half the town had gathered to bid farewell to the mayor. One could sense the hand of a competent organizer. There were buses standing around with 'Shilo's funeral, such-and-such institute', 'Shilo's funeral, such-and-such factory'.
At the funeral, the governor of the Rostov-on-Don region shouted into the microphone that the murder was a shocking event in such a
peaceful place. 'Villains have penetrated the quiet Don,' he declared, echoing the title of Sholokhov's famous novel set in the area of the slow-flowing river. The head of police, meanwhile, declared that the murder was shocking because Taganrog was the 'quietest and most stable city in Russia', with a crime detection rate of 90 per cent. After doing some research for his story, Sedov wondered whether the high incidence of reported suicides had anything to do with this high figure, despite the fact that many of this number seemed mysteriously to have been restrained before their deaths (as was the case with the president of the local arbitration tribunal). Sedov himself was somewhat alarmed when the concierge at his hotel warned him not to stray off the main street after nine o'clock in the evening.
The unveiling of a new statue to Alexander I had been one of the highlights of the three-hundredth anniversary of Taganrog in 1998 (zealous Bolsheviks had ordered the original to be melted down in the 1930s). In his speech, Mayor Shilo had particularly praised Alexander I for establishing a nineteenth-century version of a 'free economic zone' by supporting local merchants.4 Mayor Shilo's great idea for Taganrog was also the creation of a 'free economic zone'. Certainly, it was a little disappointing for local officials to learn that the American bank they approached was not enthusiastic about their proposal that it loan the city a billion dollars against the value of its property. But the oligarchs who carved up former state-run concerns profited handsomely, even if they did have to start driving around in armoured jeeps. And a wealthy Greek Cypriot entrepreneur had been able to buy a bankrupt factory in Taganrog; so what if local officials had continued asking him for money when he thought he had already paid for everything? The paperwork for creating this free economic zone, it turns out, had necessitated the employment of 568 members of staff in the mayor's office; perhaps slightly excessive for a city with a population of 300,000. But at least Mayor Shilo could not be accused of lack of patriotism. When the Bank of Russia issued a 500 -rouble note showing a statue of Peter the Great in Arkhangelsk that was identical to the one in Taganrog, he caused such a fuss that it made the news on national television. Why Arkhangelsk and not Taganrog? Peter had originally planned for Taganrog to be his new capital, after all. Many citizens of Taganrog still feel aggrieved that he changed his mind and chose St Petersburg instead.
A 500-rouble banknote issued in 1997, showing Antokolsky's statue of Peter the Great in Arkhangelsk
Despite his patriotism and professed love of Chekhov, Mayor Shilo had not felt it incumbent upon himself to support any of the museums dedicated to Taganrog's most illustrious native; the Chekhov museums are funded by regional money. As well as being able to boast the first legally registered millionaire in Russia, the city must certainly have some of the most loyal – and worst paid – employees anywhere in the country. But despite receiving a rouble salary equivalent to $25 a month, none of the staff at the town's three Chekhov museums was interested in becoming involved in the 'Adequate Pay' campaign in 2002, which had been driven by the harsh economic conditions of post-Soviet Russia. Evgenia Konopliova informed Andrei Sedov that elderly women should spend their time making cakes for their grandchildren instead of shouting their heads off at meetings. Ticket revenue certainly cannot bring much income for the Chekhov museums, but perhaps the friendly lady with the silver lame shawl and orange lipstick who sits by the old ceramic stove in the ticket office at the 'Chekhov Cottage' does a roaring trade in the busts of Chekhov and Peter the Great, matrioshka dolls, and porcelain figurines of nude ladies and Father Christmas which are on sale with the scholarly monographs about Chekhov, their print-run in the low hundreds.
After visiting the Chekhov museums in Moscow and Taganrog, and perhaps even venturing as far as the Ukrainian town of Sumy where the family's dacha on the former Lintvaryov family estate stands, frozen in
time, the intrepid literary pilgrim, might wish to retrace the steps of Chekhov's Siberian odyssey and visit the
