The Neighbors (Books of the Week, 1892) and Big Volodya and Little Volodya (Russian News, 1893) are two curiously contrasting short stories of human weakness in the relations of the sexes. In the first the naively "progressive" ideas of an unhappily married landowner and the daughter of his neighbor bring them together. Unlike the girl's compassionate brother, who senses the somber future of the affair, they are unable to perceive the futility of their eagerness to flout social conventions for the sake of their love. The second tale is a rather cynical revelation of the commonplace frailty of a pretty woman who marries Big Volodya, more than twice her age, for the creature comforts he can provide her, while she is passionately in love with his young friend, Little Volodya, who eventually seduces and then deserts her. Though her husband and seducer continue their genial companionship, the conscience-stricken wife seeks an escape in frenzied dissipation and in an orgy of self-pity.2
2 In 1892, Chekhov also published his charming sketch, After the Theater, of a young girl's dreams of love (Petersburg Gazette), and another short story, Fear,
In the monthly Russian Thought appeared the two most notable productions of Chekhov during this period, Ward No. 6 (1892) and The Tale of an Unknown Man (1893), both of them long stories. Ward No. 6, perhaps the darkest and most brutal of all his tales, created a tremendous impression and greatly enhanced his reputation. The social awareness that condemned a government for allowing human beings to rot in the prisons of Sakhalin is now turned upon the mental ward of a hospital in a remote provincial town. The good, kind, gentle Dr. Ragin, head of the hospital, has long since surrendered his reforming zeal in the face of local sloth and indifference and taken refuge in philosophy and history, and in vodka and salted cucumbers. In his retreat from reality he develops convictions which enable him to turn his back on the evils that surround him. Thought which leads to a profound striving for a full comprehension of life is all that man needs to be happy. Men must seek peace and satisfaction not in the world outside them, he declares, but in themselves. This belief allows him to overlook or to rationalize away all the filth, inefficiency, and corruption in the hospital he directs, for he has even come to the conclusion that the very existence of such hospitals is an evil. Meanwhile, the brutish watchman, Nikita, becomes the guardian of law and order.in the institution, and with his huge fists he unmercifully beats the mentally unsound patients in Ward No. 6 for any real or imaginary infractions of the rules. One of these patients, Gromov, also a philosopher of sorts and with whom the gentle Dr. Ragin loves to argue in Ward No. 6, exposes the inhumanity of the hospital head's beliefs and argues the necessity for action and protest against any form of oppression and violence. Eventually a scheming assistant, eager to supplant Dr. Ragin, exploits the oddities of his behavior and has him declared insane and locked up in Ward No. 6. There the terrible fists of Nikita beat out of Dr. Ragin's head every last vestige of his quietist philosophy, and before he dies of a stroke his tormented conscience illuminates for him the horrible years of physical pain and moral suffering which his way of life had inflicted on many defenseless people.
In writing Ward No. 6 Chekhov had worried over the absence of any love element, but he was very conscious of "the liberal direction" he had given the story. And liberal-minded critics acclaimed it as the greatest thing he had done and placed it at the top of current fiction.
which, along with several brief unsigned notes on a variety of themes in 1893, were the last of his pieces to appear in New Times.
The vaguely suggestive symbolism, however, not uncommon in Chekhov's best tales, puzzled them. Did Ward No. 6 symbolize "the mental prison" Russia, and its ferocious warden Nikita, the Tsar? And, in the humane, educated Dr. Ragin was Chekhov satirizing well-intentioned intellectuals who abstained from the cruel struggle of Russian life? Although Tolstoy was reported to have praised the story highly, did it represent Chekhov's final break with the Tolstoyan doctrine of nonresistance to evil? This uncertainty is part of the ineffable art of the story. The critic A. Skabichevsky pointed out that it was supremely difficult to say who were the healthy and who the spiritually ill people in the stupid society of this remote town, or where Ward No. 6 ended and the region of sane thinking began.
Though Chekhov received some extravagantly laudatory letters on Ward No. 6, curiously enough Suvorin wrote him that the story lacked an "alcoholic kick." Chekhov's reply contains an interesting statement on Russian literature and culture at that time, in which he modestly and quite characteristically underestimates his own contribution. In addition, he clearly indicates at last his rejection of complete objectivity in art and its corollary of portraying life just as it is, a development which no doubt his social experiences and thinking over the last few years had encouraged. Putting aside Ward No. 6, he writes: "Tell me, in all conscience, who of my contemporaries — that is, people from thirty to forty- five—have given the world even one drop of alcohol? Are not Korolenko, Nadson, and all the playwrights of today lemonade? Have Repin's or Shishkin's paintings turned your head? Charming, talented. You are delighted, but at the same time you cannot forget that you'd like a smoke. Science and technical knowledge are now passing through a great period, but for our sort the times are flabby, stale, and dull. . . . The causes for this are not to be found in our stupidity, our lack of talent, or in our insolence, as Burenin thinks, but in a disease which, for the artist, is worse than syphilis or sexual impotence. We lack 'something,' that is true, and it means that when you lift the robe of our muse you will behold there an empty void. Let me remind you that the writers whom we dub immortal or just simply good and who intoxicate us have one very important trait in common: they are going somewhere and summon you to go with them, and you feel, not with your mind but with your whole being, that they have a purpose, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, who did not come and disturb the imagination for nothing. Looking at some of them in terms of their caliber, they have immediate aims — the abolition of serfdom, the liberation of their country, politics, beauty, or simply vodka, like Denis Davydov; others have remote aims — God, life beyond the grave, the happiness of humanity, and so on. The best of them are realistic and paint life as it is, but since every line is saturated with a consciousness of purpose, as though it were a juice, you feel, in addition to life as it is, life as it should be, and you arc captivated. And we? We! We paint life as it is, but beyond that — nothing at all. Flog us but we can do no more. We have neither immediate nor distant aims and in our souls there is a great empty space. We have no politics, we don't believe in revolution, we have no God, we are not afraid of ghosts, and personally I don't even fear death or blindness. He who wants nothing, hopes for nothing, and fears nothing, cannot be an artist. . . . You and Grigorovich think that I am clever. Yes, I'm clever enough not to conceal my illness from myself, not to lie to myself, and not to cover up my own emptiness with the rags of others, such as the ideas of the Sixties and so on. I won't throw myself down a flight of stairs, like Garshin; but neither will I flatter myself with hopes of a better future. I'm not to blame for my disease, and it is not for me to cure myself, for this disease, I must assume, has good purposes hidden from us and was not sent in vain." (November 25,1892.)