Tchekhov knew what conclusions he had reached in _The Tedious Story_
and _Ivanov._ Some of his critics also knew, and told him so. I
cannot venture to say what was the cause--whether fear of public
opinion, or his horror at his own discoveries, or both together--but
evidently there came a moment to Tchekhov when he decided at all costs
to surrender his position and retreat. The fruit of this decision was
_Ward No. 6._ In this story the hero of the drama is the same familiar
Tchekhov character, the doctor. The setting, too, is quite the usual
one, though changed to a slight extent. Nothing in particular has
occurred in the doctor's life. He happened to come to an out-of-the-way
place in the provinces, and gradually, by continually avoiding
life and people, he reached a condition of utter will-lessness, which
he represented to himself as the ideal of human happiness. He is
indifferent to everything, beginning with his hospital, where he can
hardly ever be found, where under the reign of the drunken brute of an
assistant the patients are swindled and neglected.
In the mental ward reigns a porter who is a discharged soldier: he
punches his restless patients into shape. The doctor does not care,
as though he were living in some distant other world, and does not
understand what is going on before his very eyes. He happens to enter
his ward and to have a conversation with one of his patients. He
listens quietly to him; but his answer is words instead of deeds. He
tries to show his lunatic acquaintance that external influences cannot
affect us in any way at all. The lunatic does not agree, becomes
impertinent, presents objections, in which, as in the thoughts of many
lunatics, nonsensical assertions are mixed with very profound remarks.
Indeed, there is so little nonsense that from the conversation you
would hardly imagine that you have to do with a lunatic. The doctor
is delighted with his new friend, but does nothing whatsoever to
make him more comfortable. The patient is still under the porter's
thumb as he used to be, and the porter gives him a thrashing on the
least provocation. The patient, the doctor, the people round, the
whole setting of the hospital and the doctor's rooms, are described
with wonderful talent. Everything induces you to make absolutely no
resistance and to become fatalistically indifferent:--let them get
drunk, let them fight, let them thieve, let them be brutal--what does
it matter! Evidently it is so predestined by the supreme council of
nature. The philosophy of inactivity which the doctor professes is
as it were prompted and whispered by the immutable laws of human
existence. Apparently there is no force which may tear one from its
power. So far everything is more or less in the Tchekhov style. But
the end is completely different. By the intrigues of his colleague,
the doctor himself is taken as a patient into the mental ward. He
is deprived of freedom, shut up in a wing of the hospital, and even
thrashed, thrashed by the same porter whose behaviour he had taught his
lunatic acquaintance to accept, thrashed before his acquaintance's
very eyes. The doctor instantly awakens as though out of a dream. A
fierce desire to struggle and to protest manifests itself in him. True,
at this moment he dies; but the idea is triumphant, still. The critics
could consider themselves quite satisfied. Tchekhov had openly repented
and renounced the theory of non-resistance; and, I believe, _Ward No.
6_ met with a sympathetic reception at the time. In passing I would say
that the doctor dies very beautifully: in his last moments he sees a
herd of deer....
Indeed, the construction of this story leaves no doubt in the mind.
Tchekhov wished to compromise, and he compromised. He had come to feel
how intolerable was hopelessness, how impossible the creation from a
void. To beat one's head against the stones, eternally to beat one's
head against the stones, is so horrible that it were better to return
to idealism. Then the truth of the wonderful Russian saying was proved:
'Don't forswear the beggar's wallet nor the prison.' Tchekhov joined
the choir of Russian writers, and began to praise the idea. But not
for long. His very next story, _The Duel,_ has a different character.
Its conclusion is also apparently idealistic, but only in appearance.
The principal hero Layevsky is a parasite like all Tchekhov's heroes.
He does nothing, can do nothing, does not even wish to do anything,
lives chiefly at others' expense, runs up debts, seduces women.... His
condition is intolerable. He is living with another man's wife, whom he
had come to loathe as he loathes himself, yet he cannot get rid of her.
He is always in straitened circumstances and in debt everywhere: his
friends dislike and despise him. His state of mind is always such that
he is ready to run no matter where, never looking backwards, only away
from the place where he is living now. His illegal wife is in roughly
the same position, unless it be even more horrible. Without knowing
why, without love, without even being attracted, she gives herself to
the first, commonplace man she meets; and then she feels as though
she had been covered from head to foot in filth, and the filth had
stuck so close to her that not ocean itself could wash her clean. This
couple lives in the world, in a remote little place in the Caucasus,
and naturally attracts Tchekhov's attention. There is no denying the
interest of the subject: two persons befouled, who can neither tolerate
others nor themselves....
For contrast's sake Tchekhov brings Layevsky into collision with the
zoologist, Von Koren, who has come to the seaside town on important
business--every one recognises its importance--to study the embryology
of the medusa. Von Koren, as one may see from his name, is of German
origin, and therefore deliberately represented as a healthy, normal,
clean man, the grandchild of Goncharov's Stolz, the direct opposite
of Layevsky, who on his side is nearly related to our old friend
Oblomov. But in Goncharov the contrast between Stolz and Oblomov is
quite different in nature and meaning to the contrast in Tchekhov. The
novelist of the 'forties hoped that a _rapprochement_ with Western
culture would renew and resuscitate Russia. And Oblomov himself is not
represented as an utterly hopeless person. He is only lazy, inactive,
unenterprising. You have the feeling that were he to awaken he would
be a match for a dozen Stolzs. Layevsky is a different affair. He is
awake already, he was awakened years ago, but his awakening did him no
good.... 'He does not love nature; he has no God; he or his companions
had ruined every trustful girl he had known; all his life long he
had not planted one single little tree, nor grown one blade of grass
in his own garden, nor while he lived among the living, had he saved
the life of one single fly; but only ruined and destroyed, and lied,
and lied....' The good-natured sluggard Oblomov degenerated into a
disgusting, terrible animal, while the clean Stolz lived and remained
clean in his posterity! But to the new Oblomov he speaks differently.
Von Koren calls Layevsky a scoundrel and a rogue, and demands that
he should be punished with the utmost severity. To reconcile them is
impossible. The more they meet, the deeper, the more merciless, the
more implacable is their hatred for each other. It is impossible that
they should live together on the earth. It must be one or the other:
either the normal Von Koren, or the degenerate decadent Layevsky.
Of course, all the external, material force is on Von Koren's side
in the struggle. He is always in the right, always victorious,
always triumphant--in act no less than in theory. It is curious that
Tchekhov, the irreconcilable enemy of all kinds of philosophy--not
one of his heroes philosophises, or if he does, his philosophising is
unsuccessful, ridiculous, weak and unconvincing--makes an exception
for Von Koren, a typical representative of the positive, materialistic
school. His words breathe vigour and conviction. They have in them even
pathos and a maximum of logical sequence. There are many materialist
heroes in Tchekhov's stories, but in their materialism there is a
tinge of veiled idealism, according to the stereotyped prescription of
the 'sixties. Such heroes Tchekhov ridicules and derides. Idealism of
every kind, whether open or concealed, roused feelings of intolerable
bitterness in Tchekhov. He found it more pleasant to listen to the
merciless menaces of a downright materialist than to accept the
dry-as-dust consolations of humanising idealism. An invincible power
is in the world, crushing and crippling man--this is clear and even
palpable. The least indiscretion, and the mightiest and the most
insignificant alike fall victims to it. One can only deceive oneself
about it so long as one knows of it only by hearsay. But the man who
had once been in the iron claws of necessity loses for ever his taste
for idealistic self-delusion. No more does he diminish the enemy's
power, he will rather exaggerate it. And the pure logical materialism
which Von Koren professes gives the most complete expression of our
dependence upon the elemental powers of nature. Von Koren's speech
has the stroke of a hammer, and each blow strikes not Layevsky but
Tchekhov himself on his wounds. He gives more and more strength to
Von Koren's arm, he puts himself in the way of his blows. For what
reason? Decide as you may. Perhaps Tchekhov cherished a secret hope
that self-inflicted torment might be the one road to a new life? He
has not told us so. Perhaps he did not know the reason himself, and
perhaps he was afraid to offend the positive idealism which held such
undisputed sway over contemporary literature. As yet he dared not
lift up his voice against the public opinion of Europe--for we do not
ourselves invent our philosophical conceptions; they drift down on the
wind from Europe! And, to avoid quarrelling with people, he devised
a commonplace, happy ending for his terrible story. At the end of
the story Layevsky 'reforms': he marries his mistress; gives up his
dissolute life; and begins to devote himself to transcribing documents,
in order to pay his debts. Normal people can be perfectly satisfied,
since normal people read only the last lines of the fable,--the moral;
and the moral of _The Duel_ is most wholesome: Layevsky reforms and
begins transcribing documents. Of course it may seem that such an
ending is more like a gibe at morality; but normal people are not too
penetrating psychologists. They are scared of double meanings and, with
the 'sincerity' peculiar to themselves, they take every word of the
writer for good coin. Good luck to them!