SOURCE: Rayfield, Donald. “The Consequences of Sakhalin.” In Understanding Chekhov, pp. 93–113. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999.

Disillusionment in literature and in critical reception was one factor that impelled Chekhov in 1890 to desert literature for an investigatory journey to Sakhalin. But he had other reasons for his self-imposed ordeal, for which the preparations were inexorably thorough once the initial decision had been taken. Why Sakhalin? Perhaps because it was the most arduous and longest journey he could undertake, without having to speak a foreign language or obtain a passport; certainly because it was Russia's Devil's Island, and as the most terrible of penal settlements it seemed to Chekhov an inferno into which an artist must descend, if he was to get at the roots of the evil and misery which beset him on earth.

To reach Sakhalin meant 81 days' travelling across Siberia, mainly in an unsprung covered wagon, in the cold, wet spring of 1890. The monotonous plains, the flooded rivers, the terrible roads and living conditions were only a foretaste of Sakhalin itself, notorious as climatically the most unpleasant island on earth. Its isolation across treacherous seas from the mainland and its destitute remnants of an aboriginal population made it a fitting place for the most desperate and recidivist criminals. Most prisoners, once their sentence was served, had to stay on the island as subsistence farmers, still the captives of a half-military, half-bureaucratic regime which relied on floggings, fetters and starvation to keep order. Their families, whose undeserved fate concerned Chekhov most, were forced into prostitution and beggary. To explore and record this cesspit of Russia meant tracing the corruption, injustice and violence of Russian society to its sources. Arguing with Suvorin, who felt Chekhov's expedition to be a pointless exercise in muck-raking and self-mortification, Chekhov insisted on the almost religious nature of his pilgrimage (8 March 1890):

Sakhalin can be superfluous and boring only to a society that does not exile thousands of people there and does not spend millions on it. … Sakhalin is a place of the most unendurable sufferings which man, free or deprived of freedom, is capable of. People whose work is to do with, or on Sakhalin have been and are now dealing with terrible, responsible problems. I'm sorry I'm not sentimental, or I should have said that we ought to go to pay homage to places like Sakhalin, as the Turks go to Mecca.

Chekhov's wanderlust is understandable. “A Dreary Story” hints that the writer has mined his seam of experience to the end; three years earlier, in 1887, a long summer's journey had, through new material and experience, made possible new departures in writing such as “Steppe”. There were, too, more immediate reasons for travel; by early 1890, the Russian critical monthlies were so often reproaching Chekhov for alleged indifference to suffering humanity and to political and social questions, that their attacks amounted to baiting. The editors of the ‘liberal’ Russkaia mysl' (Russian Thought) were the most virulent. (‘Liberal’ in the Russia of the 1880s and '90s meant ‘free-thinking, reformist-radical, anti-aesthetic’, as opposed to the conservative nationalism of the government, the socialism—Marxist or Tolstoyan—of the illegal movements, or the decadence of the new generation of artists: for non-liberals in Russia, ‘liberal’ was a dirty word.) A month before Chekhov left, Vukol Lavrov stung him with accusations of ‘unprincipledness’ so badly in Russian Thought that for the first and last time in his life Chekhov riposted (10 April 1890):

I read this phrase, ‘Only a day ago, even the priests of unprincipled writing, such as Iasinsky and Chekhov, whose names etc., etc.’ … In fact, I wouldn't have replied to the slander, but I am soon leaving Russia for a long time and perhaps I shall never return … there is not a single line I've written which might make me ashamed. If we allow the conjecture that by unprincipledness you mean the sad fact that I, an educated, much published man have done nothing for those I love, that my activities have left no mark on the rural councils, the new lawcourts, freedom of the press, freedom in general, etc., then in this respect Russian Thought must in all justice consider me its colleague, not indict me, since it has done no more than I have in this direction up to now—and this is not our fault.

Chekhov could not have foreseen that within three years he would have moved to the radical camp of Russian Thought and that Lavrov and Suvorin's son would come to blows over their claim to Chekhov as an acolyte. The journey to Sakhalin was to prove by action what Chekhov refused to do by writing—that he was committed to alleviating human suffering.

Other motives may be cited: the death of his brother Nikolai in 1889 had haunted him so much he was unable to stay for more than a month in the same place, and a lull in the tense relationship with his eldest brother, Aleksandr, as well as his comparative affluence, loosened for a while the ties that bound him all his life to his family. He was also regretting his neglect of science for the arts, and the entire journey was planned and carried out as an expedition for sociological medicine, not as a journalist's scoop. This was heroic science, in the nineteenth-century tradition of Darwin and Przhevalsky, whom Chekhov adulated. Eighteen months before, in October 1888, Chekhov had written Przhevalsky's obituary; in it the great explorer and zoologist emerges god-like, in contrast to the despairing intellectual:

One Przhevalsky or one Stanley is worth a dozen educational institutions and a hundred good books. Their aspirations, noble ambition, based on love of homeland and science, their stubbornness, their pursuit of the goal they have set themselves, undeterred by any deprivations, dangers and temptations of personal happiness, their wealth of knowledge and love of work, their acceptance of heat, hunger, home sickness, exhausting fevers, their fanatic faith in Christian civilisation and science make them in the eyes of the people heroes who personify a higher moral force. … In our sick times, when European societies have been overwhelmed by idleness, boredom with life and unbelief, when everywhere a dislike of life and fear of death reign in a strange mutual combination, when even the best people sit back, justifying their idleness and depravity by the absence of a definite goal in life, heroes are as necessary as the sun.

Chekhov had not yet read Przhevalsky's last book on his explorations of Tibet, which recommends making war on China and removing from its empire Mongolia and Tibet, where the local population as ‘leggards in the evolutionary process’ would be exterminated and replaced by Cossacks. After an obituary like this, Chekhov could hardly do otherwise than follow in Przhevalsky's footsteps across Siberia.

There was some romanticism in Chekhov's motives. One or two of the stories written before his departure show how strong were his yearnings for new horizons. In “Vory” (“The Thieves”), first entitled “Cherti”, (“The Devils”), the central character, Ergunov, drunken, boasting fool though he is, expresses a romantic longing for wide open spaces, for the bold, amoral freedom of the horse thieves and the poetry of irresponsibility. The adventure and novelty promised by Siberia were as attractive to Chekhov as the new material and new attitudes which his researches in Sakhalin might bring him.

Chekhov returned by sea, via Hong Kong, Sri Lanka and the Black Sea, at the end of 1890. The stories he wrote after his return, admittedly, have only the faintest imprint of that year's experiences. If we read “Gusev”, “The Peasant Women”, “The Duel” or “Ward No. 6”, we shall detect only the most tenuous links with the Chekhov who toured the hell of Sakhalin, an up-to-date Dante, with ten thousand sociological questionnaires. Sakhalin nowhere seems as relevant to subsequent work as the journey south to the Don in 1887 was to “Steppe”. But in the background the island is very much there: Gusev is returning from a life worn out in Sakhalin; the Darwinist hero of “The Duel”, von Koren, plans an expedition to the Pacific coast of Siberia; the women in “The Peasant Women” long to commit a crime that can lead only to penal servitude in Sakhalin. In fact, Sakhalin played a much stronger part than these slight allusions imply. Its effect on Russian literature was less dramatic than, but just as pervasive as, Tolstoy's ‘spiritual crisis’ fifteen years before. It changed Chekhov; his tuberculosis became much more virulent, and he returned aware that he would not see middle age. There is an intense poetry of death everywhere in the stories of 1891–2, and a feeling, even stronger than before, of nature's indifference to man. Sakhalin gave Chekhov the first of his experiences of irremediable evil. Everything which he was to record in his dissertation on the island spoke of an irredeemable fall, and this vision ousts the Tolstoyan morality that underlies the earlier work. No longer can Chekhov follow Tolstoy towards a rural Eden that will save mankind from the Sodom and Gomorrah of urban civilisation: in Sakhalin he sensed that social evils and individual unhappiness were inextricably involved; his ethics lost their sharp edge of blame and discrimination. After the journey he can no longer denounce the neurasthenic, nor can he exculpate the Przhevalskys of this world.

It took five years to produce the book The Island of Sakhalin. Although it has literary values of concision, irony and understatement, and fits within a Russian genre that starts with Dostoevsky's Notes from the House of the Dead and ends, let us hope, with Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, it lies outside the purview of literary critiques. Chekhov's modesty underestimated the sheer magnitude of his achievement, in a summer exceptionally sunny for the hellish island, of interviewing some 10,000 prisoners and remonstrating with most of the prison administration. He himself remained convinced, as he told Suvorin, that he had seen everything but ‘missed the elephant’. The overall effect was a terrible depression, unrelieved by visits to exotic brothels or the acquisition of exotic pets. The most remarkable element about Chekhov's work on the island is that he established a relationship with the population of Sakhalin rather similar to that he was to establish with posterity. Brutalised psychopathic murderers and callous sadistic guards all responded with a frankness and humanity that astounded their colleagues when they read Chekhov's account. The work as a whole, like Chekhov's best mature work, tends to emphasise the potential for goodness in every individual and the potential for evil in every hierarchy—by implication Chekhov became a guarded anarchist in politics after Sakhalin.

The scientific preoccupations behind his journey naturally affected the structure of his work. Four years passed before a sociological framework is applied to his stories, but almost immediately he complicates the pattern of his narrative. Instead of one hero whose line of thought arouses our sympathy and criticism, the stories now have at least two conflicting outlooks which fight each other to a stalemate. While one argument may be more attractive than another, it is a mistake to assume that it represents Chekhov's viewpoint: the impasse is just as hopeless, whether it has two entrances or only one. In the stories of 1891–2 almost every philosophy that Chekhov had ever toyed with or fought against is embodied in one or more characters; after the lifeless landscapes of Sakhalin, optimism and faith in common sense are weakened. The letters, like the stories, are full of lunar imagery: the world to Chekhov is as dead and absurd as the moon, and for long periods he loses his sense of life on earth. In the struggles of “The Duel” and “Ward No. 6” we now have a match with a hopeless end-game. Human salvation lies elsewhere than in the correct set of values for which the stories before Sakhalin search. After Sakhalin, relief comes only in flashes of absurd beauty, which hint at the mystical insight which Chekhov always declared he lacked, and in a listless hope that science and technology will open up some unsuspected prospect.

Most important, Sakhalin cured Chekhov of lingering feelings of inferiority. He stopped apologising for his lack of leadership; he accepted himself as a Russian writer whose initiation into greatness had been as tough as Pushkin's exile, Dostoevsky's sentence of death, or Tolstoy's war service. That he has accepted himself as a classic writer can be seen in the traditional modes in which his post-Sakhalin stories are written. “The Duel” has a plot as symmetrical as any of Turgenev's, while “Ward No. 6” has a cast-iron mould of tragic necessity and a well-matched clash of philosophies which are classic in every sense of the word.

Chekhov had thus brought back across the world from Sakhalin more than a sense of social responsibility and a pet mongoose as trophies; he had instated himself as a major writer with responsibilities to a tradition. He had come of age (he was now over thirty), and his first action was to shake off the hypnotic effect that Tolstoy's writings and personal aura had for six years exerted on him. The change is seen in his reaction to Tolstoy's brilliantly stupid ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’, which was circulated in early 1890 and in which bourgeois marriage, music and sexuality all conspire to destroy the hero's potential for good. (In ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’ the narrator tells how he was lured into marrying by the unconscious sexual marketing of his bride, how the experiences of the bedroom gradually poison his life, distract him from his true goals, and, when his wife commits adultery with a violinist, turn him into a murderer.) ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’ was a sensation all over Europe, partly because it was clearly aimed by Tolstoy against his own wife, partly because its diatribe against woman as an agent of evil was a fashionable piece of Schopenhauerian philosophy, and partly because it is a powerful work in its brooding, vindictive atmosphere. A month after he had read ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’, Chekhov's doubts about it were overcome by Tolstoy's forcefulness; he wrote to Plescheev in February 1890:

Apart from its artistic merits, which are astounding in places, thanks to the story just for arousing one's thoughts to the utmost. Reading it, you can hardly stop yourself shouting, ‘That's true!’ or ‘That's absurd!’ True, it does have very annoying faults … the bold way Tolstoy deals with what he doesn't know or what he refuses out of obstinacy to understand. Thus, his arguments on syphilis, orphanages, the revulsion women have towards copulation etc. are not merely arguable, but simply reveal an ignoramus. … But these faults disperse like feathers blown by the wind; because of the story's qualities, you just don't notice them.

In December, however, when he had returned from Sakhalin, Chekhov could write to Suvorin:

How wrong you were when you advised me not to go to Sakhalin!. … What a sour-face I should be now if I had stayed at home. Before the journey ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’ was an event for me, while now I find it ridiculous and think it senseless. Perhaps I've matured with the journey, perhaps I've gone mad—the devil knows.

All his life Chekhov revered Tolstoy as a man, but he now saw the bullying ignorance behind his preaching and, in the post-Sakhalin stories, Chekhov gradually argues Tolstoyan morality out of his system. We can see the process at work in the negative features of characters such as Laevsky in “The Duel” and Doctor Ragin in “Ward No. 6”. These stories demonstrate the catalytic effect of Sakhalin, but “Gusev”, the only story written in 1890, already shows the sea-change that Chekhov has undergone. The chief character is a simple peasant soldier, sent home from the Far East, after five years there as a batman, because he is dying of tuberculosis. Submissive to the injustices of his life and the approach of death, Gusev is a natural primitive, and the story contrasts his apathy and nostalgia with the impotent rage of Pavel Ivanych, likewise dying, who has contrived to get himself a passage with the soldiers. Pavel Ivanych berates Gusev for his ignorance, brutality and quietism: almost Dostoevskian in his self-conscious unpleasantness, he is ‘protest incarnate’. As death comes, it is Gusev who accepts it, while Pavel Ivanych fails to come to terms with it. Thus the story is a rather Tolstoyan contrast of the healthy peasant and unhealthy bourgeois views of death. Like Chekhov's other post-Sakhalin works, it opposes rebellious scepticism with passive surrender to fate, but unlike the later stories it is above all a static poetic vision. The arguments between Pavel Ivanych and Gusev do not matter much: Gusev cannot understand a word Pavel Ivanych says and is hardly allowed to reply. What matters is Gusev's burial at sea, when the body falls through the waves, is ripped from its sailcloth by a shark and sinks into the ocean. Here, as so often in Chekhov's mature work, the sea is the beginning and the end of life; ocean and sky communicate, and create forms which go beyond any human powers of expression. Chekhov conveys a thoroughly romantic vision of nature having its own spirit, language and poetry, in which human beings are an ephemeral anomaly:

But meanwhile, up above, where the sun sets, the clouds are packing; one cloud is like a triumphal arc, another like a lion, another like scissors. … A green ray of light emerges from the clouds and stretches right into the middle of the sky … the ocean at first frowns, but soon also takes on gentle, joyful, passionate colours, for which human language may well have no name.

Nature has all the beauty, emotion and communication that have disappeared from human life. What is clearly the point of “Gusev” is to become part of the lapidary structure of “The Duel” and “Ward No. 6”: the poetic imagery will recur in the seascapes and the death vision of the later works. That green light—in the sky or in a person's eyes or clothes becomes symbolic of death in Chekhov's mature work.

In 1890 Chekhov had spent 4,000 roubles and produced only one story. In spring '91, restless as before, he made another journey, his first to Western Europe, with the Suvorins. To pay for his travels, he worked feverishly for the rest of 1891. Up to September, “The Duel” took up most of his time; simultaneously, he was tackling his dissertation on Sakhalin. A summer with a pet mongoose at a decaying estate Bogimovo, 150 miles south-west of Moscow, was phenomenally productive: this pastoral setting produced a rhythm of eighteen hours a day writing, and impressions of local characters and of his friends that would fuel work for years to come. New efforts at more conventional modes of writing did not come easily, but in the same summer and autumn he threw off a number of stories from his previous mould, some like “Moia zhena” (“My Wife”) on the lines of “A Dreary Story”, others continuing on familiar Tolstoyan lines.

In “The Duel”, Chekhov was shaking off the influence of Tolstoy but he was still to write two of his most Tolstoyan works. One is “Baby” (“The Peasant Women”). The women, two peasant sisters-in-law, one ugly with an absent husband, the other pretty with an idiot husband, bored and oppressed in their father-in-law's house, make the ‘frame’ story, while its core lies in the narrative of a visitor, Matvei. Matvei tells his story, quite unaware of its effect or its morality: he seduced a soldier's wife, and drove her to poison her husband. Matvei is a Russian Tartuffe in his hypocrisy, lechery and moralising; he also comes across as a parody of Tolstoy's Pozdnyshev, the narrator of ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’. To this extent the story is anti-Tolstoyan. But the ‘frame’ story dominates: the peasant women, after they have heard Matvei, feel an urge to kill the men who make their lives such a misery. The evil of the narrator infects the listeners in a truly Tolstoyan fashion. “The Peasant Women” plunges us into the language and hierarchies of a peasant household, with a Tolstoyan feeling for the layers of passion, inhibitions and ritual in its outlook. Most Tolstoyan of all, however, is the sensation of immense evil threatening to break through into action.

“Poprygun'ia” (“The Grasshopper”, also known as “The Butterfly”) can also be classified as Tolstoyan. Like “The Peasant Women”, it pleased Tolstoy greatly and he eventually put it on his list of Chekhov's ‘best’ works. It is a story of virtuoso narrative technique, even by Chekhov's standards, but it is marred by Tolstoyan defects in its overall scheme. As in “The Princess”, black is jet-black and white is snow-white. The ‘grasshopper’ herself is a satirical portrayal of a woman, Olga Ivanovna, who lives on reflected glory and jumps from one celebrity to another in search of it; the satire is subtly coloured by the ingenuous way in which the narrator echoes the clichés and exclamations that Olga herself utters. But in contrast to the satire, a morality story is in progress. Olga frivolously marries a saintly doctor and by her trivial exploitation, her adultery with an artist and her lies drives him to despondency, so that, overworked and careless, he infects himself with diphtheria. Chekhov wrote “The Grasshopper” very quickly; the doctor, the grasshopper herself and the artist were modelled on real people. The scheme of the story is as ill-digested as the raw material; only in an obituary, not in a short story, can the hero be so idealised and the villains so blackened. The result is a denunciation of woman's irrelevance and destructiveness as crude as ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’; nevertheless, the pretentiousness of the artist and the post-coital disgust of the lovers are cleverly evoked by such touches as the image of a peasant woman's filthy finger in the soup she serves to the lovers. Olga Ivanovna's comments on art are turned into clichés simply by putting the words ‘she said’, ‘she replied’ in the imperfect tense, so that her statements become routine to the point of absurdity.

If the hero of “The Grasshopper”, Doctor Dymov, is the last plaster saint to appear in Chekhov's work, the story itself is the last of Chekhov's Tolstoyan moralities. It is, unfortunately, not the last work in which close friends were caricatured, even attacked: in this respect “The Grasshopper” is a practice run for The Seagull. Levitan was unmistakable as the irritable, womanising artist: he did not speak to Chekhov for three years, and would have challenged him to a duel, had he not, as a Jew, been expelled from Moscow in 1891. Olga was seen as a libel by both Sofia Kuvshinnikova, Levitan's long-standing mistress-in-chief, and by Lika Mizinova, who in the summer of Bogimovo was trying to provoke Chekhov's interest by a flirtation with Levitan. The tolerant, complacent Dr Dymov was identified with Dr Kuvshinnikov, who was widely admired for his understanding of his wife's relationship with Levitan. Even though Sofia Kuvshinnikova was swarthy, in her forties, and an artist of some standing, she was infuriated by what she saw as Chekhov's calumny. Even minor characters, such as the dramatic artist, were recognised by their originals. (The actor-manager Lensky was probably punished for his advice to Chekhov not to write for the stage.) Chekhov seemed determined to use fiction as a means of settling scores and clarifying reality. Lika Mizinova expressed her amazement that a man as sensitive as Chekhov could be so blind to others' sufferings, but he refused to relent.

Chekhov perhaps had reservations about the story: he hovered between four possible titles for it and called it ‘a little sentimental novel for family reading’ when he offered it, in a cold-blooded marketing ploy, to Tikhonov, the editor of Sever (The North). It met, to be fair, with an enthusiastic reception (except among those who were lampooned in it), especially because it showed ‘the simplicity and patience of a noble, truly great man’. Ivan Bunin, a discriminating critic, thought it a good story with a terrible title. The doctor dying of diphtheria in an attempt to save a child was based on the recent death of a Dr Ilarion Dubrovo, and led, almost simultaneously, to a similar fictional portrait of heroic self-sacrifice in Leskov's ‘Polunoshchniki’ (‘The Night Owls’). In Russian prose (with the notable exception of Tolstoy) the doctor was still idolised.

“The Grasshopper” reflects too well Chekhov's intermittent misogyny and his distrust of æsthetes. Chekhov's thinking seems even more convoluted when his views on sexuality break away from Tolstoy's in “The Duel”, which was nearly finished when “The Grasshopper” was written. His own experience of women may have been particularly troublesome in the summer of 1891; into his letters to the vivacious Lika Mizinova (a schoolteacher colleague of his sister, whose affections he toyed with for almost a decade, and whose turmoils he exploited in several stories and in The Seagull), creeps a tone of emotional involvement. The bantering, ribaldry, mock courtship and reproaches do not quite conceal sentiment, desire, if not passion. Probably Chekhov's strongest feeling was fear—fear that sexual attraction would trap him into losing his freedom to a woman who could irritate as well as stimulate. His irreplaceable sister, Masha, was the only person who could have given an account of Chekhov's love for Lika Mizinova and, discreet to the last, she chose not to do so. All we can be sure of is Chekhov's cat-and-mouse treatment of Lika; even six years later, when his non-committal had brought her near to disaster, he could still be cruel. ‘I always valued Reinheit (purity) and kindness in women, and you have always been kind’, he wrote. The ambivalence in his treatment of his women friends is reflected in his heroines. The sexual delinquency of the “grasshopper” is condemned, while the delinquency of Nadezhda, the heroine of “The Duel”; is condoned.

“Duel” (“The Duel”) is one of Chekhov's longest works, over 30,000 words, so long that it crowded other contributors off the literary pages of Suvorin's New Times, for which it was Chekhov's last major contribution before, in keeping with his reactions to Sakhalin, he moved leftwards to Russian Thought. One of his most carefully constructed stories, it cost Chekhov considerable effort. Its plot is taut and symmetrical. Into a dull seaside Caucasian town two newcomers introduce conflict and tension. The first is Laevsky, a self-diagnosed Petersburg Hamlet in the tradition of the ‘superfluous man’; he has run away with another man's wife, Nadezhda. His intentions were to take refuge from the corruption of the city and work like a Tolstoyan convert on the land; instead, his weak nature has led him to take his place as an idle civil servant in the easy-going life of the local Russians. The second newcomer is von Koren, a zoologist and a Darwinist, who is immune to Laevsky's charm and violently hates him and Nadezhda as ‘macaques’, who should be exterminated in the name of progress (views which suggest that Chekhov had now read all of Przhevalsky's views on human evolution). The story turns into a plot at the moment when Laevsky, bored with Nadezhda, learns that her husband has died (of that nineteenth-century complaint ‘softening of the brain’) and that he now has to marry her or run away back to Petersburg. Inevitably, he sees his salvation in flight, and much of the story concerns his efforts to raise the money for his fare. The mediator between von Koren and Laevsky is the kindly military doctor, Samoilenko, who lends Laevsky money and takes in von Koren as a paying guest. Samoilenko's saintliness emerges in his argument that if he ceased to love a woman he would spend the rest of his life concealing the fact. Von Koren grows more and more convinced that Laevsky should be exterminated, as he sees him pressing Samoilenko for loans, and finally he takes advantage of Laevsky's hysteria and provokes him to a duel, which takes place at dawn. Nature casts an eerie spell over the event, and von Koren just misses killing Laevsky when his friend the deacon interrupts with a shout of horror. The deacon, like Doctor Samoilenko, is a mediator, a peacemaker who is more profound, yet more stupid, than the antagonists with whom he argues. Samoilenko is a naïve, blustering clown compared with the articulate Laevsky; the deacon is an unworldly, childlike ecclesiastic compared with the ruthlessly logical von Koren, but our final impression is that they are the true normal human beings.

The consequences of the duel seem a little trite: Laevsky is so shattered by the nearness of death that he reforms. He and Nadezhda work to pay off their debts and marry to expiate their fornication. Von Koren takes back his insults and departs with an apology. Laevsky's repentance is brought about not only by the duel, but also through the sub-plot involving Nadezhda. Neglected by Laevsky, she sinks into malaise and debts; she goes to bed with the local police chief and then prostitutes herself to the son of the shopkeeper to whom she owes money. Laevsky catches her in bed with the police chief on the eve of the duel; he immediately sees himself as the cause and, instead of experiencing Tolstoyan revulsion, falls properly in love.

The plot is thus more eventful and sequential than most of Chekhov's. The main effort is expended on creating a full, objective characterisation of the duellists. The aggressive von Koren had to be detached from his real-life original, Vagner, a Moscow zoologist. Chekhov insisted on a German name, not only because most prominent zoologists in Russia were German, but also because von Koren's energy and dedication had to be un-Russian. Likewise, in Chekhov's original plan, Laevsky was called Ladzievsky, an equally un-Russian name. Only under pressure from his editor did he cancel this Polish name, which would have brought out better the contrast between the Russian minor characters and the non-Russian ‘bearers of an idea’. Laevsky, as it is, is a difficult piece of characterisation, so close is he not only to Chekhov's brother Aleksandr (who also spent time as a civil servant on the Black Sea coast, wondering how to escape commitment to his common-law wife), but also to the stereotype of the ‘superfluous man’. Chekhov makes him convincing by bringing out his literariness; Laevsky talks in quotations, cites Tolstoy, calls himself a Hamlet, and acts like one of Lermontov's or Turgenev's heroes. Since the duel plays such a crucial part in Russian prose, from Pushkin to Tolstoy, it is hardly surprising that Chekhov's story of that name, and his duellists' remarks should so frequently echo, consciously or not, so many of his predecessors' plots and their hero's utterances. For this reason, “The Duel” impresses us as the most classically Russian of Chekhov's stories in the devices that sustain the story-line.

Chekhov makes fundamental innovations, however. The characterisation benefits from a technique that is to be the backbone of Chekhov's drama; the hero's philosophy is expounded both by Laevsky and von Koren with the energy of hatred, and thus exaggerated slightly but irrevocably into comedy—and now a comedy more subtle than that of his humorous stories. This is the cruel comedy of the mature plays. “The Duel” is in fact even more dramatic than Chekhov's plays: the story is staged in five major confrontations and the conflict emerges almost entirely in dialogue. But there is a stage brilliance in von Koren's advocacy of the laws of natural selection when he justifies the liquidation of Laevsky, which reminds us of Uncle Vania's tirade against Professor Serebriakov. As in Chekhov's later plays, serious argument is interrupted by the elaborate preparation and eating of the food which the host (here, Dr Samoilenko) is serving and the dramatic laughter and protests of the others present. Laevsky's jaded arguments against woman and civilisation, that echo so patently his reading of Tolstoy, likewise make a dramatic impact, tragi-comic and self-satirising, that echoes Uncle Vania's monologues. The antagonists belong essentially to Chekhov's dramas; if Laevsky anticipates Uncle Vania, von Koren's brutal wit recalls Doctor Astrov. (In this sense Chekhov was already beginning the revision of The Wood Demon into Uncle Vania.)

The narrative has the poetic intensity we associate with Chekhov: the roaring of the sea, the awe-inspiring mountains, the lighting, all combine to give an uncanny strangeness to what would otherwise be a familiar romantic plot. Typical, too, are the intrusions of everyday trivia into an abstract discussion: the sand in Samoilenko's boots and the smell of Nadezhda's bedroom break up the continuity of action. Nevertheless “The Duel” is virtually drama transposed into story-telling; for the first time, Chekhov's action arises out of dialogue. Even the descriptive passages are condensed into no more than an occasional dozen words, and it requires little to convert them into stage effects—backdrops, offstage noises, lighting. The climax of the story, when von Koren rides to fight with Laevsky, is lit by the same image as symbolises death in “Gusev”: two rays of green light. Here the image is in pure stage terms. The very structure of intrigue, climax and denouement belongs to Chekhov's dramas. The pistol shot that fails to kill does, admittedly, seem to destroy the falseness in Laevsky, and thus makes for an apparently trite dénouement, but the effect is more subtle than the triumph of German action over Russian idleness would suggest. The rehabilitated Laevsky and Nadezhda are not quite alive any more. When von Koren takes his leave of them, he seems to sense that he has destroyed something in Laevsky, who is now a worn-out automaton: ‘He's pathetic, shy, crushed, he bows like a Chinese dummy, and it makes me sad’.

Naturally, Chekhov does not try to make us think that the duel leads to any clear-cut triumph. The impact of the story comes from the minor characters, the deacon and Doctor Samoilenko, and from the sexual ordeal of Nadezhda. The story begins with the sea drowning Laevsky's complaints, and ends with it repulsing the oars of von Koren's boat as he leaves for good. Only Samoilenko, the deacon and the minor characters hidden in the mountains around the town, the Tatar innkeeper and the ghost-like tribesmen, live at peace with nature. Laevsky declares that he hates nature, von Koren fights it with his system, his science and his Darwinism. But nature triumphs over them: in the episode of the evening picnic that for the first time brings all the characters together, it reduces the conversation of the picnickers to exclamations and mute bewilderment; it isolates them.

Across the river from the party, Caucasian tribesmen (presumably Abkhaz) gather and sit in a circle, listening to a story. They are barely discernible in the dusk, and their language is unintelligible, but in the harsh scenery of rocks and stunted trees they are at home, while the European, posing, arguing picnickers seem creatures from another planet. One can relate this to Chekhov's experience of Sakhalin where 20,000 dehumanised prisoners and guards contrast with the remants of the native Giliaks and Ainus who still try to live in harmony with the country so brutally colonised. The picnic is one of Chekhov's post-Sakhalin ‘lunar’ episodes, and it sheds a quasi-religious light on human alienation. The deacon stares at the scene, plunged into a daydream which ends in a vision of himself as a bishop proclaiming, ‘Oh God, see and visit this vineyard which thy right hand hath planted’, (This akafist blessing is taken directly from a letter by Chekhov's father, congratulating Aleksandr on the birth of his first legitimate son by Natalia Golden.) An idle reverie cut short by Samoilenko's shout of ‘Where's the fish?’, it is nevertheless the poetic high-water mark of the story. It is one of Chekhov's most intense pleas for the revelation of meaning, for an explanation of nature's relationship to man. Truth does not lie in a compromise between Laevsky's excuses for inertia and von Koren's campaign to exterminate the weak. It is found in the silence in between the arguments, as one listens to the forces of nature outside man.

The sub-plot of Nadezhda's experiences has a gruesome comic streak; giving in to Kirilin, the police chief, she infuriates the shop keeper's son Achmianov, who takes Laevsky along to catch her in bed with Kirilin. In these half-farcical, half-pathetic episodes Chekhov's critics rightly saw a retort to Tolstoy. Certainly, Nadezhda is at the mercy of her sexual instincts and gives Laevsky a case when he blames her for the squalor of their life. Taking his cue always from literature, he echoes Tolstoy's words, ‘The emancipation of women is not in courses or hospital wards but in the bedroom’, shocking Samoilenko with his ‘women need the bedroom most of all’. The sub-plot is full of sordid detail: Nadezhda's vaguely gynaecological illness, her tawdry clothes, her untidiness, all make sexuality seem demeaning. But Laevsky's reaction when he discovers her infidelities radically distinguishes Chekhov's hero from Tolstoy's. He feels no more resentment or revulsion, only tenderness. This is perhaps the only place in Chekhov where Christian love moves in when sexual love is dead; it is shown as convincingly as possible. Laevsky is, after all, in extremis; it is the eve of the duel and he has to see himself for what he is. ‘In the whole of my life I haven't planted a single tree’ is a terrible indictment for a character created by a man who planted thousands of trees.

Of all Chekhov's characters, von Koren is the strongest. He would dominate “The Duel”, were it not that the very lucidity and finality of his views implant the seeds of doubt in us. The peacemakers cannot match him in argument; only Laevsky, feeling the force of his hatred and having to justify himself, can undermine him in an exposé so witty that it undoes a good deal of Chekhov's characterisation and, using the phrases of Chekhov's obituary of Przhevalsky, makes von Koren seem a monstrous parody of the explorer:

He's a hard, strong, despotic character. … He wants the wilderness, a moonlit night; around him in tents and under the open sky sleep his sick, hungry Cossacks, worn out by terrible marches … only he is awake, sitting like Stanley on a folding chair and feeling like the king of the desert and the boss of these people. He goes on and on somewhere, his men groan and die one after the other, while he goes on and on, perishes in the end and still remains a despot and the king of the desert, since the cross over his grave shows up for thirty or forty miles to the caravans and reigns over the desert [as Przhevalsky's grave by Issyk-Kul dominates the Kirghizian scenery D.R.].

Von Koren's scientific defence of natural selection leads to paradoxes: the abnormal must be wiped out for love of humanity. This application of zoology and Darwinism to ethics and politics was very characteristic of Chekhov's day, and his letters and feuilletons (especially his denunciation of Moscow Zoo, “Fokusniki” [“The Tricksters”], 1891) brought him onto the fringe of the controversy that was raging among Russian thinkers abroad and at home. Darwinism in England meant only an end to literal belief in the Book of Genesis and to respect for the anthropoid apes. In Europe, however, the extreme left and, in some cases, the extreme right saw Darwinism as a justification of war and suffering in human society. Works such as Robert Byr's Der Kampf ums Dasein (1875) spread neo-Darwinism in Russia, with such von-Korenisms as ‘Fight for existence consciously or unconsciously, by force or cunning … follow the eternal urge dominating us from birth to death—but don't lie about loving one another’. In Sakhalin Chekhov had seen all he wanted of the struggle to exist. That explains why he worshipped Przhevalsky in his obituary of 1888 and why he is disabused of heroics and neo-Darwinism in '91. Seeing von Koren's boat disappear in the darkness, Laevsky thinks of humanity taking a step backward for every two steps forward; while truth remains unfathomable, we can be sure that von Koren's ideology is a step backwards. For that certitude we can thank Sakhalin.

Writing “The Duel” in conjunction with the book on Sakhalin, which dragged on for three more years, exhausted Chekhov. The autumn and winter were all the more gloomy for the onset of the great Russian famine, which Chekhov tried, with Suvorin's reluctant help, to relieve; for the death of several people close to him; and for the end of the brief respite in his illness. Worried by the search for a country estate, plagued again by influenza, headaches, haemorrhoids, a tubercular cough and depression, Chekhov had no need of outside horrors to create the despondency of “Palata No. 6” (“Ward No. 6”). Nevertheless, the story is a culmination of his Sakhalin experiences; its austerity recalls the Sakhalin landscapes, and its view of the world as a prison generalises the penal state of Sakhalin. Undoubtedly, two bleak journeys to the wilds of Nizhnii Novgorod and then, with an increasingly sour Suvorin, to Voronezh province (to help organise famine relief), affected many episodes—notably Dr Ragin's journey with his tedious friend the postmaster, and explain the story's wintry greyness, whereas the colouring of “The Duel” reflects the exotic landscapes of the Caucasus that Chekhov had first seen on a journey with Suvorin's son in 1888.

“Ward No. 6”, however, is not directly autobiographical. Like “The Duel”, it is long; it took eight months to write, and, like “The Duel”, it is unusually conventional in its structure. Chekhov saw from the start that it was not typical of his work up to this time: ‘There's a lot of argumentation in the tale and no love element. There's a plot, an intrigue and a dénouement. Liberal in trend’, he wrote to Suvorin in March 1892. Its difference is emphasised by the fact that Chekhov took great pains (after the quarrel of 1890 had been patched up by the actor Pavel Svobodin) to have it published by Vukol Lavrov, who had so bitterly attacked him two years before, in Russian Thought. ‘Liberal in trend’ should, however, be taken with a grain of salt, despite Chekhov's remark and the choice of a ‘liberal’ magazine. Chekhov was not assenting to Lavrov's criticisms of his ‘unprincipledness’ so much as showing explicitly in “Ward No. 6” why he could not preach liberal ideas, even though he agreed with a radical diagnosis of Russia's ills.

“Ward No. 6” opens with a narrator's description of the ramshackle provincial hospital and résumé of the lives of the five mental patients locked up in Ward No. 6; in its free commentary this follows the style of Chekhov's early period, particularly his feuilletons, and gives the work, at first, a documentary flavour. Then the narrator effaces himself, and the narrative style merges with the inner monologue of the protagonist. We are told how Ivan Gromov, the only youthful, articulate and educated patient, came to suffer from persecution mania and to end up as prisoner of the brutal male nurse, Nikita. Then comes a portrait of the hospital doctor, Andrei Ragin, who condones the cruelty and neglect in his hospital. Gromov reacts to the world outside and inside the ward with indignant idealism; Ragin justifies his inactivity by a curious quietism, perverting the stoic ideal into an argument that suffering and death are inevitable and that it is pointless to alleviate one or delay the other; happiness lies only in introspection, and the world is unalterable. If Gromov is an existentialist, Ragin is an ‘essentialist’, believing that if a mental ward exists, then patients must fill it.

The story proper begins with an ominous accident. Ragin visits the ward and become interested in Gromov as an intellectual sparring partner. This is the fatal catastrophe to which his hubris and his easy-going nature have laid him open. Interest becomes a liking; his visits start an intrigue by his jealous assistant, and the rumour runs through the provincial town that Ragin, too, is mad. Driven by his superiors' suspicions to hysterical anger, he is trapped into becoming a patient in his own ward, where he dies soon afterwards of a stroke. Like “The Duel”, “Ward No. 6” has an unintentional dramatic structure, but it is more unequivocally tragic than any of Chekhov's dramas. The classical pattern of hamartia, hubris, catastrophe, catharsis and nemesis underlies Ragin's fondness for intellectual speculation, his visits to Gromov, his sudden fall and his painfully unstoic death. There is little comedy in the story. There is vaudeville verve only in the secondary character the postmaster, Ragin's supposed best friend, Mikhail Averianych. The postmaster drives him mad with his catch-phrases and poses. When they travel abroad for a break from the hell of the provincial town, their journey ends abortively in Warsaw, before they can reach Western Europe. The comedy turns back to tragedy as we realise that this escapade is only a trap to silence Ragin and incarcerate him in his own hospital. Any other comedy is Gogolian in its grotesquerie. The Gogolian atmosphere is reinforced by the virtually all-male set of characters and the locale of the story—a nameless, quintessentially provincial town, so typical of the Gogol of Dead Souls or The Government Inspector.

“Ward No. 6” is an austere work. The hospital is a prison. It has no landscapes or views. Only a grey fence, nettles and burdock and the town prison in the near distance make the story a composition en abîme, and thus a work unique in its allegorical and symbolical effect. The town itself, left undescribed, outside place and time, is as closed as the hospital; it is a symbol of the world. There are no sunsets, no cloud formations, no trees. Even the imagery of death, so important in Chekhov's post-Sakhalin work, is condensed into the last few sentences of the story. The ‘green light’ of “Gusev” and “The Duel” is alluded to in the colour of Ragin's eyes as he dies. Only one strange fragment of poetry lights up the gloomy fatal dialectic of Gromov and Ragin, as the latter's consciousness fades:

His eyes went green. Andrei realised that this was the end and he recalled that Ivan Gromov, Mikhail Averianych and millions of people believed in immortality. Supposing it existed? But he didn't want immortality and he thought of it only for a moment. A herd of deer, unusually beautiful and graceful, which he had read about the night before, ran past him.

The absurd image of the deer is the sole stroke of beauty; it implies a lost nature, harmony and peace which are not to be found either in the humanitarian and Christian ideals expressed by Gromov or in the defeatism of Ragin. It leads on to the final image of the story, when the moon lights up the doctor's corpse on the mortuary table. Again, a picture of lunar sterility, so important in the post-Sakhalin works of Chekhov, provides the key to the real idea of “Ward No. 6”.

Suvorin disliked the story and questioned Chekhov's sanity. More radical critics generally took the view that Chekhov was anti-Ragin and pro-Gromov, anti-defeatist and pro-humanist. While he obviously sympathises with the vital, anguished Gromov and exposes the bankruptcy of Ragin's pact with evil, this is too simple an interpretation. There is too much irony in the portrayal of Gromov; like Ragin, he is an innocent, a bookworm and a provincial. It is necessary to look more closely at the story's construction and to take into account the circumstances in which it was written. Sparse in its prose texture, “Ward No. 6” is one of the few pieces that Chekhov barely altered when he revised it for his Collected Works. Not only are two philosophies matched, tested and left for our verdict, the story is also plotted with a deadly irony. This is the first time that Chekhov gives us a microcosmic setting—a universe made out of a handful of characters against a sketchy background. Many contemporaries understood it as an allegory.

Nikolai Leskov had himself a decade before written a story, ‘The Unmercenary Engineers’, based on fact, about a young officer who, out of principle, refuses to accept bribes and is persuaded to accept psychiatric treatment, which leads to real madness and suicide. Leskov recognised “Ward No. 6” as a successor story and exclaimed ‘Ward No. 6 is Russia’, a hospital where the sane are locked up for their madness and the cynical serve the state by acquiescing. Three years later, just before he died, Leskov paid tribute to Chekhov by continuing the theme in Hare Park, a novel where the persecutor of revolutionaries goes mad and is sent to a psychiatric hospital where he finds happiness (and a painless death by heart attack), nursed by one of the revolutionaries he had harrowed.

In Chekhov's day, the symbol of the world-as-a-hospital was already common in poetry—Baudelaire was beginning to find a decadent following in Russia—but in prose Chekhov is anticipating the nightmares to come of Sologub and Leonid Andreev.

Once the narrator has shown us round the ward, with the Chekhovian images of spiked fencing, nettles and rotten wood that pervade the description, we are given our cue for response. The narrator takes a stance to be found in the earliest Chekhov, saying openly how he approves of Ivan Gromov: ‘I like him, he's polite, anxious to help and usually considerate in his dealings with everybody’. Gromov's past experience of life is set out in such a way that a persecution complex seems the most logical reaction to the sight that germinates it: convicts being taken through the streets. His mad ravings are summed up in a passage that suggests they are no madder than any noble outpouring of idealism: ‘He talks of humanity's baseness, of violence crushing truth, of the beautiful life that will one day come to pass on earth.’ But to like Gromov is not to follow him blindly. In that last phrase, ‘the beautiful life that will one day …’, is to be heard an ironic reverberation of cloud-cuckoo-land; the beautiful future is the religion of the foolish and naïve in all Chekhov's work, and it is the one true symptom of insanity shown by Gromov.

The characterisation of Doctor Ragin is striking for the number of parallels between him and his patient, the fearful symmetry of guard and prisoner. Like Gromov, he reads as compulsively as he breathes; his knowledge of the world is bounded by an unhappy infancy. Like Gromov, he sees the world only through the prism of his ideas. Gromov ‘used only crude colours in his judgements of people, only white and black … there was nothing in the middle’. This was a criticism Chekhov often made—of Dostoevsky in particular and Russian thinkers in general. The doctor, too, fits everything he sees into an inverted Panglossism, as though everything were for the worst in the worst of all possible worlds. If Gromov is not wholly right, Doctor Ragin is not wholly wrong. Like Chekhov, at this time working for famine relief, and like so many Chekhovian doctors, he realises that his efforts can leave no mark on human misery; he is unlike Chekhov and Chekhovian doctors principally in his logic: if efforts are useless, they should not be made. Much of his philosophy parodies Chekhov's own thoughts; the idea that prisons exist and must therefore be filled, that life on earth is an unfortunate and temporary absurdity in a cosmos that will soon revert to its primeval inanimate state, the feeling that the inevitability of suffering and death makes all attempts at embellishing life futile—all this can be found in Chekhov's life and letters. Where Chekhov differs is that he persisted in treating the sick and planting trees.

No reader of “Ward No. 6” in 1892 could fail to see Doctor Ragin as a caricature of Tolstoy's ‘non-resistance to evil by violence’. But it is doubtful whether Chekhov was hitting at Tolstoy's Christian ethics so much as at the Schopenhauerian conviction that the material world is evil, which underlies much of Tolstoy's thought. In Tolstoy's study at Iasnaia Poliana, ever since the writing of Anna Karenina, there has hung a portrait of Schopenhauer. Unlikely bedfellows though they are, Tolstoy and Schopenhauer had much in common: their suspicions of woman as a traitor to the ‘idea’, a horror at the enormity of death, disgust at Western civilisation, a feeling for a life of the spirit, of Nirvana rather than Utopia, all made Schopenhauer extremely attractive to Tolstoy. Ragin is Schopenhauer in provincial Russia, with none of the heart-searching of Tolstoy—a conceited and glib reciter of Aphorismen zur Lebensweisheit. Ragin, with his beer served by a decrepit female servant, has many sordid traits borrowed from Chekhov's friend, the Moscow bohemian poet Liodor Palmin. Only in his bigotry and his refusal to fight social evils can Ragin be seen as an attack on Tolstoy.

Ragin quotes classical authors, above all Marcus Aurelius, the stoic. In Chekhov's library, dating from 1887, is a much-thumbed and annotated Russian translation of Marcus Aurelius. Ragin is not a disciple, but a perverter, of the stoic; Chekhov knew very well that Marcus Aurelius felt existence to be finite and senseless and, like Ragin, sought only the pleasures of the intellect, but unlike Ragin he did not advocate total indifference to evil. At the same time Chekhov knew it was too easy to be stoical about pain and suffering if you are Emperor of Rome, with the world's greatest doctor, Galen, to attend to every discomfort. Like Solzhenitsyn's In the First Circle, “Ward No. 6” deconstructs the philosophy of Marcus Aurelius.

Gromov, naturally, expresses himself less coherently than does Ragin; his views are based on his nervous instincts, and in his need to act, to follow his senses, no matter how irrational, he steps out of the pages of fiction and speaks for Chekhov, who at this very time was moving into a country estate and planning for the future. Like Gromov, Chekhov felt that the ultimate stoic (and Schopenhauerian) could only be the fellow-patient in Gromov's ward, the fat peasant, a filthy, mindless vegetable, not even reacting to the stimulus of a beating. Right or wrong, Gromov is undoubtedly more noble and promising as a model. The fact that he lives and Ragin dies hardly gives him victory; his subsequent life is endless hell, while Ragin, even in his nemesis, is vouchsafed a moment of beauty and eternal relief. His stoicism is put to the test and fails, but it is scarcely purged, so quickly does his apoplexy kill him. His death is a subtle authorial intervention, for Chekhov, with his usual medical expertise, has unobtrusively given his character a set of little symptoms which lead up to the stroke. The final images as he dies make us wonder what he has done to earn this transfiguration; the moonlight almost sanctifies him.

Doctor Ragin and Ivan Gromov are in fact two facets of one personality. Ragin is a symbol of the contemplative but inert artist, while Gromov symbolises suffering humanity. There was undoubtedly a dualism of this kind in Chekhov's make-up, but there is no need to see a confessional purpose in the two men. If Ward No. 6 is the whole world, they are the only inhabitants deserving eternity: together, they add up to humanity.

“Ward No. 6”, like “The Duel” a year earlier, examines and finds wanting two philosophies, one noble, one ignoble. The noble failure may be honourable, but it can hardly attract converts. While “The Duel” leaves us with the consolation of natural man in Samoilenko, the deacon and the Caucasian natives, “Ward No. 6”, without its philosophers, leaves us only with idiots and walking gargoyles. The only glimmer is Ragin's knowledge that in Vienna there are now humane, progressive mental hospitals: the failure of his tour with the postmaster to get as far as Vienna extinguishes even that glimmer for the vision of Russia's future. Nature has deserted the scene; the only view from the window of the ward is cold and lunar: ‘A cold, scarlet moon rose. Not far from the hospital fence, two hundred yards, no more, stood a tall white house, surrounded by a stone wall. This was the prison’. The only other feature described is the bone-processing works, which in Chekhov's townscapes often symbolises pollution and death. “Ward No. 6”, despite the indomitable hatred of Gromov for his captors, is the most desperate of Chekhov's works, for a vitiated humanity has not even the beauty of the earth to console it. In Russia, “Ward No. 6” is the most influential of Chekhov's works: Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward is only the last of a long series of political allegories that are modelled on it. Chekhov himself seemed unnerved by the gloom of his story. Before he travelled up to Moscow to read the proofs in his hotel room, he wrote to Vukol Lavrov in October 1892, ‘I ought to touch it up, otherwise it stinks of the hospital and the mortuary. I'm not fond of stories like that.’ More revealing is a letter to Suvorin earlier that month, which confirms that Gromov and Ragin both exist in Chekhov's own personality:

You have seen a monochrome, colourless and melancholy life through the prism of my bonhomie. According to you, I am one thing, and my Monrepos [the new estate, Melikhovo] and seven horses is another thing. Dear chap, I'm not one to deceive myself about the true position of things; I'm not only at a loose end and dissatisfied, but even in purely medical terms—i.e. to the point of cynicism—convinced that we can only expect bad things from this life—mistakes, losses, diseases, weakness and all sorts of foulnesses, but at the same time if you only knew how nice it is not to pay for a flat and what pleasure it gave me to leave Moscow yesterday. … Today I have been walking over the snow in the fields, there was not a soul around and I felt that I was walking on the moon.

The ‘vanity of vanities’ of Ecclesiastes, and the feeling of lunar sterility, never far beneath the surface of Chekhov's work, are plain in the letter, as they are in “Ward No. 6”, then being printed. A week later, Chekhov had to reply to Suvorin's reactions to the story. In 1904 Suvorin took back and destroyed all his letters to Chekhov, but between the lines of Chekhov's reply we can guess at a typically Suvorin reaction: ‘Very good, old boy, clever, but it hasn't got the fire and idealism of Tolstoy or Goethe’. Chekhov, modest as usual, tried to discuss the merits of “Ward No. 6”, but produced a number of judgements which applied to himself, to his fellow-writers and to his contemporaries in painting. The failings of art in his time are, he says,

due to a disease which is worse than syphilis or sexual exhaustion for an artist. We lack ‘something’, that's right, and it means if you lift up our muse's skirt, you'll find a flat place. Remember that the writers whom we call eternal or simply good and who intoxicate us have one common and very important factor: they are going somewhere and calling you to come with them and you can feel not with your mind but with all your being that they have an aim, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, which has come to disturb the imagination with good reason.

This is the most cogent of all the comments made à propos of “Ward No. 6”: Chekhov abjures evangelism. The story is an allegory that analyses; it is not a parable that reveals new truths. Afterwards, Chekhov took little interest in the story. The praise and questions of his correspondents roused only embarrassed disclaimers. A Taganrog classmate wrote in the spirit of most of the critics to say how pleased he was that Chekhov in “Ward No. 6” had moved from pantheism to anthropocentrism. Presumably he felt that from nature, as in “The Duel,” Chekhov had switched his search for divinity to suffering mankind, as personified by Gromov. To this classmate, Dr Ostrovsky, Chekhov gave only the vaguest encouragement but made his usual point that the skill, not the intentions, counted in literature. He wrote, ‘Everyone writes as best he can: I'd like to go to heaven, but I haven't the strength [a Russian proverb]. … The point is not pantheism but the extent of one's talent’.

One short story, “V ssylke” (“In Exile”), which Chekhov wrote in April 1892, while “Ward No. 6” was getting underway, shows how close “Ward No. 6” is to memories of the journey to Sakhalin. Chekhov heavily revised “In Exile” in 1901, but the essential likeness remains, despite the deletions. A young Tatar, unjustly deported to Siberia, talks with an old ferryman, himself an exile, at a crossing-point on one of the great rivers which Chekhov crossed at great risk on his way across Siberia. Semion the ferryman preaches, like Ragin, indifference and the suppression of desire as the way to endure Siberia. The young Tatar, like Gromov, defends human warmth and sorrows and laments what he has left behind. Moved to fury and tears, he denounces the ferryman for his inhuman defeatism; like Gromov he prefers suffering, nostalgia and hope without end to the finality and stony consolations of apathy.

After “Ward No. 6” Chekhov explores one new genre and milieu after another, but this story dominates with its gloom the work of 1892. Stories such as “Sosedi” (“Neighbours”) or “Strakh” (“Fear”), minor in comparison, evoke the same horror for both life and death. One passage in “Neighbours” (which Chekhov deleted when he revised the work, since it seemed to impose an interpretation) offers a unique footnote to his treatment of human dilemmas. The narrator rides home after visiting his sister who has eloped with the rather Laevsky-like neighbouring landowner; having failed to put his foot down, he muses, ‘I had gone to settle something, but not a single one of life's questions can have a special solution; in each separate case you must say and do what you think—that is the solution to all questions’.

As in 1889, so now Chekhov's writing had reached an impasse. Not merely had ethics disintegrated and landscapes been obliterated; his characters in 1891–2—Laevsky and von Koren, Ragin and Gromov, the characters in “Neighbours”, the narrator and Doctor Sobol in “Moia zhena” (“My Wife”)—were lapsing into stereotypes, too much in the typically Russian mould of Hamlets versus Don Quixotes. Just a few signs of innovation can be found in “Neighbours”. As the central narrator rides to and from his neighbour's house, where his sister has eloped with an undesirable, the mood of the hero and situation are summoned up by the trees—the willows and poplars that the narrator passes. Here is the ‘dendrophilia’ which is at the heart of Chekhov's mature symbolism, and which stems from that feeling for dying nature in the stories of 1887 and in The Wood Demon. Chekhov was clearing the path for new directions. With the purchase of hundreds of acres and a derelict house at Melikhovo, he forced an end to three years of peregrination. He was trying to deflect Lika Mizinova's attachment, letting the family circle close round him once more, and playing the part of the responsible landowner—a task which took time and energy away from literature, and whose material would ferment into inspiration only after four or five years had passed among the peasantry and landowning gentry. Soon the pet mongoose he had kept as a memento of his journey home from Sakhalin and which he had loved and worried about for a year became too troublesome to keep. It went to Moscow Zoo—oddly, considering Chekhov's denunciation of the Zoo as an animals' graveyard—and the Sakhalin period was over. The Melikhovo phase began, full of commitment and experiment.