Ward No. 6

"Ward No. 6" is an 1892 short story by Anton Chekhov.

Summary

The story is set in a provincial mental asylum and explores the philosophical conflict between Ivan Gromov, a patient, and Andrey Ragin, the director of the asylum. Gromov denounces the injustice he sees everywhere, while Dr. Ragin insists on ignoring injustice and other evils; partially as a result of this way of thinking, he neglects to remedy the shoddy conditions of the mental ward.

Reaction

Literary critic William Lyon Phelps reacted positively to the story, writing:

In Ward No. 6, which no one should read late at night, Chekhov has given us a picture of an insane asylum, which, if the conditions there depicted are true to life, would indicate that some parts of Russia have not advanced one step since Gogol wrote Revizor... The fear of death, which to an intensely intellectual people like the Russians, is an obsession of terror, and shadows all their literature,—it appears all through Tolstoi's diary and novels,—is analysed in many forms by Chekhov. In Ward No. 6 Chekhov pays his respects to Tolstoi's creed of self-denial, through the lips of the doctor's favourite madman.

Literary critic Edmund Wilson called it one of Chekhov's "masterpieces, a fable of the whole situation of the frustrated intellectuals of the Russia of the eighties and nineties."

Communist politician and political theorist Vladimir Lenin believed that his reading of Ward No. Six "made him a revolutionary." Upon finishing the story, he is said to have remarked: "I absolutely had the feeling that I was shut up in Ward 6 myself!"

Adaptations

The short story has been adapted to film several times, including the 1978 Yugoslav production Ward Six and a 2009 film with the same name as the original story.

External links

• Ward No. 6 at Eldritch Press