In the Library
Ward No. 6
Anton Chekhov, 1892
- Form
- Form Novella
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Accessible
- Reading time
- Reading time 1.5 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by Constance Garnett (1916)
- Original
- Original ru
- Chapters
- Chapters 19
- Length
- Length 22k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
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In the hospital yard there stands a small lodge surrounded by a perfect forest of burdocks, nettles, and wild hemp.
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- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
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Bartleby, the Scrivener
Herman Melville
Bartleby traces the same quiet refusal to keep participating in an indifferent system, but the resistance is passive silence rather than a doctor's slow disillusionment with the ward he runs.
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About the book
Behind the hospital, past a forest of burdock and nettle, stands the lodge they call Ward No. 6, and inside it Dr. Andrei Ragin discovers the one man in town worth talking to: Gromov, a patient, who insists with furious clarity that pain is real and must be fought. Ragin disagrees. He is a reader, a gentle stoic who has persuaded himself that a mind well stocked with Marcus Aurelius can be serene in any cell, that suffering is finally a matter of where you choose to stand. Chekhov, who was a doctor, lets this idea sound almost wise, and then he does the cruelest and most honest thing in the story: he has Ragin declared mad and locked in the ward himself. Nikita the guard beats him with the same bored efficiency that has kept the others docile for years. The philosophy that survived every argument does not survive a single blow. Detachment, it turns out, was only ever the luxury of the man holding the key.