Short Stories by Chekhov
intelligent and interesting conversation, or care to do so. It is an
immense privation for us. Even the educated class do not rise above
vulgarity; the level of their development, I assure you, is not a bit
higher than that of the lower orders."
"Perfectly true. I agree."
"You know, of course," the doctor went on quietly and deliberately,
"that everything in this world is insignificant and uninteresting except
the higher spiritual manifestations of the human mind. Intellect draws a
sharp line between the animals and man, suggests the divinity of the
latter, and to some extent even takes the place of the immortality which
does not exist. Consequently the intellect is the only possible source
of enjoyment. We see and hear of no trace of intellect about us, so we
are deprived of enjoyment. We have books, it is true, but that is not at
all the same as living talk and converse. If you will allow me to make a
not quite apt comparison: books are the printed score, while talk is the
singing."
"Perfectly true."
A silence would follow. Daryushka would come out of the kitchen and with
an expression of blank dejection would stand in the doorway to listen,
with her face propped on her fist.
"Eh!" Mihail Averyanitch would sigh. "To expect intelligence of this
generation!"
And he would describe how wholesome, entertaining, and interesting life
had been in the past. How intelligent the educated class in Russia used
to be, and what lofty ideas it had of honour and friendship; how they
used to lend money without an IOU, and it was thought a disgrace not to
give a helping hand to a comrade in need; and what campaigns, what
adventures, what skirmishes, what comrades, what women! And the
Caucasus, what a marvellous country! The wife of a battalion commander,
a queer woman, used to put on an officer's uniform and drive off into
the mountains in the evening, alone, without a guide. It was said that
she had a love affair with some princeling in the native village.
"Queen of Heaven, Holy Mother..." Daryushka would sigh.
"And how we drank! And how we ate! And what desperate liberals we were!"
Andrey Yefimitch would listen without hearing; he was musing as he
sipped his beer.
"I often dream of intellectual people and conversation with them," he
said suddenly, interrupting Mihail Averyanitch. "My father gave me an
excellent education, but under the influence of the ideas of the sixties
made me become a doctor. I believe if I had not obeyed him then, by now
I should have been in the very centre of the intellectual movement. Most
likely I should have become a member of some university. Of course,
intellect, too, is transient and not eternal, but you know why I cherish
a partiality for it. Life is a vexatious trap; when a thinking man
reaches maturity and attains to full consciousness he cannot help
feeling that he is in a trap from which there is no escape. Indeed, he
is summoned without his choice by fortuitous circumstances from non-
existence into life . . . what for? He tries to find out the meaning and
object of his existence; he is told nothing, or he is told absurdities;
he knocks and it is not opened to him; death comes to him--also without
his choice. And so, just as in prison men held together by common
misfortune feel more at ease when they are together, so one does not
notice the trap in life when people with a bent for analysis and
generalization meet together and pass their time in the interchange of
proud and free ideas. In that sense the intellect is the source of an
enjoyment nothing can replace."
"Perfectly true."
Not looking his friend in the face, Andrey Yefimitch would go on,
quietly and with pauses, talking about intellectual people and
conversation with them, and Mihail Averyanitch would listen attentively
and agree: "Perfectly true."
"And you do not believe in the immortality of the soul?" he would ask
suddenly.
"No, honoured Mihail Averyanitch; I do not believe it, and have no
grounds for believing it."
"I must own I doubt it too. And yet I have a feeling as though I should
never die. Oh, I think to myself: 'Old fogey, it is time you were dead!'
But there is a little voice in my soul says: 'Don't believe it; you
won't die.'"
Soon after nine o'clock Mihail Averyanitch would go away. As he put on
his fur coat in the entry he would say with a sigh:
"What a wilderness fate has carried us to, though, really! What's most
vexatious of all is to have to die here. Ech! . ." VII
After seeing his friend out Andrey Yefimitch would sit down at the table
and begin reading again. The stillness of the evening, and afterwards of
the night, was not broken by a single sound, and it seemed as though
time were standing still and brooding with the doctor over the book, and
as though there were nothing in existence but the books and the lamp
with the green shade. The doctor's coarse peasant-like face was
gradually lighted up by a smile of delight and enthusiasm over the
progress of the human intellect. Oh, why is not man immortal? he
thought. What is the good of the brain centres and convolutions, what is
the good of sight, speech, self-consciousness, genius, if it is all
destined to depart into the soil, and in the end to grow cold together
with the earth's crust, and then for millions of years to fly with the
earth round the sun with no meaning and no object? To do that there was
no need at all to draw man with his lofty, almost godlike intellect out
of non-existence, and then, as though in mockery, to turn him into clay.
The transmutation of substances! But what cowardice to comfort oneself
with that cheap substitute for immortality! The unconscious processes
that take place in nature are lower even than the stupidity of man,
since in stupidity there is, anyway, consciousness and will, while in
those processes there is absolutely nothing. Only the coward who has
more fear of death than dignity can comfort himself with the fact that
his body will in time live again in the grass, in the stones, in the
toad. To find one's immortality in the transmutation of substances is as
strange as to prophesy a brilliant future for the case after a precious
violin has been broken and become useless.
When the clock struck, Andrey Yefimitch would sink back into his chair
and close his eyes to think a little. And under the influence of the
fine ideas of which he had been reading he would, unawares, recall his
past and his present. The past was hateful--better not to think of it.
And it was the same in the present as in the past. He knew that at the
very time when his thoughts were floating together with the cooling
earth round the sun, in the main building beside his abode people were
suffering in sickness and physical impurity: someone perhaps could not
sleep and was making war upon the insects, someone was being infected by
erysipelas, or moaning over too tight a bandage; perhaps the patients
were playing cards with the nurses and drinking vodka. According to the
yearly return, twelve thousand people had been deceived; the whole
hospital rested as it had done twenty years ago on thieving, filth,
scandals, gossip, on gross quackery, and, as before, it was an immoral
institution extremely injurious to the health of the inhabitants. He
knew that Nikita knocked the patients about behind the barred windows of
Ward No. 6, and that Moiseika went about the town every day begging
alms.
On the other hand, he knew very well that a magical change had taken
place in medicine during the last twenty-five years. When he was
studying at the university he had fancied that medicine would soon be
overtaken by the fate of alchemy and metaphysics; but now when he was
reading at night the science of medicine touched him and excited his
wonder, and even enthusiasm. What unexpected brilliance, what a
revolution! Thanks to the antiseptic system operations were performed
such as the great Pirogov had considered impossible even in spe.
Ordinary Zemstvo doctors were venturing to perform the resection of the
kneecap; of abdominal operations only one per cent. was fatal; while
stone was considered such a trifle that they did not even write about
it. A radical cure for syphilis had been discovered. And the theory of
heredity, hypnotism, the discoveries of Pasteur and of Koch, hygiene
based on statistics, and the work of Zemstvo doctors!
Psychiatry with its modern classification of mental diseases, methods of
diagnosis, and treatment, was a perfect Elborus in comparison with what
had been in the past. They no longer poured cold water on the heads of
lunatics nor put strait-waistcoats upon them; they treated them with
humanity, and even, so it was stated in the papers, got up balls and
entertainments for them. Andrey Yefimitch knew that with modern tastes
and views such an abomination as Ward No. 6 was possible only a hundred
and fifty miles from a railway in a little town where the mayor and all
the town council were half-illiterate tradesmen who looked upon the
doctor as an oracle who must be believed without any criticism even if
he had poured molten lead into their mouths; in any other place the
public and the newspapers would long ago have torn this little Bastille
to pieces.
"But, after all, what of it?" Andrey Yefimitch would ask himself,
opening his eyes. "There is the antiseptic system, there is Koch, there
is Pasteur, but the essential reality is not altered a bit; ill-health
and mortality are still the same. They get up balls and entertainments
for the mad, but still they don't let them go free; so it's all nonsense
and vanity, and there is no difference in reality between the best
Vienna clinic and my hospital." But depression and a feeling akin to
envy prevented him from feeling indifferent; it must have been owing to
exhaustion. His heavy head sank on to the book, he put his hands under
his face to make it softer, and thought: "I serve in a pernicious
institution and receive a salary from people whom I am deceiving. I am
not honest, but then, I of myself am nothing, I am only part of an
inevitable social evil: all local officials are pernicious and receive
their salary for doing nothing. . . . And so for my dishonesty it is not
I who am to blame, but the times.... If I had been born two hundred
years later I should have been different. . ."
When it struck three he would put out his lamp and go into his bedroom;
he was not sleepy. VIII
Two years before, the Zemstvo in a liberal mood had decided to allow
three hundred roubles a year to pay for additional medical service in
the town till the Zemstvo hospital should be opened, and the district
doctor, Yevgeny Fyodoritch Hobotov, was invited to the town to assist
Andrey Yefimitch. He was a very young man--not yet thirty--tall and dark,
with broad cheek-bones and little eyes; his forefathers had probably
come from one of the many alien races of Russia. He arrived in the town
without a farthing, with a small portmanteau, and a plain young woman
whom he called his cook. This woman had a baby at the breast. Yevgeny
Fyodoritch used to go about in a cap with a peak, and in high boots, and
in the winter wore a sheepskin. He made great friends with Sergey
Sergeyitch, the medical assistant, and with the treasurer, but held
aloof from the other officials, and for some reason called them
aristocrats. He had only one book in his lodgings, "The Latest
Prescriptions of the Vienna Clinic for 1881." When he went to a patient
he always took this book with him. He played billiards in the evening at
the club: he did not like cards. He was very fond of using in
conversation such expressions as "endless bobbery," "canting soft soap,"
"shut up with your finicking. . ."
He visited the hospital twice a week, made the round of the wards, and