Ward No. 6 and Other Stories

This collection gathers 23 short stories by Anton Chekhov, written between 1885 and 1902 and set across the breadth of late 19th-century Russian life. The stories portray peasants, merchants, doctors, officers, clergy, and aristocrats whose quiet struggles, unfulfilled longings, and moral failures are rendered with precise, understated detail.

In "The Cook's Wedding," seven-year-old Grisha, a child of the household, watches with bewilderment as the family cook, Pelageya, is matched with a red-haired cabman she does not want to marry. Despite her protests, the wedding proceeds, and Grisha, distressed that a stranger has acquired power over Pelageya, slips her an apple in sympathy. "The Witch" takes place on a stormy night, where the church caretaker Savély accuses his beautiful wife Raïssa of using witchcraft to summon storms that lure young travelers to their isolated hut. A handsome postman arrives; Raïssa gazes at him with fascination, but he departs, leaving her raging at her miserable life. In "A Dead Body," two peasants guard a roadside corpse at night; a terrified pilgrim begs one to escort him onward, leaving Syoma, the other peasant, alone with the dead.

"Easter Eve" follows the narrator across a flooded river on Easter night, where Ieronim, a lay brother (a monastery worker who has not taken full monastic vows), mourns his closest friend, the monk Nikolay, a gifted writer of hymns whose artistry no one in the monastery valued. While the narrator joins the festive service, Ieronim remains on the ferry all night, unreplaced and grieving. In "On the Road," a storm strands the young traveler Marya Ilovaisky at a tavern on Christmas Eve, where she meets Grigory Liharev, a ruined gentleman who has squandered his fortune through a series of passionate enthusiasms, from science to Nihilism (the rejection of existing institutions) to Slavophilism (the idealization of Slavic culture). Ilovaisky is moved by his sincerity but departs in her sledge, and Liharev stands watching her tracks vanish in the snow.

"The Dependents" depicts the 70-year-old artisan Zotov, who curses his aging horse and mangy dog for eating him out of house and home. After deciding to move in with a relative, he finds the animals following him and, unable to turn them back, leads them to a slaughterer. Both are killed, and Zotov, in drunken despair, puts his own forehead against the killing stand. In "Grisha," a toddler not yet three ventures outside for the first time and encounters soldiers, horses, cats, and oranges in overwhelming succession. That night, unable to process the flood of impressions, he cries feverishly, and his mother gives him castor oil.

"The Kiss" traces the shy artillery officer Ryabovitch, who is accidentally kissed in a dark room by an unknown woman at a general's party. The kiss transforms his inner life for months. When his brigade returns past the general's estate, no invitation comes, and Ryabovitch reflects on the meaninglessness of the episode and of life itself. When an invitation finally arrives, he refuses to go. In "Typhus," the young lieutenant Klimov falls deliriously ill on a train from Petersburg to Moscow and spends days in fever at home. When he recovers, overwhelmed with animal joy, his aunt tells him his sister Katya caught typhus while nursing him and has died. Grief takes a week to overtake his convalescent happiness.

"The Pipe" presents a conversation between a bailiff and an old shepherd who laments the disappearance of birds, fish, forests, and rivers, concluding that God's world is perishing. The bailiff adds his own grievances of poverty and domestic misery. In "The Princess," a wealthy woman visits a monastery where a doctor she once employed confronts her with a devastating critique: Her philanthropy was a self-indulgent farce, her servants were treated as less than human, and she dismissed him without explanation after 10 years of service. The princess weeps, but by the next morning she drives away feeling like a light, transparent cloud, entirely unchanged.

In "Neighbours," Pyotr Mihalitch rides to confront the married idealist Vlassitch, who has taken his sister Zina, but cannot resolve anything; he tells Zina she has done well, then rides home concluding he has never acted on what he really thought. "The Grasshopper" follows Olga Ivanovna, a socialite who marries the selfless doctor Dymov, then betrays him with the painter Ryabovsky. As her affair sours and Ryabovsky discards her, Dymov contracts diphtheria while trying to save a sick child. Only as he dies does Olga recognize he was an extraordinary, rare, great man.

"In Exile" pits old Semyon, a ferryman who preaches stoic indifference, against a young, homesick Tatar exile and the story of Vassily Sergeyitch, a gentleman whose wife abandoned him and whose daughter is dying of consumption (tuberculosis). The Tatar insists that even brief happiness is better than wanting nothing and calls Semyon a dead carcass.

"Ward No. 6" centers on Dr. Andrey Yefimitch Ragin, the passive, intellectually curious director of a decrepit provincial hospital. He ignores the brutality of Ward No. 6, the mental ward, where the guard Nikita, a former soldier, beats patients without consequence. When Andrey Yefimitch discovers a stimulating conversationalist in the patient Ivan Dmitritch Gromov, a former civil servant who has persecution mania (a delusional terror of arrest and surveillance), he begins visiting daily. Ivan Dmitritch dismantles the doctor's Stoic philosophy of emotional detachment, calling it a cover for laziness and cowardice. Rumors spread that the doctor has gone mad. After his friend the postmaster Mihail Averyanitch gambles away 500 roubles of his money on a trip, Andrey Yefimitch returns to find he has been replaced. His colleague Hobotov lures him into Ward No. 6 under a pretense. When the doctor tries to leave, Nikita punches him in the face, and Andrey Yefimitch finally understands the pain he ignored for 20 years. He dies of a stroke the next evening.

In "Rothschild's Fiddle," the embittered coffin-maker Yakov, who has spent his life calculating losses and mistreating others, is transformed by his wife Marfa's death. Sitting under a willow she once mentioned, he remembers a baby who died decades ago and wonders why people hinder each other from living. Dying, he bequeaths his fiddle to Rothschild, the Jewish flute player he once persecuted. "The Student" depicts a seminary student who tells two widows the story of Peter's denial of Christ and is struck by their tears, sensing an unbroken chain connecting past and present.

"The Darling" portrays Olenka, a gentle woman who serially adopts the opinions and identity of whoever she loves: her theater-manager husband, a timber merchant, a veterinary surgeon, and finally a 10-year-old schoolboy. "A Doctor's Visit" sends a young physician to examine a factory heiress whose sleeplessness reflects the dehumanizing weight of her family's industrial fortune. In "Gooseberries," a veterinary surgeon tells how his brother sacrificed everything, including his wife's life, to buy an estate with gooseberry bushes, and argues that the happy feel at ease only because the unhappy bear their burdens in silence.

"The Lady with the Dog" follows the philanderer Dmitri Gurov, who notices Anna Sergeyevna, a married young woman walking alone with a white Pomeranian dog, on the seafront of Yalta, a Crimean resort town. Their casual affair becomes, for the first time in Gurov's life, genuine love. They meet secretly in Moscow, recognizing that the most difficult part of their story is only beginning. "In the Ravine" chronicles the Tsybukin merchant family in a corrupt village, where the ruthless daughter-in-law Aksinya, enraged that land is being deeded to her infant nephew Nikifor, scalds the baby to death with boiling water. Years later, old Tsybukin wanders the village half-starved while Aksinya controls everything. The final story, "The Bishop," follows Bishop Pyotr through Holy Week as illness overtakes him. His mother visits but cannot treat him naturally, constrained by his rank. He dies on Easter Eve and is quickly forgotten; only his old mother sometimes tells people she had a son who was a bishop, and some do not believe her.