Ward No. 6
The lodge behind a provincial hospital holds five lunatics, a watchman who beats them, and a former court official whose persecution mania has left his intelligence intact. The hospital's doctor, who decided long ago that nothing can be done and reads philosophy instead of making his rounds, starts calling on the patient for the pleasure of an argument about whether suffering matters. Lenin recorded that finishing it left him too frightened to stay in his room; the bleakest thing Chekhov wrote, and the work that made him a moral force in Russia.
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- 49% · 10 shared