Don’t believe a word of it! It’s all a trick. There’s only one thing wrong with me: it has taken me twenty years to find one intelligent man in town and he is insane.
– Dr. Ragin, from Karen Shakhnazarov’s Ward No. 6
Cinematic adaptations of Anton Chekhov have an advantage in that the former physician specialized in dialogue: His most famed works are, after all, stage plays. In his short stories, as well, the dialogue is naturalistic (if a little on the satirical side) and imbued with the life of the speaker, and not caricatured or stilted. Even a cursory exploration of his stories—in, say, a wisely collated selection—will show that among the Russian Masters, Chekhov understood the art of character best, and could resist stereotype with far more alacrity than his more vaunted countrymen. For instance, I’d read Fyodor Dostoevsky’s short story “White Nights” a while back and was stunned at how such a melodramatic and clichéd tale could attain to the status of a classic. As a young writer’s (to crib from Robert Louis Stevenson) “prelusory gymnastic” it has all the telltale signs—but immortal literature? No.
Chekhov, however, avoids such pitfalls. He never panders nor preaches, and is concise, without an ounce of narrative fat; his ear for dialogue, as stated previously, renders the late nineteenth century of Russia clearly communicable to today’s reader (this is in part thanks, of course, to his translators). Is it any wonder that much of what we understand as modern acting, with its focus on psychological realism and the working out of inner motivations, began with Konstantin Stanislavski, whose Moscow Art Theatre collaboration with Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko revolutionized the medium primarily through Chekhov’s plays?
So when one is adapting Chekhov onto film, one begins with about as trusty a blueprint as one is likely to have. However, certain adjustments are required, and welcome, as cinema offers several unique opportunities that are simply unavailable in literature and live drama.
Karen Shakhnazarov’s Ward No. 6, an adaptation of Chekhov’s great short story-cum-novella, is an example of one that survives the transferal mainly through the power of its source material and some strong performances. A few key decisions also work to make the film recommendable as a film, and not simply a straightforward page-to-screen adaptation, but it really is Chekhov’s story as it is that gives Shakhnazarov’s reimagining its quality.
The most apparent change is Shakhnazarov moving the story to the twenty-first century—2008/9 to be specific. This allows him to utilize a faux-documentary approach, with a camera crew following the denizens of the town and mental institute where Ward No. 6 is located. The time shift accomplishes two things: 1) the world of the narrative is given more attention, and the various characters a little more prominence than in the novella, where Ragin and Gromov dominate; and 2) it highlights the timelessness of the tale, and how the issues Ragin wrestles with, excuses, and eventually is subsumed under are both perennial and endemic to any society, not just Chekhov’s Russia.
The story concerns the gradual decline of a dissipated middle-aged doctor, Andrey Yefimitch Ragin, who oversees the patients in a rundown mental institute far from the cultural center of Russia. One of the patients, Ivan Gromov, a formerly well-off sufferer of persecution mania, enthralls him with episodes of fervent righteousness, and Ragin visits Gromov’s ward more and more in order to continue their philosophical discourses.
Ragin is one of those self-aware do-nothings who, although armed with considerable learning, are nevertheless trapped by ennui and the plush cushioning provided by a good, albeit spiritually unnourishing, career. Once desirous of a position in the clergy, threats from his father forced him into medicine, where he barely works in order to spend most of his days carousing with an ex-landowner, Mikhail Averyanitch, and obsessively reading from his library. Ragin’s philosophy amounts to a high-minded apathy, where a cultivated mind can basically live through all bodily and material sufferings without any real attachments. In fact, in one of his discussions with Gromov, he says that life is all up to chance, and it was chance that put Ragin in his position and Gromov in the ward. One should be at peace with this knowledge, rather than rage about the misfortunes of one’s circumstances.
Gromov, however, skewers him for being a bookish man of privilege who can afford to believe such things only because he has never truly suffered. The younger man, for all his mental disjunction, is a Romantic at heart, who longs for a full life and even believes in the immortal soul. Despite his wild swings of lucidity and crippling paranoia, Gromov’s intelligence fascinates Ragin, who falls into a deep despair, fueled by his resentments against the petty concerns of the townspeople and their intellectual dearth—as well as by the mirror Gromov’s accusations holds up against Ragin.
Mikhail attempts to liven Ragin’s spirits by taking him into Moscow (and then Warsaw, in the novella) but the sights and sounds of the city only deepen his loathing. After an outburst against Mikhail and Khobotov (Ragin’s direct subordinate, and a dullard whom he despises), Ragin is deemed mentally unwell, and, after he loses his job, it is contrived for him to be committed to the very institute he once oversaw.
Ragin, for all his preachings about “chance,” and being content with one’s situation, immediately tries to redress this misunderstanding—only to be beaten by the institute’s cruel handler, Nikita (Viktor Solovyov). Cowed, he helplessly joins an almost exultant Gromov as a fellow patient of Ward No. 6.
It’s an ironic, almost hilariously so, reversal—especially as performed by Vladimir Ilin, who waddles through the hospital in his skivvies searching for the exit. Ilin, throughout, is wonderful as the deludedly detached doctor—a little heavier and squatter than his description in the novella, but nevertheless capturing the character’s facile acquiescence to the status quo, the sort of dilettante who uses philosophy to justify his impotence against said status quo. Aleksey Vertkov, too, is good as Gromov, whose more or less sensible intuitions about society and injustice are trapped in a paranoiac’s self-sabotaging mind.
Mikhail (Aleksandr Pankratov-Chyornyy) and Khobotov (Evgeniy Stychkin) are given more screentime, and Khobotov shown as less a dull functionary and more of an active manipulator.
While I am not entirely confident that the faux-documentary approach is creative enough to recommend the film over the original story, there are certain angles that do attract some interest. For instance, the interpolation of home video footage taken by Mikhail of his interactions with Ragin are wise additions—his camcorder is broken, and can only record video sans audio, which nicely meshes with the idea of how people like these men are “muted” from the rest of the world’s serious concerns by their privilege and willful ignorance.
The opening’s interviews with a few of Ward No. 6’s other patients add an additional layer of realism, but also provide some resonance when their stories are pretty much snuffed out in favor of Ragin and Gromov, whose dual obsessiveness dominates those squalid interiors—even a lingering shot of one of them staring into the middle distance after a Ragin/Gromov debate ends has a small poetic touch.
Some of the non-novella moments, like a holiday party where a younger female mental patient dances with a defeated Ragin, are neither here nor there, well-acted as it is. And there may be some commentary on how contemporary Russian filmmakers adapt Chekhov in order to fit his tales with contemporary Russian concerns, but, since I am not well-versed in such matters, I’ll leave that for other analysts to opine over.
Suffice it to say, Ward No. 6 is a prime example of great art’s endurance over time, and how when one fixates on the human being first, their motivations and inconstancies, relevancy to a surprisingly wide spectrum of readership (and mediums) is preserved; too few artists realize this, and remain hemmed in by the fads of their respective eras, unwilling to explore what does not change, and/or what changes at a depth far beneath such circumstantial surfaces.
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