In "Ward No. 6," which no one should read late at night, Chekhov has given us a picture of an insane asylum, which, if the conditions there depicted are true to life, would indicate that some parts of Russia have not advanced one step since Gogol wrote "Revizor." The patients are beaten and hammered into insensibility by a brutal keeper; they live amidst intolerable filth. The attending physician is a typical Russian, who sees clearly the horror and abomination of the place, but has not sufficient will-power to make a change. He is fascinated by one of the patients, with whom he talks for hours. His fondness for this man leads his friends to believe that he is insane, and they begin to treat him with that humouring condescension and pity which would be sufficient in itself to drive a man out of his mind. He is finally invited by his younger colleague to visit the asylum to examine a strange case; when he reaches the building, he himself is shoved into Ward No. 6, and realises that the doors are shut upon him forever. He is obliged to occupy a bed in the same filthy den where he has so often visited the other patients, and his night-gown has a slimy smell of dried fish. In about twenty-four hours he dies, but in those hours he goes through a hell of physical and mental torment. The fear of death, which to an intensely intellectual people like the Russians, is an obsession of terror, and shadows all their literature, --it appears all through Tolstoi's diary and novels,--is analysed in many forms by Chekhov. In "Ward No. 6" Chekhov pays his respects to Tolstoi's creed of self-denial, through the lips of the doctor's favourite madman. "A creed which teaches indifference to wealth, indifference to the conveniences of life, and contempt for suffering is quite incomprehensible to the great majority who never knew either wealth or the conveniences of life, and to whom contempt for suffering would mean contempt for their own lives, which are made up of feelings of hunger, cold, loss, insult, and a Hamlet-like terror of death. All life lies in these feelings, and life may be hated or wearied of, but never despised. Yes, I repeat it, the teachings of the Stoics can never have a future; from the beginning of time, life has consisted in sensibility to pain and response to irritation." No better indictment has ever been made against those to whom self-denial and renunciation are merely a luxurious attitude of the mind.