In the banalities of life and its useless beatings against the bars Chekhov was quick to see effective literary material. If life was colorless, it still called for a master of grays and neutral tints to lay them effectively upon the canvas--and such a painter was Chekhov. Dealing with trivial things, and dealing with them in a manner sometimes bitterly laughing, again at times with fierce cynicism, but sometimes too with the gentle sadness of an accepted despair, the man became a sincere realist--an accurate delineator of “the unprofitable life.” He could picture, in “The Steppe,” that most monotonous of all landscapes with an idealized charm of variety which enchanted the reader, but his obligation to human nature was to paint it remorselessly with truth. Unhappily, his pathological mind saw little but the contemptible, the trivial, the stupid, and the mean. The nobler elements he did not omit, but he never asserted or even intimated their final triumph. He could strip the shreds of pretension and illusion from the soul of man as ruthlessly as a fiend would denude the body of his helpless victim. For old age to be despicable, or for youth to be polluted, was all the justification needed to picture them just so upon his canvas. “Ward No. 6”--a pitiless tragedy disclosing the ultimate break-down of all that is noble in body, mind, and spirit--is probably Chekhov’s greatest story. It takes its title from the lunatic asylum in a “squalid, remote, and stagnant country town.... A pandemonium of brutality, corruption, and neglect.” The patients suffer unspeakable abuses from the attendants, chiefly from the porter, Nikita, whose brutal fists beat all protesting patients into insensibility. The old doctor used to sell the hospital stores to enrich himself, but Ragin, the new physician, was a man of honesty, heart, and ability. The abuses of the place he detests, and the sufferings of the inmates make his gorge rise and his heart burn. But, as with most of Chekhov’s good men, his will is inert, and at last he condones and falls into indifference toward the horrors of the place. One day he discovers an unusual intelligence in Gromof, one of the long-time inmates, and comes to take a great interest in him. For hours at a time he gives up his occupations and listens to Gromof’s wisdom. The nurses, at this, think Ragin insane, and by a trick shut him up in the very room whose terrible condition at first so inspired him with horror. “I am glad! You drank other men’s blood; now they will drink yours!” screams Gromof in a rage of madness. After a short confinement, Ragin joins the other inmates in a revolt, but Nikita uses his huge fists, and the next day Ragin is dead. I recite this at some length because no shorter story could so fully present the hopeless philosophy of its author. It is a powerful, impressionistic picture of Russia--at its worst, let us hope.