ABSTRACT

When asked to define the genre of his 2009 film Ward No. 6 (Palata N 6) based on Anton Chekhov’s 1892 enigmatic novella, the director Karen Shakhnazarov says that he created “a drama or even a tragedy,” aimed to convey Chekhov’s “truth of life that we choose not to notice. [ . . . ] In this novella Chekhov came to the edge of an abyss and looked down in it. He reveals what we already know but would rather not think about” (“Shakhnazarov perelozhil”). Set in the Russia of 2007 and unfolding on the premises of the Nikolo-Poshekhonsky monastery (now an asylum) of the Dmitrovsky region near Moscow, 1 Shakhnazarov’s Ward No. 6 retells the story of Chekhov’s Doctor Ragin, who becomes the patient of his own hospital, namely, its ward for the insane. In its complex style of storytelling the film seeks to find a cinematic analogue to the eclectic manner of Chekhov’s own writing. It becomes an interesting case of mutation, when the means of one medium (film) are creatively used to evoke the stylistic and compositional particulars of another (short story).