The Social Collective as a Devouring Mother
A Possible Feminine Symbolism in Ward No. 6 Between Chekhov and Shakhnazarov
Introduction: A Literature Critical of Social Collectivity
In Russian modern history, the relationship between individuals and collective bodies was quite a controversial philosophical and political issue. Whether in the Slavophile camp, or in the camp of the so-called Westernizers, thinkers introduced several theories and insights regarding the nature of the human being. On both sides, humanistic tendencies were prevalent, and the value of the human being was affirmed, hence the claim that Russian philosophical thinking is fundamentally humanistic.[1] However, it is taken for granted by some scholars that the Russian society and thought glorifies collectivity, which is, according to them, best represented by the concept of the sobornost’.[2] However, this idea of the sobornost’ is indeed very nuanced, and should not be considered identical to collectivity, as some Russian thinkers argue that the sobornost’(untranslatable term that stems from the word sobor, signifying, among other things, cathedral or council) is more of a “third way” between individualism and collectivity, a spiritual assembly of persons with no higher authority on its individuals.[3]
Leaving philosophical thought aside, many classical Russian literary works proved to be more or less critical of social collectivity. Thus, with the rise of the concern with the destiny of individual human beings comes skepticism towards the role that the society and the state play in the life of the individuals. The reader of Russian literature sees how Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina is getting paranoid and isolated after being rejected by most of her acquaintances, including hypocrite ladies who lead very similar lives, which leads in the end to her demise. Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot is also one impressive example (autobiographical to some extent) of the collapse of the thinking and idealist individual under the sway of the crude collective power of society. Thus, if Chekhov’s Ragin, as it will be shown below, is accused of madness because of his unusual behavior, Dostoyevsky’s Prince Myshkin, being a mentally fragile youth since childhood and deeply spiritual with idealistic worldview, is driven to actual psychic breakdown, as he tries to engage in the social life that surrounds him. Myshkin, who approaches the society from an idealistic point of view, proves very weak and inexperienced before the ruthless dynamics of actual social life with all its capriciousness and oppressive mechanisms. In his case, social life, including many individuals, proves irredeemable as a collective phenomenon. However, in this novel, it is not only Myshkin who is doomed by this social and psychological/spiritual environment; it is Nastasia Filippovna, who, like Karenina, internalizes the collective condemning voice of the society, who loses her life at the end.[4]
Yet the main example of the struggle between the individual and the social collective power in this essay is Chekhov’s Ward No. 6. So, how does this short story depict the social and official collective destructive impact on the individual? Using psychological terms, this essay will demonstrate how the social collective can become a devouring or negative mother that can usurp and destroy the inquisitive individual personality in society. This essay will also explore how Shakhnazarov’s movie contributed to counterbalance Chekhov’s outlook of Ragin’s fate.
Ward No. 6 and the Two Mother Figures
In Ward No. 6, Chekhov writes the story of Ragin, (Vladimir Il’in in Shakhnazarov’s movie) a doctor who ends up as a patient in the same ward in which he worked as a supervisor of mental and psychological patients. However, following the outstanding Chekhovian plot, the story seems to hint that although Ragin suffered from some type of absurdist and cynic mentality, he, nonetheless, did not go mad until the end of the story. In fact, he was imprisoned in the ward, considered patient, only by a mixture of carelessness and mediocracy on the part of local officials and colleagues. Ragin was mistaken for an idiot because of his long conversations with Gromov (Aleksei Vertkov), a paranoid patient (00:39ff in the movie). This judgment was perhaps aggravated by one impulse of rage that took over him when his colleague, Khobotov, and Ragin’s own friend, Averyanovich, came to visit him. If Ragin was really close to madness right before his imprisonment in the ward no. 6, the story seems to hint at the fact that the real reason for that is his social and economic situation. Ragin was deprived of his job, pension, house, and everything he had by one decision of local authorities and by his friend who borrowed half of his savings but did not pay back. Naturally, this almost total deprivation of all his assets would make him isolated as he could not function without job or money, although as a sane person he still could take care of his landlady’s little daughter who were intimidated by their mother’s boyfriend.
From one point of view, Ragin shows several symptoms of disillusionment and cynicism. As per one of his initial conversions with the paranoid patient, Gromov, he seems to adopt an absurdist type of philosophy that considers everything a matter of luck and natural caprice. As Gracia Fellmeth summarizes Ragin’s initial attitude: “Ragin has lived a protected and comfortable life and believes that suffering and hardship are bestowed upon individuals at random and that these individuals must learn to ignore their effects.”[5] Ragin’s protective milieu produced a person that bears some characteristics of a Puer Aeternus (The Eternal Child), which is a Jungian psychological term that M.-L. von Franz describes as young man who mostly live a provisional life, idealist, dreaming, hardly involved in his social milieu, who usually shows signs of rejecting his social milieu and borders on nihilism and absurdity.[6] Apparently, this situation is similar to the disillusioned teenager that sees the adult life as vain and meaningless, and consequently refuses to participate in it. Although, he is not a striking example of that childishness that one encounters in Goncharov’s Oblomov, he is still as isolated as Oblomov when it comes to the experience of the real life around him.[7]
Not unlike Oblomov’s typical mother complex, which the director Nikita Mikhalkov hints at in his movie (1980) illustrating its origins by highlighting the powerful overprotectiveness of his mother with her physical intimacy—unlike this complex, Ragin’s attitude seems to be a more hidden version of Oblomov’s detachment from his social reality as an adult, including distancing himself from his beloved woman. Ragin’s conversations with his patient, Gromov, started to make a slight change in his uninvolved attitude. Ragin became more inquisitive, willing to have long conversations with his patient and to think seriously about his long-time held convictions, as he judged that Gromov’s reasoning is excellent and brilliant, and in general that narrator of the short story asserts that a certain “conversation went on for about an hour longer, and apparently made a deep impression on Andrey Yefimich ]Ragin[. He began going to the ward every day. He went there in the mornings and after dinner, and often the dusk of evening found him a conversation with Ivan Dmitritch [Gromov].”[8] Thus, Ragin starts to change, because he finally finds something meaningful and a possibility of a worldview that makes sense to him. However, this personal change proves unable to stay a private personal issue, for the social and professional authorities around him intervenes and takes the initiative against him. It is possible here to see the society (represented by the authority of the town’s council as well as his friends and colleagues) as a social manifestation of a Devouring Mother, to use psychological terminology.
In the case of Ragin, social and official authority intervenes in the harmless process taking place in his inner world and, thus, critically contributes to his disastrous demise. Men in higher positions, along with some friends and colleagues of his, interpret his behavior as socially alien and psychologically invalid, and therefore condemn him as an insane person who must need supervision and even imprisonment later. The Jungian analyst M.-L. von Franz depicts the devouring mother as a strong mother who may sometimes prefer the death of her son to his independence and leaving home (especially if she is to lose him for another woman).[9] Society, too, as a mother figure, displays similar traits when it tends to suppress or ridicule those who ask deep questions or to apply different measures of official and non-official punishments on those who live in radical different ways or subjects the approved social and political consensus, or higher authority, to skepticism. McGehee & Thomas explain this “devouring” or, in their words (speaking of a collectivity like the Church), the “negative” mother, as that which “does not want us to have a new idea, because we might come to a new way of thinking, and heaven forbid, grow up and leave home. Under the thumb of the negative mother, we suffer self-alienation when some nascent inner authority urges us to a new thought or attitude.”[10] And that kind of external collective will is exactly what encounters Ragin and smashes his personality.
However, it is interesting that the Russian director of the film Palata No. 6 [Ward No. 6] (2009), Karen Shakhnazarov, changes significantly the end of the short story’s plot. Although the film’s script is generally faithful to Chekhov’s text, the epilogue is radically different. Shakhnazarov introduces a force that can virtually counterbalance the ruthless authority that condemned Ragin to insanity and consequently to isolation and death. His narrative makes a use of the feminine element in a way that opposes the negative influence of the “social mother.” He inserts, thus, a feminine figure, a positive one, that can arguably be considered motherly, or, in the context of the movie, has implications that may refer to an eternal feminine presence who takes the initiative to save Ragin from isolation and psychic seclusion. Mysteriously, the female patient (1:19:17) has the same face (Anna Siniakina) of one of the two nuns who appear at the outset of the movie (while the other nun appears is the same figure that dances in the same scene with Gromov), as though the film is telling the audience that there is indeed some mystical and spiritual connection between the present and the mystical Russian past, and that this young lady (along with her other female colleague) represents a feminine savior figure. Thus, the face who, historically, helped in putting the foundation of the chapel that became later a monastery then a hospital, appears now, or returns, to complete a new mission, albeit not having much power to change the whole present (Ragin will probably remain mute while continuing to live in the asylum).
Moreover, Shakhnazarov seems to introduce this feminine figure, who approaches the mute Ragin, as an opposite of Nikita (Viktor Solov’ev), who takes the role of the guardian of order in the hospital, and who is the one who beat Ragin and made him mute after suffering a stroke. And while Chekhov makes Nikita, the direct cause of Ragin’s death, Shakhnazarov offers an alternative path towards his open end of the movie. The female patient who bears the same face of the nun appears during the party, which is supervised and led by Nikita, who in his turn has the same face of the ancient monk who founded the chapel. A lot of things can be said about this contrast; one of them is that Shakhanazrov may be demonstrating how death (Nikita) and life (the female patient) emerge from the same ancient source, and that the present inherits history and can transform it. One can even question the masculine and feminine dichotomy in such an image, and the transformation of an active revivalist force (the monk as founder) in history to a passive protective force in the present (Nikita as a guardian, a discipliner, a representative of a collective mother figure).
Conclusion
Although in Chekhov’s short story Ragin becomes a victim of a devouring Mother, embodied by the common voice of his society, that does not in fact reflect any sobornic spirit, he still has, according to Shakhnazarov’s movie, hope in an indefinite future, given to him by a saving mother, and eternal feminine, figure that takes the initiative to save him from his mental decay and psychological isolation. Interestingly, this benevolent mother figure approaches Ragin while he lives his most hopeless and passive presence, whereas the devouring mother who ruined his life intervened when he was in his most active and lively phase in his life, namely, when he was taking serious actual steps to change his life-long philosophical and psychological views and attitudes. Consequently, this story and its filmization offer an impressive example of how Russian literature demonstrates the powerful repression that the individual personality endures in empirical society, and how hope may come through salvific interventions of another individual personalities that challenge the common voice of the social collectivity.
[1] See G. M. Hamburg and Randall A. Poole, “Introduction: The Humanist Tradition in Russian Philosophy,” in A History of Russian Philosophy 1830–1930: Faith, Reason, and the Defense of Human Dignity, ed. G. M. Hamburg and Randall A. Poole (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 4–5. See also Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, “Religious Humanism in the Russian Silver Age,” in A History of Russian Philosophy 1830–1930: Faith, Reason, and the Defense of Human Dignity, ed. G. M. Hamburg and Randall A. Poole (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 227.
[2] Richard Sakwa, Russian Politics and Society, 5th ed. (London & NY: Routledge, 2021), 483. See also Olof Petersson, Politikens möjligheter: Har folkstyrelsen någon framtid? (Stockholm: SNS Förlag, 1996), 58ff.
[3] See for example Fr. Aleksandr Men’ commentary on this issue in Fr. Aleksandr Men’, Russian Religious Philosophy: 1989–1990 Lectures, trans. Fr. S. Janos (Mohrsville, PA: frsj Publications, 2015), 12, 36, where he declares that Khomiakov’s concept of the sobornost’ is in fact politically anarchic, which inspired some Russian anarchists of the 19th century, indicating that the sobornost’ is a third way between individualism and collectivism. Compare, for instance, with Nicolas Berdyaev, The Beginning and the End, trans. R. M. French, 2nd ed. (San Rafael, CA: Semantron Press, 2009), 131.
[4] See Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 581, https://archive.org/details/dostoevskywriter00fran/page/580/mode/2up.
[5] Gracia Fellmeth, “Learning from Ward Number Six,” British Journal of General Practice 64, no. 619 (February 2014), https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3905435/
[6] See Marie-Louise von Franz, The Problem of the Puer Aeternus (Toronto, Canada: Inner City Books, 2000), 7–11.
[7] Cf. Von Franz, 19. See also Fellmeth’s article quoted previously, “When Ragin’s sanity is called into question and he is admitted to his own ward, the physical and mental distress he suffers enable him to finally truly understand the lived ‘realities’ of Gromov and the other patients. Ragin renounces his previously held views and wholeheartedly takes on Gromov’s philosophy.”
[8] See Chapters X and XI in Anton Chekhov, “Ward No. 6,” trans. Constance Garnett, The Project Gutenberg Collection of Short Stories by Chekhov, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/57333/57333-h/57333-h.htm#Alink2H_4_0002.
[9] Von Franz, 23.
[10] J. Pittman McGehee and Damon J. Thomas, The Invisible Church: Finding Spirituality Where You Are (Westport, Connecticut & London, UK: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2009), 35.