70). In a rush of concern for her, invites her to call on him, but when she calls, sympathizing with his deep unhappiness, he brutally insults her. Her departure asserts a dignity he acknowledges for no one; he claims to be "satisfied with my theory about the use of insults and hatred, in spite of the fact that I myself almost fell ill from anguish" (Dostoevsky 88). But the Notes author is a victim of his pose of nihilism, declaring the universe absurd but bungling every attempt to embrace it. In other words, Dostoevsky is attacking cowardly, poseuristic nihilism at others' expense and for some other way of being-in-the-world.
In Ward Number Six, Chekhov treats nihilism in a portrait of an aging doctor whose backwater practice has failed to invest his life with meaning. Ragin has become a creature of professional habit, gradually withdrawing medical expertise from the village itself. If life lacks meaning, surely there the mad and sick don't need curing. He does not insist on clean conditions for the local hospital, too bored to fight the bureaucracy.
What does it all matter? There are antiseptics, there is Koch, there's Pasteur--yet the essence of things has not changed a bit, sickness and mortality still remain. People arrange dances and shows for the lunatics, but they still don't let them loose. So it's all a snare and delusion, and between the best Viennese clinic and my hospital there is no real difference at all (Chekhov 40).
Ragin becomes intrigued by one Gromov, a former civil servant who has had a breakdown and who speaks the language of dialectical social criticism: "You . . . have never suffered, you've only battened, leech-like, on others' woes, whereas I've never stopped suffering from my day of birth until now" (Chekhov 51). Gromov may be crazy, but he reaches Ragin's feelings; when Ragin continues visiting Gromov for conversation, medical colleagues become concerned. An extended vacation with an insufferable loc...