CHAPTER 6 - Schizophrenia, as was Said
At half past one in the morning a bearded doctor in a white coat enters the examination room of a new psychiatric clinic on the Moscow riverbank. Three orderlies keep watch over Ivan Nikolaevich Homeless, who is seated on a couch, his arms and legs untied but his head still bound with napkins. The agitated poet Riukhin, also present, greets the doctor timidly. The doctor examines Homeless, asking his age and why he is there. Homeless answers angrily, denouncing the staff as “idiots” and accusing Riukhin of being a “giftless goof Sashka,” a “little kulak” masquerading as a proletarian. He describes being seized, tied, and dragged to the clinic, his nudity from a swim in the Moscow River, and his frantic quest to catch “the consultant” Berlioz, confusing the composer with the Massolit secretary who was allegedly run over by a tram at Patriarch’s Ponds.
Homeless then launches into a bizarre, paranoid monologue: he claims the consultant is mixed with “unclean powers,” that he personally spoke with Pontius Pilate, and that an icon he pinned to his chest frightened the powers. He demands a telephone to call the police, shouting for a squad of motorbikes with machine‑guns to capture the foreign consultant. The doctor’s female assistant fills out a form, extracts a sealed ampoule, and an ether‑filled syringe is prepared. When Homeless attempts to flee, orderlies restrain him; the doctor sedates him with ether, injects him, and after a struggle places him back on the couch. He is diagnosed by the doctor as suffering from locomotor and speech excitation, delirious interpretations—a “complex case” of schizophrenia compounded by alcoholism. The doctor orders that Homeless be moved to a private room, number 117, with a nurse.
Later, Riukhin is placed in a truck and driven toward Moscow. During the ride he experiences a hallucinatory landscape of fences, wood piles, and the river, reflecting on his own madness and the loss of reason. He hears internal monologues about his poetic mediocrity, the futility of glory, and a growing sense of existential despair. The truck stops at a boulevard where a metal statue of a man watches indifferently; Riukhin, in a fit of anger, attacks the statue.
The scene then shifts to Griboedov’s veranda, now empty except for a few remaining patrons and the master of ceremonies wearing a skullcap. Riukhin, still clutching the napkins from the clinic, is greeted by Archibald Archibaldovich, who offers him a glass of vodka. Riukhin, exhausted and disillusioned, retreats to a corner, drinks glass after glass, and contemplates the irretrievable loss of the night, recognizing that nothing can be set right and that forgetting is the only recourse.