figure
Mikhail Sergeich
also: Михаил Сергеич
A stout, fair-haired, fashionable Moscow psychiatrist with a large practice, who receives Vasilyev's collapse as a routine case history -- taking a hereditary and personal anamnesis, noting 'forced mental labor' and overwork as contributing causes -- and, when Vasilyev demands to know whether prostitution is an evil, answers only that no one disputes it, before dosing him with drops, examining his skin sensitivity and knee reflexes, and sending him off with prescriptions for potassium bromide and morphine.
Reading notes
- A Nervous Breakdown §186 He finished in '82, and already has an enormous practice
The medical student's social credentialing of the psychiatrist before the visit -- his degree year, his size of practice, his easy manner with students -- frames Mikhail Sergeich as a fashionable, successful specialist rather than a marginal or dubious figure, which sharpens the story's irony: it is precisely mainstream, well-regarded, competent 1880s psychiatric practice that receives Vasilyev's moral crisis as routine casework.
- A Nervous Breakdown §188 smiled with only one cheek
A small, recurring physical detail (repeated verbatim at loc 198) that becomes emblematic of the doctor's whole manner -- polite, practiced, and only ever partially, professionally engaged; the asymmetric smile stands in, economically, for the story's larger critique of clinical detachment applied to a crisis the doctor cannot or will not meet as a moral question.
- A Nervous Breakdown §191 How old are you?
Chekhov gives the doctor's method genuine professional competence and gives Vasilyev's anguish genuine weight simultaneously, without the narration endorsing either the doctor's reduction of the crisis to pathology or, straightforwardly, Vasilyev's own reading of his reaction as the only sane response; this ambiguity is the story's famous, deliberately unresolved final note.
- A Nervous Breakdown §196 secret vices, blows to the head, infatuations, peculiarities, unusual attachments
The standard battery of etiological questions in period psychiatric case-taking, aimed at uncovering hereditary taint, physical trauma, or 'degenerate' predispositions per contemporary (largely Charcot- and Krafft-Ebin-influenced) continental psychiatric theory; the narrator's own aside -- that 'half the questions... might go unanswered without the slightest harm to one's health' -- is one of the story's few moments of direct authorial skepticism about the medical apparatus being applied to Vasilyev.
- A Nervous Breakdown §198 Forced mental labor, overwork
The doctor's diagnosis reframes Vasilyev's moral horror at the brothels as a secondary complication of academic overexertion (two university faculties, an award-winning dissertation) rather than a response to what he actually witnessed -- the exact substitution of pathology for ethics that Vasilyev protests explicitly two sections later (loc 206).
- A Nervous Breakdown §204 Are you a psychiatrist?
Vasilyev's blunt question crystallizes the story's central confrontation: having just asked whether prostitution is an evil and received only a doctor's noncommittal, professionally neutral non-answer ('who disputes it?'), he demands to know whether he is being treated as a patient for having a moral reaction at all. The doctor's flat, unembarrassed 'Yes, sir, a psychiatrist' declines to engage the challenge on its own terms.
- A Nervous Breakdown §208 potassium bromide ... morphine
The closing detail that Vasilyev has taken both before ('All of this he had taken before!') suggests this is not his first such episode or consultation, quietly reframing the whole story as one recurrence in an ongoing pattern rather than a single, isolated crisis.