Extreme Chekhov: The Black Monk

Black Monk is definitely one of the strangest and most puzzling of Anton Chekhov's stories; it's another early 1890s example of Chekhov's exploring somewhat longer forms, compressing novelistic material into the story or at most the novella format - whereas his earlier stories typically explored a single action or moment, the mid-career stories explore the course of a lifetime in a tight, efficient manner - breaking story up into several short, enumerated sections. Ward No. 6 a pefect example - but The Black Monk is similar - the first 10 or so enumerated sections following the course of a courtship and marriage between the scholar Kovrin and the daughter of his mentor, Olga (?). Only the last section jumps forward quite a bit in time as we see Kovrin after breakup of marriage, late in his career, and near death. Several aspects of this story are strange and intriguing, notably Kovrin's relation to the Black Monk - a legendary figure who appears as a vision and of whom it's said he will return in 1000 years; Kovrin has visions in which he sees and speaks with the Black Monk, who tells him that he is a special genious who should persue his creative vision and not become part of ordinary humanity; these visions, at first, give Kovrin peace and self-confidence, but after his marriage, his wife, a highly emotional and fragile very young woman, sees that he is distracted and at last sees him talking to an empty chair and she (and her domineering father) are sure that K. is insane; they urge treatments on him, and then later we see him living on father's orchard but a dull, ordinary man who believes he has betrayed his vision and his gift. This story, like Ward No. 6, explores the boundaries of madness - what seems to be madness to conventional society may be a form of creativity or greatness - or maybe not, maybe K. is just simply insane, without the potential for greatness. Plenty of geniouses were no doubt considered insane in their day; and plenty of mentally ill people believe they are seeing visions and that they are called to greatness. This story is a rare example of Chekhov's working in a Dostoyevsky-like palette - highly emotional people, mental derangement, visions, failure on a grand scale - except in Dostoyevsky the protagonist would be more likely an epileptic rather than consumptive and would be a political visionary rather than a scholar or artist - and the suffering wife would be more saintly and less of a neurotic. In his later novellas, e.g., Lady with a Lapdog, Chekhov perfected the use of novel-like material in the story format; the Black Monk is fascinating but a little uneven and hysterical in tone - Chekhov pushing himself to the extremes of emotion, for him.



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