This is a long story–nearly a novella, and not a good one, in my opinion. Oddly, though, it was the title story of the first Chekhov collection to appear in English, so obviously somebody thought it was good stuff.
It’s a tiresome portrait of a tiresome, ambitious man. The story hinges on visitations by a hallucinated monk, clad all in black.
Henry James supposedly said: “Describe a dream, lose a reader.” I would add a correlative: Describe a hallucination, lose my interest.
In this particular case, the hallucinated monk is a kind of pre-Freudian psychologist. Woof.
The structure of the story is weirdly disjointed. A man named Kovrin returns to the estate of his adopted father, who is a passionate botanist. While there, Kovrin works incessantly on some nameless project, but still has enough time and attention to fall in love with his adoptive father’s biological daughter. They marry, despite their incompatibilities; Kovrin works incessantly, imperiling his marriage.
And it goes on from there, a kind of spiral of misery, each gyration punctuated by a visit from the Black Monk.
The first and foremost weakness of the story is the dialog with the Black Monk, who drones on and on about the nature of man, the meaning of life, etc. etc. etc. Here he is, quibbling with Kovrin about a Latin adage:
“Not everything the Greeks and Romans said is true. Exaltation, enthusiasm, ecstasy–all that distinguishes prophets, poets, martyrs for the idea, from the common folk–is repellent to the animal side of man–that is, his physical health.”
Okay, whatever you say.
Even more irritating is the way that Kovrin and the monk discuss (frequently!) the fact that the monk is just a hallucination: “I exist in your imagination, and your imagination is part of nature, so I exist in nature.”
Eesh.
“The Black Monk” also comes up very short in its world-building: The estate of Kovrin’s adoptive father is rendered muddily. It’s spooky and forbidding on the one hand; beautiful and resplendent with gardens on the other. Its stucco is flaky; its doorman wears a swallowtail coat. Every detail seems to be counterweighted with a contradictory detail, and it never adds up to a coherent whole. It also does not feel in any way like it was once the home of Kovrin.
Finally, there is the matter of Kovrin’s great ambitions, which are never described. He works tirelessly, to the point of making himself ill, but to what purpose? He holds a masters degree, but in what? He works on “articles.” He reads and writes “a great deal.” Oh, and he studies Italian. Somehow this activity is so taxing as to threaten his health and well-being? It’s ridiculous. It’s annoying as hell to be told that this kind of work is somehow enough to make a man ill.
It’s very odd to think that a man like Chekhov would consider (or at least seem to consider) a man like Kovrin to be working himself to exhaustion. Because Chekhov was a guy who worked. Having grown up in a family that essentially had fled its creditors under cover of darkness, he was a key provider of financial support to his parents even when he was a medical student, dashing off sketches that he sold to weeklies in Moscow. In later years, when he was a successful author and man about town, he not only continued to practice medicine, he acted as a medical examiner to make extra cash.
Not only that, “The Black Monk” was composed the year that Chekhov took a research trip to the prison enclave on Sakhalin island, interviewing hundreds if not thousands of convicts and their catastrophically impoverished families. How could a man like Chekhov look at this dull fop Kovrin and his silly research and his Italian studies and say, “This man is working hard!”
Finally, how could a modern reader take this claptrap seriously???
Blargh!
READ THIS? READ THAT!
Well, after a dud like “The Black Monk,” it’s hard to know what to recommend. How about another tale with supernatural overtones? “The Shoemaker and the Devil” is far from Chekhov’s best but it’s a better (and way shorter) than “The Black Monk,” and it offers up a much more interesting hallucination than philosophical monk.
A Chekhov Circus 