Anton Chekhov's "The Black Monk": An Example of the Fantastic?

Anton Chekhov's "The Black Monk": An Example of the Fantastic?Author(s): Claire WhiteheadSource: The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 85, No. 4 (Oct., 2007), pp. 601-628Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25479132 .

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THE SLAVONIC

AND EAST EUROPEAN

REVIEW

Volume 85, Number 4 -

October 2007

Anton Chekhov's The Black Monk:

An Example of the Fantastic?

CLAIRE WHITEHEAD

Introduction

Chekhov wrote Chernyi monakh {The Black Monk) whilst at his Melikhovo estate in 1893 and the story was first published in the January 1894 volume of the journal Artist, in spite of the editor's reservations regard ing its quality.1 In two letters written around the time of publication, Chekhov indicated, perhaps somewhat disingenuously, that the story could be categorized quite straightforwardly. Writing to his friend and

publisher, Suvorin, on 18 December 1893, he described the subject matter of The Black Monk thus: '[you] will find the description of a young man, suffering from megalomania'; addressing the critic,

Menshikov, the following month, he stated: 'it is a medical story, an

historia morbi. Its subject is megalomania.' However, the story can also be traced to a more personal source than simply Chekhov's medical

knowledge. Writing again to Suvorin on 25 January 1894 in response to concerns expressed by his friend's wife, he reveals:

I wrote The Black Monk in a mood of cold reflection, without experiencing any depressed thoughts. I simply felt like depicting delusions of grandeur. The monk who scuds across the field appeared to me in a dream and, upon

waking up in the morning, I told Misha about it. So you can tell Anna Ivanovna [Suvorin's wife] that, thank God, poor Anton Pavlovich has not

Claire Whitehead is Lecturer in Russian at the University of St Andrews.

1 A. P. Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v tridtsati tomakh, Moscow, 1974-83,

Sochineniia, vol. 8, p. 489. F. A. Kumanin thought the story 'watery and unnatural', but considered that not to publish a work of Chekhov's would be 'awkward'.

2 Ibid, p. 488.



602 anton ghekhov's the black monk

yet taken leave of his senses, but simply tucks into a good supper and as a result sees monks in his dreams.3

Despite the avowed 'cold reflection' with which Chekhov wrote the

story, it has caused considerable consternation amongst his readers ever since its publication. In 1894, Menshikov wrote to the author to say that he had been terrified by the figure of the monk and to ask whether

people actually experienced hallucinations of the type seen by the

protagonist, Kovrin.4 Six years later, Chekhov's contemporary, N.

Mikhailovskii, expressed the confusion occasioned to him by a reading of The Black Monk:

But what does the story itself mean? What is its sense? Is it an illustration of the saying: 'anything for a quiet life', and which advocates that we should not prevent people from going out of their minds, as doctor Ragin says in Ward No. 6? Let those suffering from megalomania continue to consider themselves great,

? in this there is happiness because they are content in themselves and do not know the grief and sorrow of life ... Or is it an indication of the fatal shallowness, dullness and poverty of reality which we should simply accept and adapt to, because any attempt to rise above it is threatened by madness? Is the 'black monk' a benevolent genius who calms exhausted people by means of dreams and ideas about the role of 'God's chosen ones', the benefactors of mankind, or, rather, is he an evil genius

who, with treacherous flattery, drags people into a world of illness, unhap

piness and woe for those closest to them and, finally, into death? I do not know.5

Elsewhere in this article, Mikhailovskii admits that he encounters further difficulties in deciding whether the sympathies of Chekhov's narrator lie predominantly with Kovrin or with the Pesotskii family. This debate surrounding Chekhov's sympathies and the interpretation of the figure of the monk dominated Soviet critical reaction to the story for many years. Whilst numerous critics, almost in turn, argued that Chekhov sided with either one or the other, only V. B. Kataev claimed the more justifiable middle ground by suggesting that the author sides

with neither party definitively.6 Outside this debate, far more stimulat

ing Soviet contributions were made to the interpretation of The Black Monk by N. Fortunatov, who carefully details the work's 'musicality', M. Semanova, who investigates its poetics and I. Sukhikh, who focuses on the characters' pursuit of the illusory.7 In the West, the story has

Ibid, pp. 490-91. Ibid, pp. 492-93 b Ibid, p. 494.

V. B. Kataev, Proza Ckekhova: Problemy interpretatsii, Moscow, 1979. 7 N. Fortunatov, 'Muzykal'nost' chekhovskoi prozy (Opyt anaJiza formy)', Filologicheskie

nauki: Nauchnye doklady Vysshei shkoly, 3, 1971, pp. 14-25; M. Semanova, 'O poetike "Chernogo monakha" A. P. Chekhova', in V. Sedegov (ed.), Khudozhestvennyi metod A. P. Chekova, Rostov,

1982, pp. 54-67; I. Sukhikh, 'Zagadochnyi Chernyi monakh\ Voprosy literatwy, 6, 1983, pp. 109-25.



CLAIRE WHITEHEAD 603

proved to be a relatively popular subject for critics who have inter

preted it in terms of its spatial construction (O'Toole), its testimony to Chekhov's interest in gardens (Conrad, Rayfield), its use of symbolism (Debreczeny), its ironic treatment of late nineteenth-century preoccupa tions (Cornwell), its exploitation of the sonata form (Bartlett), its revela tion of Gothic imagery (Komaromi) and its engagement with the legacy of Darwin (Finke).

Alongside these various approaches, another possible reading of The Black Monk is suggested but it is one which, to date, has never been

quite satisfactorily pursued. In 1894, Iu. Nikolaev compared the story unfavourably with Nikolai Gogol"s ^ap^ sumasshedshego (Diary of a

Madman, 1835) and dismissed it as an unsuccessful example of that most popular of nineteenth-century literary genres: the fantastic.9 The

present article disagrees with this conclusion and argues instead that The Black Monk can be seen to represent an intriguingly original example of this genre. In Russia, the fantastic arguably enjoyed its

heyday in the 1830s and 1840s with the publication of works such as Pushkin's Pikovaia dama (The Queen of Spades, 1834), Zagoskin's Nezhdannye gosti (Unexpected Guests, also 1834) and Odoevskii's Kosmorama (The Cosmorama, 1839), amongst many others. Nevertheless, later examples do exist (Turgenev's Prizraki [Phantoms, 1864] and Garshin's Krasnyi tsvetok [The Red Flower, 1883], for instance) and Chekhov's depiction of the black monk, whose status in the story world is profoundly ambi

guous, is just one of the elements which can be seen to align the story with this genre. As has been discussed elsewhere, it is Tzvetan Todorov who provides the most workable definition of the fantastic as a genre governed by the aesthetic of reader hesitation between a natural and

8 L. Michael O'Toole, Structure, Style and Interpretation in the Russian Short Story, New Haven,

CT, 1982 (hereafter, Structure, Style and Interpretation in the Russian Short Story), pp. 161-79; Joseph L. Conrad, 'Vestiges of Romantic Gardens and Folklore Devils in Chekhov's

"Verochka", "The Kiss", and "The Black Monk'", in Thomas Eekman (ed.), Critical Essays on Anton Chekhov, Boston, MA, 1989, pp. 78-92; Donald Rayfield, 'Orchards and Gardens in

Chekhov', Slavonic and East European Review, 67, 1989, 4, pp. 530-45 (hereafter, 'Orchards and Gardens in Chekhov'); Paul Debreczeny, 'The Black Monk: Chekhov's Version of

Symbolism', in R. L. Jackson, Reading Chekhov's Text, Evanston, IL, 1993, pp. 179-88; Neil

Cornwell, 'Two Visionary Storytellers of 1894: R. L. Stevenson and Anton Chekhov', in Peter Liebregts and Wim Tigges (eds), Beauty and the Beast: Christina Rossetti, Walter Pater, R. L. Stevenson and their Contemporaries, Amsterdam, 1996, pp. 171-85 (hereafter, 'Two Visionary Storytellers'); Rosamund Bartlett, 'Sonata Form in Chekhov's The Black Monk', in Andrew Baruch Wachtel (ed.), Intersections and Transpositions: Russian Music, Literature and Society, Evanston, IL, 1998, pp. 58-72 (hereafter, 'Sonata Form in Chekhov's The Black Monk'); Ann Komaromi, 'Unknown Force: Gothic Realism in Chekhov's "The Black Monk'", in Neil Cornwell (ed.), The Gothic-Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature, Amsterdam, 1999 (hereafter, The Gothic-Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature), pp. 257-75;

Michael Finke, Seeing Chekhov: Life and Art, Ithaca, NY, 2005, pp. 120 28. 9 A. P. Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v tridtsati tomakh, Moscow, 1974-83,

Sochineniia, vol. 8, p. 494.



604 anton ghekhov's the black monk

supernatural interpretation for narrative events.10 In the light of this

definition, an analysis of the discursive techniques used to problematize the reader's interpretation in The Black Monk, as well as a discussion of some of the most significant thematic preoccupations, will reveal notable points of convergence between this story and the fantastic. At the same time, by comparing The Black Monk to a number of other

stories, it will be shown how Chekhov's work engages intertextually, both through similarity and difference, with other well known examples of the European fantastic.11 Whilst it is not the intention in what follows to claim that Chekhov's story should be classified as a degree-zero example of the fantastic (if such a text even exists), it is hoped that

detailed consideration of The Black Monk from this particular perspective will reveal how well acquainted Chekhov was with the principles of the genre and how skilfully he succeeded in turning a number of his trademark devices to the creation of ambiguity and the exploitation of hesitation.

Status of the Fictional World: Ambiguous Foundations

A general consensus exists amongst critics that one of the keys to the

functioning of the fantastic is its relationship to realism.12 If a work is to

provoke hesitation concerning apparently supernatural events, it needs first to convince the reader that the world in which such events occur

is essentially 'natural'. Therefore, the creation of a mimetic fictional

world, which is the defining feature of realist texts, is also a vital

preliminary step in fantastic narratives. The Black Monk succeeds in per

suading the reader to see a mimetic relationship between real world and story world by means of the nature of the description of this latter and of the possession by the narrative voice of certain attributes.

However, the actual status of Chekhov's fictional world is complicated by the realization that both it, and the voice which describes it, are far more unstable than might initially appear to be the case.13

Paradoxically, however, whilst perhaps appearing to threaten the key

10 Claire Whitehead, The Fantastic in France and Russia in the Nineteenth Century, Oxford, 2006

(hereafter, The Fantastic in France and Russia in the Nineteenth Century), pp. 6-7. 11 In particular, comparison will be made with A. S. Pushkin's The Queen of Spades, V. F.

Odoevskii's Sil'jida [The Sylph, 1837) and Guy de Maupassant's Le Horla (1887). Martine Atz

has previously compared The Black Monk with Garshin's story in <The Red Flower of V. M.

Garsin and The Black Monk of A. P. Cechov: A Survey of One Hundred Years of Literary Criticism', Russian Literature, 20, 1986, pp. 267-96 (hereafter, l1he Red Flower of V. M.

Garsin'). 12 For example, Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: Literature of Subversion, New York and London,

1981 and Christine Brooke-Rose, A Rhetoric of the Unreal: Studies in Narrative and Structure,

Especially of the Fantastic, Oxford, 1981. The inherent instability of Chekhov's fictional worlds is shown particularly clearly by

Wolf Schmid's article 'Mnimoe prozrenie Ivana Velikopol'skogo ('Student')' in his Proza kak

poeziia: stat'i 0 povestvovanii v russkoi literature, St Petersburg, 1994, pp. 167-83.




mimetic relationship, the ambiguity which results from such instability merely nourishes further the fantastic elements in the story.

The Black Monk is narrated by a heterodiegetic voice which, in the

opening pages of the story, appears to perform its task in a relatively

straightforward and informative fashion. The first words of the narrative provide the reader with the full name of the protagonist (Andrei Vasil'ich Kovrin) and his profession, 'master of arts'. After

having revealed the circumstances of Kovrin's retreat from town to

the Pesotskii estate, the narrator then succinctly characterizes the

protagonist's former guardian as 'a famous Russian horticulturalist'.14 The reader's belief in the reliability of this narrative voice is reinforced when it takes the trouble to provide two sets of details which do much to construct a resemblance between fictional and extra-fictional worlds. In the first instance, we are told that Kovrin goes to his family estate in April and stays there for three weeks before going to Pesotskii's Borisovska estate. Such specific temporal reference is an effective tool in

persuading the reader that the rules which function in the fictional world resemble those in the real world. It can also be contended that details of time are used to promote a sense of the rational, as the frame work of time is just one of the ways in which man attempts to impose order on the universe he inhabits (as Pesotskii arguably does by plant ing the figure '1862' in his garden). Secondly, the narrative voice draws a geographical equivalence between fictional and extra-fictional worlds

by noting that some seventy versts separate Kovrin's estate from Borisovska. Distance, like time, in the manner in which it allows man to structure his relationship to the world numerically (and hence, perhaps, scientifically), functions as a rational, organizing framework.

In one sense, this heterodiegetic voice further encourages the reader's belief in its reliability by displaying the omniscience which it is conventionally expected to possess. It shows itself to be capable of

describing the inner thoughts and emotions of the characters, particu larly Kovrin. Indeed, revealing the type of 'objective' narration which

A. P. Chudakov has identified as being Chekhov's dominant method in works written after 1888, it is often difficult to state whether descrip tions are actually given from the point of view of the narrator or of the protagonist.15 For instance, whilst ostensibly provided by the voice of the narrator, the description of the grounds of the Pesotskii estate is coloured throughout by emotions triggered by Kovrin's childhood

memories of this space. On at least one occasion this convergence of

14 A. P. Chekhov, The Black Monk in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v tridtsati tomakh,

Moscow, 1974-83, Sochineniia, vol. 8, p. 226. All translations are my own. Henceforth page numbers refer to this text.

15 A. P. Chudakov, Poetika Chekhova, Moscow, 1971, particularly pp. 61-87.



6o6 anton chekhov's the black monk

narrator/protagonist perspective spills over into a clear instance of free indirect discourse as the impression of the ornamental part of the

garden prompts the exclamation: 'What sort of caprices, elaborate monstrosities and mockeries of nature were not here!' (p. 227). How

ever, as Chudakov reveals in his reading of Poprygun'ia {The Grasshopper, 1892), it is possible to detect the presence of free indirect speech (betray ing the consciousness of the protagonist) in a great deal of what osten

sibly appears to be third-person-voiced narration. In the case of The Black Monk, therefore, the apparent omniscience of the heterodiegetic voice can, in a contrary sense, be taken to be a more disruptive tool where the boundaries between usually distinct consciousnesses become

porous. The 'objective' manner of narration thus has interesting consequences upon interpretation later in the story, as will be discussed

subsequently. The dual temporality of present and past, which is first revealed

during this description of the gardens where the account of their

present appearance is augmented by an account of Kovrin's memory of

them, is a crucial element in The Black Monk. It is, moreover, a centrally complicating factor which can be interpreted in various, even contra

dictory, ways. In terms of the characteristics attributed to the narrative

voice, this ability not only to record Kovrin's present emotions but also to retrieve the memories evoked by the gardens can be seen to promote a sense of the narrator's reliability. It suggests that his acquaintance with the protagonist dates back to a point prior to the chronological beginning of the narrative and thereby implies that he must possess

ample information concerning him. With regard to the creation of a mimetic fictional world, this intermingling of present and past moments can also be seen to create a sense of greater temporal depth which

appears to the reader to be more 'real'. More significantly, as Daria

Kirjanov has suggested, the poetics of memory are crucial to an under

standing of the different stages of Kovrin's relationship to his sense of self and belonging.16 On numerous occasions throughout the story,

memories appear to be triggers for events, whether real or apparently unreal. It is here, however, that the motifs of dual temporality and

memory become problematic when, as will be seen later, the apparent status of events, and nature of relationships, is undermined by the

acutely porous boundaries which exist in this fictional world between

past and present. Related to this, and adding a further layer of

complexity, is the fact that, throughout the story, a notable equivalence is drawn between the usually distinct concepts of 'I remember' and 'I understand'. In a genre which is predicated upon an inability

16 See Daria A. Kirjanov, Chekhov and the Poetics of Memory, New York, 2000 (hereafter,

Poetics of Memory), pp. 103-16.




definitively to attribute either a natural or supernatural interpretation to events, it is to be expected that the notion of 'understanding' will

play a pivotal role. And yet, in The Black Monk, the lexical field related to 'understand/remember' is even more dominant and complex than

usual. Expressions related to this field occur no less than eighteen times

in Chekhov's story and these are very frequently aligned with the issue

of memory.17 It would appear that Chekhov complicates the question of understanding, for both protagonist and reader, to an even greater

degree than is usual in the fantastic by choosing to intertwine it with the function of memory. This is a point to which I will return later in this article.

This duality of both intention and effect also encompasses the extended description of the appearance of the gardens and orchards at Borisovska given in the early stages of the story. On the one hand, in spite of the reservations expressed by some critics regarding the use

of detail in The Black Monk relative to other Chekhov stories, the obser vation of features in the gardens encourages the reader to believe that this scene is one which could be encountered in the extrafictional

world.18 By having his narrator refer to numerous different flowers and trees and describe the layout of the gardens in technical terms, Chekhov clearly uses his well-documented knowledge of horticulture to

promote a sense of realism. On the other hand, however, as Rosamund Bartlett has pointed out, these descriptions can be read inversely because 'Pesotsky, as a gardener, represents "nature," yet his horticul

ture, particularly where the ornamental part of the garden is concerned

(the narrator actually speaks of its "travesties of nature") is shown to be a highly ambiguous manifestation of human "culture"'.19 Donald

Rayfield concurs when he notes that 'the garden of The Black Monk is almost unbelievable, but just manages to stay credible'.20 Moreover, certain elements within this description ensure that the question of the status of the natural world becomes one of hugely symbolic significance

17 Of these eighteen instances, the vast majority belong or relate to Kovrin (eleven) with

Tania accounting for four and Pesotskii only three. The intersection between memory and

understanding can clearly be seen in the following two extracts, the first spoken by Kovrin and the second by Tania: 'Even as a child here I used to sneeze from the smoke [...] but even now / do not understand how this smoke can prevent a frost' (p. 228); 'I remember that when you used to come to us for holidays or just like that then the house would become somehow fresher and lighter as if the covers had been taken off the candelabras and the furniture. I was a child then but I still understood* (p. 230) (my italics). 18

I. Sukhikh notes that: 'the environment in which the Chekhovian heroes in Chernyi monakh exist seems to be too approximate, conditional, as if painted in watercolours com

pared to his usual, extremely detailed manner of depicting everyday life', in 'Zagadochnyi Chernyi monakh\ p. 116.

19 Rosamund Bartlett, 'Sonata Form in Chekhov's The Black Monk', p. 65. 20 Donald Rayfield, 'Orchards and Gardens in Chekhov', p. 536.



608 anton chekhov's the black monk

to the story. Whilst the shaping of nature in the formal part of the

garden is ornamentally grotesque, man's attempt at dominion over the natural world is far more rationally and structurally informed in Pesotskii's orchard. We read that:

Here the trees were arranged as if on a chess board, in straight and true

lines, just like ranks of soldiers, and this strict and pedantic regularity and the fact that the trees were all of the same height and all had exacdy the same

canopies and trunks made them look monotonous and even

depressing, (pp. 227-28)

The implication in this description is that, in his horticultural work, Pesotskii attempts to tame nature and subjugate it so that it serves his own purposes of productivity and profit. In the figure of Pesotskii, man

has attempted to rationalize nature and impose an unnatural order

upon it.21 He has arguably imposed similar strictures upon his daugh ter, Tania, who is described in terms which emphasize her lack of free dom: 'her broad, very serious, chilled face with its thick black brows and the raised coat collar which prevented her from moving freely [...] touched [Kovrin]' (p. 228). What the development of The Black Monk can therefore perhaps be seen to illustrate, with its description of the incursions of the apparently irrational, is nature's reassertion of its own

primacy and its breaking of the shackles of scientific rationalism. Kovrin's encounters with the black monk might be considered to be the antithesis of Pesotskii's husbandry in the orchard: through them, nature

proves that it still contains mysteries beyond the understanding of the

nineteenth-century rationalist. One final aspect of the indications given regarding the nature of

the story world in the early paragraphs of The Black Monk needs to be discussed: the characterization of the main protagonist. From the

outset, and crucially before his first encounter with the black monk, the reader is prompted to harbour contradictory expectations about

Kovrin's personality. The first line of the story informs the reader that Kovrin 'had exhausted himself and upset his nerves' (p. 226). Just as

Pesotskii obsesses about the maintenance of the garden, Kovrin appears to be monomaniacally driven in his work:

In the country he continued to lead as nervous and agitated a life as in town. He read and wrote a great deal, studied Italian and, when out

walking, he would think with pleasure that he would soon be back at work.

(p. 232)

21 Man's attempt to divert normal natural processes can clearly be seen in the description

of Pesotskii's use of smoke to prevent a frost in the orchard on the first night of Kovrin's

stay. This episode unmistakably illustrates the use of nineteenth-century scientific

knowledge to overcome the natural processes which should be at work in the orchard.




He is also a man marked out from the crowd by the Pesotskiis' elevated

opinion of him. On more than one occasion, he is told that he is an 'unusual man' who has carved out a glittering career for himself.22 The use of the adjective 'neobyknovennyi' ('unusual', which is a close

equivalent of the French 'singulier'), as well as his characterization as an unhealthy and potentially unsound character, aligns Kovrin with other protagonists in the genre of the fantastic.23 Martine Atz has com

pared Kovrin to the patient in Vsevolod Garshin's The Red Flower, but there are also other significant forerunners. The hero of Vladimir

Odoevskii's Sil'fida (The Sylph, 1837) exiles himself to the relative calm of his uncle's country estate to recover from a bout of spleen. Aleksandr Pushkin's Germann in The Queen of Spades arguably shares Kovrin's monomania as he is determined to live his life according to the idea

that, 'I am not in a position to sacrifice the necessary in the hope of

gaining the superfluous'.24 The primary significance of this character ization concerns the consequences it has upon the degree of reliability the reader will bestow upon Kovrin's perspective and voice. By indicat

ing that Kovrin is suffering from nervous exhaustion and monomania even before the first appearance of the black monk, the narrator effec

tively undermines his reliability as a witness. The reader is implicitly warned, therefore, to treat information he receives from Kovrin, rather than from the narrator, with scepticism. This characterization creates a hierarchy of authority between the voice of the narrator and the

protagonist where, in instances when the two voices can be clearly distinguished one from the other, the former is considered to be more reliable and authoritative. Notwithstanding the comments made above

regarding the merging of narrator and protagonist perspectives and

voices, this hierarchy will be shown to be of notable significance to the

provocation of hesitation which subsequently occurs in The Black Monk. And yet, the characterization of Kovrin is far from being uniformly negative. In spite of the early indication of his delicate mental state, the description of the frenzied frost-protection activity on the Pesotskii estate which dominates the opening chapter means that concerns about his health and reliability are relegated to the background. Furthermore,

22 Tania says just this to Kovrin on pp. 228-29, for example. 23 The adjective 'singulier' and the adverb 'singulierement' are frequently used in the

fantastic to denote the proximity of the supernatural. For instance, the hero of Theophile Gautier's Onuphrius, ou les vexations d'un admirateur d'Hqffmann (1833) is said to have 'l'air assez

singulier' whilst the voice of the guillotined woman who seduces Borel's eponymous hero in

Gottfried Wolfgang (1833) 'impressionna singulierement'. 24 In the broader perspective of European literature of the fantastic, the description of

Kovrin's fluctuation between states of extreme happiness and melancholy recalls the emotional instability of the narrator-protagonist in Guy de Maupassant's Le Horla.



6lO ANTON CHEKHOV'S THE BLACK MONK

again highlighting the principle of inversion which Bartlett sees as

informing the entire story, in the context of the overwrought emotional

relationship between Pesotskii and Tania, Kovrin is actually cast as the voice of reason. On more than one occasion, it is Kovrin who inter cedes to play peacemaker in the rows between the equally monomania cal father and his daughter. Betraying the type of irony that pervades and problematizes the entire story, the man who will ultimately be accused of killing both Pesotskii and the garden is initially the deliverer of happiness and stability. Such equilibrium between indicators of the

protagonist's reliability and unreliability is a key feature of the genre of

the fantastic. Kovrin's reliability aligns him with the everyday individu als who are the stock-in-trade of realism while his unreliability holds out

the promise of uncertain interpretation which is the life blood of the

fantastic.

The Account of the Legend of the Black Monk: Anticipation of the Fantastic

Ambiguity of the kind associated with the status of the fictional world in The Black Monk is not, by itself, sufficient to allow a classification of a work as 'fantastic'. For that, the apparently supernatural must also

be present. This co-existence of ambiguity and the supernatural begins to be seen in chapter two of Chekhov's story when Kovrin recounts to

Tania the legend of a black monk which has been occupying his

thoughts all day. Over and above the nature of the monk, the particu lar role played by memory in the communication of this legend further

complicates its status as a reliable narrative. Kovrin is seemingly

prompted to recount the story of the monk after hearing a Braga serenade. The lyrics of this serenade (which for a long while Kovrin cannot 'understand') are portentous, as they relate the story of a girl

who hears mysterious sounds in her garden and decides that they form a holy harmony which is unintelligible to ordinary mortals. This clearly

anticipates the subsequent development of Kovrin's monomania into

megalomania and his belief that he is one of God's elect few rather than

'an ordinary mortal'. As such, the serenade can be seen to function as

the type of discreet mise en abyme which fantastic narratives like to invoke

as a means of associating themselves with realist practice.25 An earlier

example of such technique can be found in Theophile Gautier's Spirite

(1865) where the protagonist is described reading Longfellow's Evangeline

which, in its account of how lovers are separated and have to search for

each other in vain, anticipates his own fate.

25 Such a mise en abyme functions as the type of 'semiotic complementarity' which Philippe

Hamon sees as one of the possible efforts made by a realist text to provide maximal infor

mation by 'over-coding' itself. For more details, see Hamon, 'Un discours contraint',

Poetique, 16, 1973, pp. 411-45 (p. 427).



CLAIRE WHITEHEAD 6ll

In Chekhov's story, the legend is also lent a paradoxical status by standing not only as something that Kovrin thinks that he 'remembers' but also as a predictive narrative of his future encounters with the black monk. In fairy tales it is commonplace for the fate of the protagonist to be foretold, most frequently in a premonition seen by another person and recounted to the hero/heroine or their family. This is less common a feature in the fantastic, however, precisely because such premonitions tend to undermine the reliability attributed to subsequent descriptions

which realize the fate foretold. Indeed, the reliability of Kovrin's

'premonition' of the black monk is immediately cast into doubt because in the very first lines of his account he admits that his memory of it is unclear: 'I don't remember whether I read it somewhere or heard it'

(p. 233). And in a manner which is entirely consistent with conventional

practice in the fantastic, Kovrin's difficulty in remembering the exact

provenance of the legend expands to affect both his and the reader's

understanding of its constituent details. It is in its lack of clearly defined details that Kovrin's account of

the legend of the black monk most closely coincides with the fantastic. For example, Kovrin reveals that the legend is 'kakaia-to strannaia'

('somehow strange') and involves 'kakoi-to monakh' ('some sort of

monk') who wanders in the desert 'gde-to v Sirii ili Aravii' ('somewhere in Syria or Arabia') (p. 233). This combination, in quick succession, of indefinite adjectives and adverb makes a strong impression upon the reader. In the manner in which they deny the provision of specific, unambiguous information, such approximative terms are a signature device of the fantastic. In The Sylph, for instance, Odoevskii's narrator

protagonist uses them to compromise the reliability of his description of what he sees occurring in the glass of water containing his signet ring: he walks up to it one night and notices 'kakoe-to dvizhenie' ('some sort of movement').26 Later in the story, the 'publisher' repeatedly has recourse to this syntactic device as he records the madness which has apparently taken hold of the protagonist: 'kogda my podoshli, on ne uznal nas, khotia glaza ego byli otkryty; v nikh gorel kakoi-to dikii ogon" ('as we approached, he did not recognize us, although his

eyes were open; some sort of a wild light was blazing in them', p. 120); 'nakonets, poslednie stroki byli napisany kakimi-to strannymi

neizvestnymi mne bukvami' ('finally, the last lines were written in some

strange kind of letters which were unknown to me', p. 123). In the case of Chekhov, the attenuation achieved by such approximative terms means that the reader cannot be sure exactly what sort of strange legend is being recounted, what sort of monk is involved and where

exactly he is walking. The resulting uncertainty is only reinforced by

26 V. F. Odoevskii, Sil'Jida, in Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh, vol. 2, Moscow, 1981, pp. 106-26.



6l2 ANTON CHEKHOV'S THE BLACK MONK

the use of the modalizing 'byt' mozhet' ('maybe') later on in the passage to qualify whether the monk might now be visible somewhere on Mars or on the Southern Cross. Modalization phrases such as this are also a

staple of fantastic narratives and have been championed by Tzvetan Todorov as a means of rendering statements ambiguous.27 Kovrin's

inability to seize definitively the contents or meaning of the legend is further revealed by the three occasions on which sentences drift into non-existence with the use of elliptical points. And finally, the conclu sion of his account underlines his uncertainty as he poses a series of

questions about its origins: 'Did I read it somewhere? Did I hear it? Or,

perhaps, the black monk appeared to me in a dream? I swear to God, I do not remember' (p. 233).

8 The presence of questions at the close of

such an ambiguous and compromised account is yet another feature which aligns this section of The Black Monk with the fantastic. However, what marks it out from conventional generic practice is that Kovrin's

questions specifically interrogate not the meaning of the legend, but its

origins. And crucially, because Chekhov's protagonist is recounting a

narrative that exists (at least at this early stage) only in his head, neither

he nor the reader need necessarily interrogate whether the events of

the legend actually occurred in reality or not. Therefore, although this

first account of the legend of the black monk exhibits a number of the

syntactic devices associated with the fantastic, precisely because of its

indirect status, they are not quite sufficient to provoke the hesitation

which is the key to the genre. For this, we must wait until the hero of

the legend apparendy shows himself directly.

First Direct Encounter with the Monk: Convergence with the Fantastic

And we do not have long to wait. Less than a page after the account of

the legend has ended the reader meets the description of Kovrin's first

allegedly face-to-face encounter with this enigmatic figure. It is during this section of the narrative that the reader has the greatest difficulty

deciding whether the appearance of the monk should be interpreted as

a natural or supernatural phenomenon. Still trying to remember where

he heard or read the legend, Kovrin sets out from the house alone

and wanders along a path leading out into the fields beyond the

orchard. In describing how open, free and quiet Kovrin thinks it is

there, the narrator exploits a device for which Chekhov is renowned

27 Tzvetan Todorov, Introduction a la litterature fantastique, Paris, 1970 (hereafter, Introduction a

la litterature fantastique), p. 43. 28 This is another instance where the story encourages an association between remember

ing and understanding. In the context of these lines, substituting T do not remember'

with T do not understand' would be entirely acceptable and could be seen to associate

Chekhov's story more closely with the fantastic.




but which, in the particular context and conditions of this story, takes on an added significance. The hero muses to himself: 'it seems that the whole world is looking at me, has hidden itself and is waiting for me to understand it...' (p. 234). Nature is frequently animated or humanized in Chekhov's work so that it becomes not simply a passive backdrop for the action, but an active participant which serves to express or reflect the mood of characters. However, in a narrative which interrogates the status of the rules of nature by invoking the allegedly supernatural, such animation takes on a more significant potential. It suggests that the rules of the natural world may not be as we usually conceive of them

(trees and fields cannot look at man or wait for him) and makes the task of definitively interpreting events all the more difficult.

In the description which follows, the reader's hesitation in attributing one particular interpretation to events can be traced, in large part, to an overarching device: discernible shift in point of view. In the opening lines of the description of Kovrin's walk, the perspective informing the account belongs to the narrator. However, in the passages which follow the thoughts which have been quoted above, it shifts away from this

figure so that the all-important description of the first appearance of the monk is narrated from Kovrin's point of view, albeit still in the voice of the narrator. Because of its crucial importance to interpretation of the

story, the account of this appearance is worth quoting at some length: On the horizon, like a whirlwind or a tornado, a huge black column rose

up from the earth to the sky. Its contours were indistinct but from the very first instant one could understand that it was not standing still but moving

with frightening speed, moving precisely in this direction, straight towards Kovrin, and the closer it got, the smaller and more distinct it became. Kovrin moved quickly to one side, into the rye, so as to leave the way clear

for it, and only just managed to do so in time ... A monk, dressed in black with a grey head and black eyebrows, his hands crossed on his chest, scud ded past . . . His bare feet were not touching the ground. Having already flown some six metres past, he turned to look at Kovrin, nodded his head

and smiled at him tenderly, but at the same time slyly. But what a pale, dreadfully pale and thin face! Again beginning to grow, he flew across the river, silently collided with the clay bank and the pines and, passing through them, disappeared like smoke, (pp. 234-35)

The deictic adverb 'siuda' (translated as 'in this direction' but which

literally means 'to here') in the second sentence above clearly indicates that the scene is now being recorded from a point of view which coin cides with that of the protagonist. Consequently, the description of the first appearance of the monk is now informed not by the somewhat more authoritative perspective of the narrator but by that of Kovrin. As with the animation of nature discussed briefly above, and the con

vergence of voice and perspective mentioned in the first section of this article, this shift in point of view can also be viewed as a typically




Chekhovian technique. In pursuit of the desire to engage in more

'objective' narration, he employs it in numerous different works in order to render the voice of the narrator less invasive.29 However, given the ambiguous and potentially supernatural quality of the events

being described in the above passage, the continued presence of the narrator's point of view could have served to dispel interpretative uncertainty. Shifts in narrative point of view are one of the most effec tive tools employed in the genre of the fantastic to provoke ambiguity.

One of the most well-known and striking examples, which I have dis cussed elsewhere, is in Pushkin's The Queen of Spades?0 In the crucially important passage describing the apparent nocturnal visit made by the dead countess to Germann, the informing point of view switches away from the uninvolved narrator to that of the hero himself. Consequently,

much of the information which might have helped the reader decide

upon the actual status of the events described is left obscure or open ended. Returning to Chekhov's story, the shift in visual perspective is

pushed one step further a little later in the passage quoted above as the voice of the narrator also gives way to that of Kovrin. In its emotional

alignment with the protagonist, the exclamation regarding the paleness of the monk's face is another clear instance of free indirect discourse.

Whilst not wishing to claim that the consequences of these shifts in The Black Monk are as severe as those generated in Pushkin's story, they nevertheless perform an essentially similar function. If the visual and verbal perspective guiding this passage had clearly remained that of the

narrator, the reader would have had to accept the existence of the monk as fact. However, the shifts in point of view and the intermingling of voice permit, and actually oblige, the reader to view the reality of these events far more sceptically.

The reader's ability to assign a definitive interpretation to the actions described in this passage is further problematized by the use of two

syntactic devices which are also frequently exploited in the fantastic.

Firstly, on two occasions in the lines quoted above, the movement of the monk is described by means of reflexive verbs: 'scudded past' ('pronessia') and 'having flown past' ('pronesias"). Such verbal con

structions are seemingly tailor-made for the fantastic because they mask the agent responsible for the action. They are most commonly used in

such stories when the observer's perspective is somehow compromised so that it becomes impossible for him/her to ascertain quite how an

29 One obvious example would be Dama s sobachkoi [The Lady with the Little Dog, 1899)

in which the account of adultery between Gurov and Anna is rendered largely non-judgemental due to the fact that it is narrated from the point of view of the former.

30 Claire Whitehead, 'The Fantastic in Russian Romantic Prose: Pushkin's The Queen of

Spades', in Cornwell, The Gothic-Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature, pp. 103-25.




action is achieved. However, as here, they can also be employed even

when there is no apparent impediment to hinder a full visual account of an action. In the particular case of Chekhov's story, the reflexive form of the verbs confuses somewhat the question of whether the monk is

moving himself or whether, perhaps, he is being moved by some other, unidentified force. Although not as ambiguous as Pushkin's use of reflexive verbs, for instance, the verb 'pronosit'sia' should still be con sidered to belong to the same group of syntactic devices designed to obscure interpretation.31 Secondly, the uncertainty which imbues this account and which infects the reader is clearly betrayed by the two instances of elliptical points. This punctuation implies that the status of events being described is so uncertain that sentences cannot be brought to a definitive conclusion.

In spite of the apparently supernatural character of the black monk's

appearance and the undeniably ambiguous terms in which it is

described, Kovrin himself does not seem to experience hesitation.

Following the disappearance 'like smoke' of the monk (an analogy which arguably links to the dominion over nature in the Pesotskii

orchard), Kovrin simply remarks: 'so, you see ...[...] that means there is truth in the legend' (p. 235). He does not question anything about

what he has just seen and he experiences no fear in response to it. This reaction marks Kovrin out from his brethren in other works of the fan tastic where the most natural response is one of surprise frequently tinged with fear. For example, Pushkin's Germann is so frightened by the apparent wink of the dead countess in her coffin that he stumbles back from the catafalque and falls to the floor. In Maupassant's Le

Horla, the discovery of the disappearance of milk and water from his bedside leaves the protagonist paranoid about the invasion of his house

by an otherworldly creature. But in a manner which anticipates how The Black Monk will distinguish itself from conventional fantastic prac tice, Kovrin registers neither shock nor fear. The acceptance of the visit of the black monk as proof of the truthfulness of the legend appears to have a positive rather than a negative effect upon him. Returning to the house: 'he laughed loudly, sang, danced the mazurka and was cheerful'

(p. 235). Where Chekhov's story corresponds more closely to usual

practice within the fantastic is in the conflict that the vision of the black monk triggers between natural and supernatural preoccupations. The

opening of the third chapter of the story records how Kovrin retires to his room after dinner in the hope of being able to think about the monk. However, he is prevented from realizing this desire by a knock

31 The use of passive and reflexive forms of the verb 'to open' in Pushkin's The Queen of

Spades very effectively mask the identity and nature of the person or object responsible for

opening the doors to Germann's room during his nocturnal visit from the dead countess.



6l6 ANTON CHEKHOV'S THE BLACK MONK

on the door from Tania who invites him to read the various articles on horticulture that her father has written. Whereas in the opening chap ter practical concerns on the estate have provided beneficial relief from the nervous illness Kovrin suffers, they now figure as an unwelcome

impediment to his communion with the otherworldly. I shall return in the fifth section of the present article to the similarity this conflict

presents to evidence offered in other works of the fantastic, notably Odoevskii's The Sylph.

The Second Visit: Departure from the Fantastic

The points of departure from conventional fantastic practice in chapter two (the focus of Kovrin's questions about the legend; his acceptance of its truth after the monk's appearance) are amplified considerably in the account of the second direct encounter. Indeed, in her article on

'Gothic Realism' in The Black Monk, Ann Komaromi claims that this second appearance sees Chekhov turning the fantastic on its head.32 In spite of this, I do not believe that this description in chapter five distances The Black Monk irrevocably from the genre of the fantastic.

Rather, what proves to be particularly fruitful from this point onwards is a consideration of how the story continues to offer undeniable

triggers for uncertainty linked to the supernatural whilst simultaneously developing the 'natural' explanation for the visions of the monk constituted by Kovrin's megalomania.

Just as in the first, the key technique which provokes reader hesita tion in the description of the second appearance of the monk is a shift in point of view. For ease of reference, this description is again repro duced at length. The perspectival shift is signalled by the passage of free indirect discourse which appears at the end of the chapter's first

paragraph: When the evening shadows began to fall across the garden, the sound of a violin and voices singing could vaguely be heard and this reminded him of the black monk. Is this optical incongruity moving [itself] somewhere now, in some country or on some planet?

He had only just remembered the legend and sketched in his imagina tion the dark apparition which he had seen in the rye field when out from behind the pine trees exactly opposite, silently and without the slightest rustle, walked a man of medium height with a bare grey head, all dressed in black and barefooted, looking like a beggar, and on his pale, almost

deathly, face his black eyebrows stood out starkly. Nodding his head in a friendly welcome, this beggar or wanderer noiselessly walked up to the bench and sat down, and Kovrin recognized him as the black monk. For a

32 Ann Komaromi, 'Unknown Force: Gothic Realism in Chekhov's The Black Monk\ in

The Gothic-Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature, p. 264.




minute they both looked at each other ? Kovrin in amazement and the monk tenderly and, just as on the previous occasion, a little slyly, with a

knowing expression. 'But you are a mirage,' said Kovrin. 'Why are you here and sitting in one

place? This does not coincide with the legend.' 'That does not matter,' replied the monk after a pause, speaking softly and

turning towards him. 'The legend, the mirage and I are all a product of

your agitated imagination. I am a phantom.'

'So you don't exist then?' Kovrin asked.

'Think what you like,' said the monk and smiled weakly. T exist in your imagination and your imagination is part of nature, therefore I also exist in

nature.' (p. 241)

Like the deictic adverb in the previous passage, the present tense form of the verb 'to move [itself]' ('nosit'sia') in the final sentence of the first

paragraph above betrays the switch towards Kovrin's voice. It is from this point onwards that interpretative difficulties are encountered. Just as before, the second appearance of the monk is apparently triggered by Kovrin's memory. The similarities in the physical setting 'remind' Kovrin about the black monk and so he pictures the figure in his

imagination. This leads immediately, however, to a description of how a dark figure appears out from behind the pine trees. As a figure in Kovrin's imagination, the black monk should cause no uncertainty; but as an 'apparition' which appears to escape the confines of the hero's mind and walk freely in the reality of the fictional world, the monk is a far more ambiguous and troublesome proposition. And the authority which the reader can attribute to the account of this appearance is further undermined when the shift in verbal point of view (betrayed by the free indirect discourse) is again accompanied by a visual switch.

This move is betrayed by the fact that an identity is only given to this

'apparition' when it sits down next to Kovrin on the bench. If the visual

perspective were still to belong to the narrator, this identity could, theo

retically, have been provided at an earlier point.33 In typical fantastic

fashion, and equally common 'objective' Chekhovian practice, both the voice and visual perspective of the narrator appear absent and so the reader is obliged to rely on Kovrin for information. Consequently, it becomes impossible to decide definitively whether this second

apparition is entirely a product of Kovrin's deranged imagination or

whether, in fact, he is actually visited again by the monk.

33 The timing of the provision of information as an indicator of the location of visual point

of view is also encountered at a key juncture of Pushkin's The Queen of Spades. The alignment of perspective with the protagonist, Germann, is revealed because a description of the countess lying in her coffin is only provided once he has pushed his way through the crowd and can see it for himself. If the point of view were still to belong to the narrator, this

description could have been provided in the general description of the scene in the church.




It is the contents of the brief discussion Kovrin has with the monk which invert the normal practice of the fantastic. The monk's response to Kovrin's contention that, as a product of his own agitated ima

gination, he does not actually exist, goes a long way to confusing the boundaries drawn between natural and supernatural. His sophistry in claiming that he is part of Kovrin's imagination which is part of nature and that, therefore, he too is part of nature not only disrupts more conventional notions of existence but also sees him claiming to

have natural, rather than supernatural, status. The monk's status as

apparently nothing more than a product of Kovrin's own mind is borne out by the fact that the two share lexical fields and echo each other

verbally. They both repeatedly use the word 'znachit' ('so' or 'there

fore') in a manner which seems more than simply coincidental. Kovrin makes this link between himself and the monk more explicit when he

says: 'it's strange, you repeat what often comes into my own head'

(p. 243). The non-supernatural status that should be conferred upon the

figure of the black monk (and which should, consequently, resolve reader hesitation) is further promoted by the contents of the discussion

following the revelation that Kovrin is one of God's chosen few. Chekhov's protagonist acknowledges his pleasure at their conversation but then admits:

But I know that when you leave I will be troubled by the question con

cerning your essence. You are a phantom, a hallucination. Therefore, I am psychologically ill, abnormal, aren't I? [...] If I know that I am

psychologically ill, then can I trust my own judgement? (p. 242)

Mirroring his earlier acknowledgement that he is a figment of Kovrin's

imagination, the black monk now confirms the protagonist's self

diagnosis of mental illness. Although he argues that it should not be considered to be a negative development, he does acknowledge that Kovrin has made himself ill through overwork. According to Todorov's model of the fantastic, explanations such as imagination or madness

provide resolutions of apparently disruptive events as 'natural' pheno mena: they did not actually occur in

reality and so offer no challenge

to the natural laws governing the world.3 Such 'natural' resolutions are relatively frequently encountered in works which seem initially to

belong to the genre of the fantastic. The ambiguous status of events

in Petrus Borel's Gottfried Wolfgang (1833), for instance, is ultimately resolved when we are told that the protagonist who claims to have slept

with a woman who has previously been guillotined is actually mad.

However, Chekhov's story disrupts this model by having the apparently natural status of events confirmed by the very embodiment of the

34 Todorov, Introduction a la litterature fantastique, p. 50.



CLAIRE WHITEHEAD 6ig

apparently supernatural. What is it therefore that, despite this apparent confirmation of natural status, allows hesitation regarding the poten tially supernatural interpretation to persist? I would like to propose a

number of factors.

The Rational and the Irrational Compete: the Fantastic Survives

First, while Chekhov inverts nineteenth-century norms of the fantastic

by having the potentially supernatural black monk explicitly confirm his own natural status, in the revelation of this figure's purpose in

visiting Kovrin he clearly harks back to Romantic-era models. What the black monk tells Kovrin, or perhaps what Kovrin tells himself, is that he is 'one chosen by God' who, through his hard work, will lead

mankind into the kingdom of eternal truth thousands of years earlier than would otherwise have been the case.35 He warns Kovrin against the dangers of becoming just one of the herd; he is different because his life bears the stamp of the divine and is dedicated to the beautiful and the rational. He goes on to remind the hero that scientists now consider

madness to be allied to genius and advises him that it is only ordinary mortals who worry about their health. It is the black monk, therefore, who is the harbinger of Kovrin's megalomania. And as such, his status is again ambiguous: not only is the monk a product of mental illness, he is also the catalyst for more severe psychological disturbance. And

yet this dialogue is also clearly reminiscent of earlier examples encoun tered in fantastic literature where heroes believe their experience of the otherworldly marks them out as genii. It is a commonplace of pre Chekhovian practice of the fantastic that protagonists are awakened to the existence of another world to which they can accede if only they can open their minds sufficiently widely. This is precisely the case in Odoevskii's The Sylph where the rationalist, Mikhail Platonovich, is

apparently taken by his water sylph out of the material world and into

another, higher poetic realm where art and creativity are valued to the extent desired by the Romantic artist. Chekhov therefore, albeit in a

more problematic manner, invokes the Romantic model of 'dvoemirie'

(the belief in the existence of two worlds) to sustain reader uncertainty. Secondly, and most crucially, this 'conversation' and its revelation of

Kovrin's supposed mission on earth ushers in a period of struggle which has been foretold by the aftermath of the first visitation and which will endure to the end of the story. And it is a struggle which should be recognized as exemplary in this genre. It opposes the lure

35 For a discussion of how the monk's message to Kovrin casts the hero as a 'podvizhnik'

('zealot' or, in Chekhov's case, 'someone who accomplishes an heroic deed'), see Atz, 'The Red Flower of V. M. Garsin', p. 275.




of the irrationality represented by megalomania to the rationality con

stituted by married life. The two sides in the struggle are represented by the black monk and Tania Pesotskaia, respectively. As the daughter of a horticulturalist, Tania symbolizes the natural, the earthly, the

'this-worldly' (although, true to the model of inversion operating in the

story, her arguments with her father suggest she is not an unambiguous symbol of rationality). As Pesotskii's daughter specifically, she is associ ated with the attempt to rationalize nature and bend it to man's will.

Facing her is the black monk who signifies the non-natural, the irra

tional, the ephemeral and the otherworldly. The conflict which began when Tania prevented Kovrin reflecting upon the monk after his first visit by bringing her father's articles to be read is now significantly intensified because, immediately following the second appearance,

Kovrin proposes to her. What is particularly striking about the conflict between Tania and the black monk in Chekhov's story is the extent to

which it mirrors that encountered in Odoevskii's The Sylph.36 In both

stories, the struggle is employed to sustain tension after a point at which the protagonist appears to have reconciled himself, albeit in different

ways, to the existence of the apparently supernatural. It is as if this

antagonistic alignment is exploited to prevent the reader following the lead of the fictional protagonist in resolving his interpretative uncertainty.

In Odoevskii's story, Mikhail Platonovich is torn between his engage ment to Katia (the daughter of a neighbouring landowner with whom the protagonist is embroiled in a number of lawsuits) and the water

sylph he has 'created' in his cabbalistic experiments. Just as in The Black

Monk, these two figures embody two opposing worlds and the relative involvement of Mikhail Platonovich with each of them signals his adherence to one or other world view. Having informed his correspon dent of his plans for marriage with Katia and of the contentment this

arrangement affords him, the hero then fails to make any mention of her in his subsequent letters as he becomes increasingly involved with his experiments. The evaporation of any reference to Katia thus indi cates Mikhail Platonovich's disappearance from the rational world as

he gives himself up entirely to the poetic world into which the sylph leads him.

In Chekhov's story, Tania and the monk can initially be considered to be aligned, rather than opposed. Not only do they both consider

Kovrin to be an exceptional individual beckoned by a glittering future,

36 This similarity has previously been noted briefly by Neil Cornwell in 'Two Visionary

Storytellers'. Other points of convergence have been discussed in R. G. Nazirov, 'Chekhov

protiv romanticheskoi traditsii', in Russkaia literatura 1870-18go godov, Sverdlovsk, 1975,

pp. 96-111.




they both also have a positive effect upon his ability to work. But they are also physically separated, as Michael O'Toole has pointed out:

Kovrin encounters the monk when he is out in the field or the park while Tania is most closely associated with the house, in a manner

which echoes the lack of freedom mentioned earlier.37 However, as the

story progresses the two are brought into far greater physical proximity

(and thus conflict) because Kovrin begins to see the monk not only when he is alone but also when he is in company and much closer to

the house. In fact, the development which has the monk change from a

highly unusual figure who is only encountered in moments of Kovrin's

solitude to one who is increasingly domesticated is reflected by the fact

that his presence becomes so habitual that his appearances are, for a

time, not recorded in any detail, but summarized: 'once or twice a

week, either in the park or in the house, he would meet the black monk

and have a long talk with him; but this did not frighten him, on the

contrary he was delighted by it' (p. 247). However everyday and normal

Kovrin considers his encounters with the black monk to be, a scene

described in chapter six makes very clear the extent to which he has

been overcome by his megalomania and has withdrawn from the 'real'

world of the Pesotskiis. On this day, the monk appears at lunch time

and stands in the dining room window; Kovrin is pleased by his

presence and 'very skilfully led the conversation with Egor Semenych and Tania around to a subject which would be interesting for the monk' (p. 247). The manner in which both Tania and her father have idolized Kovrin and encouraged his feelings of 'singularity' ('neobyknovennost") now helps to explain how a conversation intended to impress an otherworldly figure does not arouse the slightest suspicion in its earthly listeners.

Although Tania may not be aware in this episode that she faces com

petition from the black monk, their conflict takes on an altogether more

direct character in a scene in the seventh chapter which must be viewed as the story's crucial peripeteia. Here the diametrically opposed views of the world embodied by these two characters are highlighted by a skilful use of switches in point of view. The potential importance of the scene is indicated by the fact that it is preceded by a significant temporal break: it occurs not in the spring and summer, which have

provided the setting for the story up until this point, but the following winter, after Tania and Kovrin have married. Furthermore, the couple have now left the estate to live in town and the degree of incursion of the black monk is indicated by the setting of the scene in the marital

37 L. M. O'Toole, Structure, Style and Interpretation in the Russian Short Story, p. 164.




bedroom. Mirroring conventions operating in the fantastic, a predomi nantly rational atmosphere is created at the outset of this scene by the

presence of two specific temporal references: 'it struck three o'clock' and 'at half past four' (p. 247).38 Following the second of these, the reader is informed that Kovrin sees the black monk sitting in the arm chair and a conversation about the nature and experience of happiness ensues. However, some two hours after the beginning of this dialogue Tania wakes up and it is then that the two worlds vying for Kovrin's attention collide. In the description of what occurs following Tania's

awakening, point of view shifts repeatedly between Tania and Kovrin, and the differences in the information provided by each are indicative of their conflicting world views. The reader is told that Tania 'looked at her husband with both surprise and horror. He was talking, addressing himself to the armchair, gesticulating and laughing; his eyes shone and there was something strange in his laugh' (p. 248). Leaving aside the somewhat cliched description of Kovrin's shining eyes and strange

laugh, what is striking here is that Tania's point of view describes her husband talking to the armchair, an entirely irrational act. But when she asks her husband to whom he is talking, his point of view comes to the fore and he replies, 'to him', 'pointing to the black monk', a seemingly

more rational state of affairs. This juxtaposition of the radically differ

ing points of view of Tania and Kovrin serves to underline the irrecon

cilability of their beliefs. And it is apparently this which prompts Tania to reveal to her husband that she believes him to be mentally ill. In an inversion of the situation which prevailed in the second chapter of the story, she is now the voice of reason as she explains what she has

long believed to be wrong with him: 'your mind has been deranged by something ... You are psychologically ill, my dear Andrei' (p. 249). Tania's victory, which is also the victory of the rational over the irra

tional, is signalled by the description given from Kovrin's point of view when he next looks at the armchair: 'he looked again at the armchair which was already empty' (p. 249). By referring back to Kovrin's pre vious conviction, the temporal adverb 'already' ('uzhe') momentarily holds both states (irrational and rational) in some sort of equilibrium. However, the realization indicated by the final position of the adjective 'empty' that there is, as Tania maintains, no one sitting in the armchair

persuades Kovrin that he is actually mad. The consequences of this realization for bringing Kovrin back onto the side of reason are clearly

38 In The Queen of Spades, Pushkin's narrator is careful to situate the incident of the dead

countess's alleged visit to Germann specifically in time: he wakes up at a quarter to three and sees the moon shining across his bed. For a fuller discussion of the impact of concrete time references in fantastic narratives see my The Fantastic in France and Russia in the Nineteenth

Century, p. 18.




underlined by the repetition of the key word, 'understand': 'looking at

[Tania], Kovrin understood all the danger of his position, understood

what his conversations with the black monk meant. For him now it was

clear that he was mad' (p. 249). Following this, the representatives of

the rational lose no time in taking Kovrin's treatment in hand: Tania

calls both her father and a doctor the very next morning and the

seventh chapter ends with the tellingly concise phrase, 'he began to be

treated' (p. 249).39

The Monk's Final Appearance: Victory for the Fantastic?

The apparent victory of the rationalist-curers proves to be short-lived, however. In the penultimate chapter of the story, where the action is

located during the following summer, the reader is presented with a

picture of the cured Kovrin. He no longer sees the monk and just needs to keep drinking milk so as to build himself up physically. Chekhov

succinctly illustrates the change that has come over the protagonist

through a revealing reference to the natural world. As has been noted

by a number of critics, in contrast to earlier descriptions, as Kovrin

walks again around Borisovska, nature is presented as entirely inani

mate, and the pine trees which the previous year had whispered and looked at him now 'stood immobile and mute, as if they did not recog nize him' (p. 250).40 Whilst this new relationship to nature might appear more 'rational', in the Chekhovian world-view such a dehumanization of the natural world is always a negative development. And in this instance it serves to foreshadow Kovrin's own reaction to his treatment.

Just like Odoevskii's Mikhail Platonovich before him, Kovrin repro aches his family for having cured him and characterizes the process as a negative one of loss rather than as a salvation of his reason:

Why, why did you cure me? Bromide mixtures, rest, warm baths, supervi

sion, cowardly fear of every mouthful, at every step ?

all this will eventu

ally lead me into imbecility. I was going out of my mind, I was suffering from megalomania, but at the same time I was cheerful, good-tempered,

happy even, I was interesting and original. Now I have become more rea

sonable and more reliable, but at the same time I am the same as everyone else: I am a mediocrity and I am bored of living, (p. 251)

The echoes with The Sylph are clear as Odoevskii's protagonist complains:

39 This recourse to medicine for a 'cure' for madness also echoes the development of The

Sylph where the publisher visits Mikhail Platonovich with a doctor and treats him with

bouillon, baths, roast beef and red wine. 40

See, for example, Donald Rayfield, Chekhov: The Evolution of his Art, London, 1975 and

Kirjanov, Poetics of Memory.



624 ANTON CHEKHOV'S THE BLACK MONK

I recall with despair that time when, in your opinion, I was mad, when a

charming creature flew down to me from the invisible world, when it

opened to me secrets which now I cannot even express, but which were

comprehensible to me ... where is that happiness? ? Give it back to me!

(P- 125)

Both heroes conceive of their cure as a regrettable process akin to

bereavement, and it is perhaps this notion more than any other which succeeds in presenting the otherworldly as a positive, life-enriching experience. In a clear expression of the Romantic exaltation of the

Ideal, which is far more surprising in the case of Chekhov than for

Odoevskii, the charge is unmistakably levelled by Kovrin that, when reduced to the rational, the sane and the here and now, human life becomes much the poorer. And it is this lament for the loss of the irrational which seemingly allows the fantastic to re-impose itself.

Accordingly, elements of uncertainty and ambiguity make a forceful

reappearance in the closing scenes of the story. In the final chapter of The Black Monk, Kovrin has left Tania and is

now living with a new companion, Varvara Nikolaevna; the two of them are in Sebastopol seeking relief for Kovrin from the severe tuber culosis he has developed. Just as in chapters seven and eight, this ninth

chapter effects another leap forward in time as the summary of various occurrences in Kovrin's life includes the information that two years have passed since he fell out with the Pesotskiis because of his cure.

This chronological shift means that the chapter is structured around a

dual temporality which is largely prompted by Kovrin's receipt of a

letter from Tania regarding the fate of her father and the orchard.

Recalling the character of the opening chapter, the narrative is clearly imbued with a sense of both past and present as Kovrin stands in the

present regretting his moments of cruelty two years previously. It can

be argued that this dual temporality reinforces the renewed proximity of rational and irrational which is presented in the closing chapter. Kovrin's memories compete with his present-moment experiences in

the same way that the natural now has to do battle once again with the forces of the non-natural. And this struggle again gives rise to

problematized interpretation. The first complicating factor is one which has been encountered in

each of the first three confrontations Kovrin has with the monk: the

role of memory in the appearance of this figure. As Varvara is sleeping, Kovrin comes out onto the balcony of their hotel room and looks

over the bay. It is night-time and he finds himself essentially alone.

The combination of dusk or darkness and solitude in the vast expanse of nature are optimum conditions for the appearance of the monk, as the first two visitations have shown. The opening passages of the

description of what occurs as Kovrin stands on the balcony begin to




introduce a number of key techniques which attenuate the reliability of the account:

The wonderful bay reflected the moon and the lights and it was of a colour which is hard to name. It was a tender and soft combination of blue and

green; in some places the water resembled blue vitriol in colour while in

others, it seemed, the light of the moon was liquified and it filled the bay in

place of water, and overall what a harmony of colours, what a peaceful,

calm and sublime mood! On the lower floor, under the balcony, the

windows, most probably, were open because women's voices and laughter could distinctly be heard. Evidendy, there was a party taking place there.

(P- 255)

Although this description does not yet present any events which could be seen to challenge the rules of the rational world, it does render inter

pretation ambiguous in a number of ways. First, although the opening sentence above appears to be provided from the point of view of the

narrator, in its subjective expression of the harmony of colours and the mood they inspire, the second represents a passage of free indirect dis course which sees the perspective seemingly shift to that of Kovrin. This is a switch which persists until midway through the penultimate paragraph of the story and entails the same consequences upon the

reliability of information as has been seen to be the case in the descrip tions of the monk's previous appearances. The less authoritative character of this perspective is then clearly illustrated by the presence of

modalizing syntax in the subsequent lines. The use of the attenuating phrase 'it seemed' ('kazalos") is reinforced by the modal adverbs 'most

probably' and 'evidently' which accompany the description of the

party.

Having read more of Tania's accusatory letter, Kovrin then sits down in front of a notebook containing ideas for work that he has

brought with him in case of boredom. However, this only reminds him of how his ability to think has been compromised by his cure and so he

gets up from the table and moves towards the window:

He was again overcome by anxiety, resembling fear, and it began to seem

that there was not a soul in the hotel apart from him . . . He went out onto

the balcony. The bay, as if alive, looked at him with its multitude of dark blue, light blue, turquoise and fiery eyes and it beckoned to him. Indeed, it was warm and close and would not have been unpleasant to go for a swim.

Suddenly on the lower floor under the balcony a violin began to play and two tender female voices began to sing. It was

something familiar. The

song which was being sung downstairs spoke of a girl with a morbid imagi nation who, at night in the garden, heard mysterious sounds and decided that it was a holy harmony which to us ordinary mortals was incomprehen sible ... Kovrin's breath caught in his throat and his heart contracted with sadness and the wonderful, sweet joy about which he had already long ago forgotten trembled in his chest.




A tall black column, resembling a whirlwind or a tornado, appeared on the other side of the bay. With frightening speed it moved across the bay in the direction of the hotel, becoming smaller and darker and Kovrin only just managed to move to one side so as to leave the way clear for it... The

monk with a bare, grey head and with dark eyebrows, barefooted, his hands crossed on his chest, scudded past and stopped in the middle of the room.

'Why did you not believe me?,' he asked [...]. (pp. 256-57)

The similarity between this final description of the appearance of the monk and the first and second, in particular, is unmistakable.41 The solitude of the protagonist, that feature of his most inspiring moments of contact with the monk, is underlined once more. His readiness for one more otherworldly encounter is implied by his relationship to nature: the bay is animated and seems to communicate with him as

might another person. And the same trigger as for the first appearance of the monk is also repeated: inexplicably he hears the same Braga serenade as was sung at Borisovska more than two years previously.

These obvious points of resemblance are underlined by arguably more

subtle echoes which see a number of the same syntactic devices that have been used earlier to provoke uncertainty encountered once more.

Just as before, Kovrin's uncertain perspective is unable to decide

exactly what the black column resembles: is it a 'whirlwind' or a

'tornado'? On two occasions, the protagonist's inability to come fully to terms with what he is experiencing is expressed through the use of

ellipsis. And once again, the nature of the black monk's movement is rendered ambiguous thanks to the use of the reflexive verb 'pronessia'. In fact, the very nearly complete coincidence of the terms in which this final description is made with those seen earlier make it seem as though the victory of the rational through Kovrin's cure has never happened. It is as if we are right back where we started with a description of an event which could so easily be supernatural and which is shrouded in

interpretative mystery. During his final visit, the monk admonishes Kovrin for not having

believed him and for having wasted two years of his life in sadness and

boredom. And Kovrin is now, once again, fully convinced that he is one of God's chosen few; his megalomania is restored. However, unlike

Odoevskii's Mikhail Platonovich, who is condemned to the mundanity of married life with Katia, Kovrin manages to escape the ties of the

earthly and accede to the other world, albeit in the most gruesome manner. As he tries to speak to the monk, recalling the pleasure of his

41 The presence of such echoing in the story has been highlighted by Rosamund Bartlett

in 'Sonata Form in Chekhov's The Black Monk' as a key feature of the work's revelation of

this form.




previous conversations, his tuberculosis gets the better of him: the blood wells up in his throat and eventually drowns him. In his last moments he attempts to call his sleeping companion but actually voices the name

of his wife, 'Tania'. His final thoughts are for Borisovska, his science, his youth and his life 'which was so beautiful' (p. 257). This conclusion, like the view of madness and the otherworldly earlier, clearly aligns The

Black Monk with the Romantic tradition to which this story arguably pays homage. Kovrin greets his death not so much as an ending to be mourned but as a new beginning to be savoured. Varvara finds him the

following morning with a 'blissful smile' on his face. Kovrin has died in the belief that his frail body is no longer a capable vehicle for his genius and thus accepts his death as a welcome release. When read through the prism of other fantastic stories, particularly The Sylph, this ending poses the question of whether it is not better to die and enter another realm like Kovrin than to live cured of the irrational in the here and now like Mikhail Platonovich.

Conclusion

With its knowing exploitation of key syntactic devices triggering uncer

tainty and its inclusion of generically popular motifs, this description of the final appearance of the black monk clearly looks towards models of the fantastic popular during the genre's heyday. Indeed, what the close examination of passages throughout this article has endeavoured to show is that, in The Black Monk, Chekhov displayed a clear understand

ing of many of the devices and techniques which are the lifeblood of the fantastic. However, viewed in its entirety, the story's relationship to the

genre is intriguingly problematic. The nature of the central section of the narrative, in which Kovrin is explicitly told the monk is a vision

provoked by his mental illness, makes it impossible to consider the story as an example of what Todorov calls the 'pure fantastic'. This category includes those works in which interpretative ambiguity is never satisfac

torily resolved. The use of mental illness as the explanation to reconcile Kovrin to his contact with the black monk might be seen to align the

story with Todorov's subgenre of the 'uncanny fantastic'. This sub division groups those texts in which hesitation is resolved in favour of a rational explanation. However, what I would like to suggest is that The Black Monk treads an original path between these two. Whilst it is true that sections of the story align themselves with the uncanny fantastic, the final chapter of the story reasserts uncertainty. And in fact, I would

propose that, even outside those passages which narrate the appearance of the monk and exploit favoured devices of the fantastic, Chekhov imbues his work with a degree of ambiguity which develops the genre in novel ways. Whilst it might be most striking in descriptions of the

monk, the status of the fictional world and the characters' relationship




to the natural/rational is unstable and ambivalent throughout. This

overarching effect can be traced primarily to the characteristics of the narrative voice. On repeated occasions throughout the story, this voice absents itself and its perspective through free indirect discourse and shifts in point of view and thereby leaves the reader dependent upon the less authoritative voice and perspective of the protagonist(s). This is

entirely typical of the fantastic as practised by authors such as Pushkin and Odoevskii. However, outside these narrative peaks and noticeable

shifts, as Chudakov has made clear, the voices and perspectives of narrator and protagonist are intimately entwined in a manner which leaves the reader in search of a definitive interpretation standing on

quicksand. This intermingling of voice is only further problematized by Chekhov's exploitation of dual temporality and the central motifs of comprehension and memory. It becomes impossible for the reader to tease out the different strands of time, understanding, voice and

perspective. Not only does this guarantee that the story retains the

ambiguity which has been its hallmark from the very outset, it means that Chekhov should be considered to be complicating, and thereby updating, the model of the fantastic established in the 1830s and 1840s. The motif of the supernatural (focused on the status of the monk) ensures that the ambiguity generated by the story should be associated with that which is typical of the fantastic. The omnipresence of ambi

guity, however, indicates that The Black Monk outreaches the genre and indicates avenues for potential future development. Rather than being viewed as an unsuccessful manifestation of the fantastic, therefore, Chekhov's The Black Monk should be viewed as a significant regenerating landmark.



Anton Chekhov's "The Black Monk": An Example of the Fantastic?

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