The Black Monk

Background

On 28 July 1893 Chekhov informed Alexey Suvorin in a letter that he'd just finished "a little novella, just a couple of quires". "Come to visit me here, and I'll give it for you to read", he added somewhat teasingly. Suvorin suggested that the story should be published in Novoye Vremya, but Chekhov declined the offer. Later, upon having read the story, Suvorin asked to what extent did it reflect the author's own mental condition. "When the writer depicts a sick person it does not mean he is sick himself... Just wanted to portray a man suffering from delusions of grandeur. The image of a monk riding in the fields came to me in a dream, and as I woke up I told about to Misha", Chekhov replied in the 25 January 1894 letter.[3]

Chekhov discarded Max Nordau's ideas on the European intelligentsia's spiritual degeneration, but, perhaps inadvertently, quoted fragments from his 1892 book Degeneration at least twice in the story.

According to Mikhail Chekhov, the story in many ways reflected Chekhov's experience in Melikhovo. It was here that he became seriously engaged in gardening. "Early in the morning he would... come into the garden and carefully inspect each tree, each shrub, perhaps to some trimming, or just stare at it, inspecting something."[6] Chekhov was often visited here by Ignaty Potapenko and Lika Mizinova. "Lika would sit at the grand piano and sing the then increasingly popular "Légende valaque" by Braga... a song in which a sick, delirious girl hears the angels singing and asks her mother to come to the balcony and tell her where these sounds might come from ... Anton Pavlovich liked this romance's mysticism and fine romanticism. I mention this because it was directly linked to the origins of the story The Black Monk," Mikhail Chekhov wrote.[7]

Psychologically those were difficult days for Chekhov, who was suffering from anxiety and insomnia. "I would have eagerly flee to you in Petersburg, such are my moods, by cholera rages, twenty versts from here," he wrote Suvorin on 28 July 1883, complaining about "deadly longing for some loneliness" and "horrid psychopathic moods". "...I don't think that I suffer from some psychological ailment. It's just that the will to live seems to have left me, although I don't think it's any kind of sickness, perhaps something transitory and trivial," he wrote to Suvorin in January 1894.[3]

According to Mikhail Chekhov, "in Melikhovo Anton Pavlovich's nerves got completely out of order due to overwork, and he almost lost sleep. Once he'd start to fall into drowsiness, some strange force would throw him up."[8] It was during one such bad night that he had mental vision of a black monk. "It had the immense effect upon my brother, he won't be able to shake it off, returned to this monk in conversations from time to time and eventually wrote his well-known story about it."[9]

This was also the time when Chekhov became deeply interested in psychiatry and became friends with doctor Vladimir Yakovenko, the founder and director of the best Russian psychiatric clinic of its time, in Meshcherskoye. "If you want to become a true writer, my darling, study psychiatry, this is quite necessary," he was assuring Shchepkina-Kupernik, "...in those days when he was writing The Black Monk", according to her 1928 memoirs.[10]

In the summer of 1892 Max Nordau's book Degeneration was widely discussed in the Russian press. Chekhov thought little of Nordau's ideas,[11] but it might have left some impression upon him, for at least twice the Black Monk in his speeches quotes fragments from the chapter called "Genius and Crowd".[3]


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