Overview

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860-1904) was a Russian playwright and author, widely considered one of the greatest writers of all time. In his psychospiritual parable ""The Black Monk,"" Chekhov explores the fragile boundary between genius and madness. Andrey Kovrin's retreat to a tranquil estate leads to ecstatic visions of a mysterious black-robed monk who affirms his divine purpose and intellectual superiority, fueling a manic euphoria that strains his health and relationships. When his wife intervenes - diagnosing delusion and demanding a cure - the treatment silences the vision. As the specter fades, Kovrin is left disillusioned, spiritually vacant, and creatively barren, his brilliance extinguished by the very remedy meant to restore him. Blending psychological realism with symbolic mysticism, Chekhov crafts a cautionary tale about the seduction of grandeur and the peril of outsourcing one's sanity - of letting others dictate the terms of your spiritual reality - and reveals how the suppression of visionary ecstasy can become its own quiet death.

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Reviews

""This is one of the strongest of Chekhov's stories."" -The Book News Monthly ""'The Black Monk, ' a most remarkable story, compasses the tragedy of a brilliant intellect gradually collapsing into madness and wrecking other lives in its downfall. The story is on the highest plane of imaginative invention, and is told with a wealth of detail and description; yet it is less than fifty pages long."" -George Sampson, The Bookman ""And here the last fragment of hope is gone; dumb despair stares us in the face, and the characters, not being fighters, surrender . . . nobody can be compared to him in his own realm; there is but one Chekhov, just as there is but one Dostoevsky and one Tolstoy."" -Nathan Asch, The Nation ""Imagination and inspiration, whatever their source, are necessary to lift man to his rightful place above the rest of created things. This seems to be the purport of the story. No one reads the gray tales of Chekhov to be amused. Amazement is what the reader gathers out of them-amazement at Chekhov's awareness of what unexpected things the mind is doing under sets of commonplace circumstances."" -The Evening Star ""One of Chekhov's powerful delineations of an artistic nature."" -The Morning Union ""Chekhov shows us how the instinct for comfort, physical and mental, is the root of commonplaceness, the mainspring of the bourgeois. As soon as man gives way to it he finds the world, outside its immediate relation to himself, uninteresting, and becomes in his turn uninteresting, except to the part of the world which makes its profit out of him. Whether Chekhov did it with premeditation or not, no one has analyzed more acutely than he the psychology of the bore."" -The New York Times Book Review

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