“Do you know DJ Spinoza?” he demanded truculently.
Matej shrugged, stepping almost imperceptibly aside; he had a catlike talent, probably perfected over long years of practice, for evading potentially violent situations.
“Do you know DJ Spinoza?” the drunk man roared.
“No,” Matej said sharply. “I know Spinoza.”
From Eugene and Oya’s apartment, Max and I walked back across the Arno to the sublet we had found through one of Eugene’s friends—a minuscule, slope-ceilinged apartment on the top floor of an ancient building on the Via Vigna Vecchia. We collapsed into the tiny twin beds and fell asleep almost immediately. I dreamed of DJ Spinoza. In my dream, his initials stood for “Don Juan Spinoza.”
At three in the morning I opened my eyes, irremediably awake, and went to the kitchen for a glass of water. The window overlooked a sea of moonlit rooftops. Behind them loomed Santa Croce like a pale luminous spaceship, its rocketlike spires thrusting into the sky. I remembered Stendhal’s description of the church: “its plain carpentry roof, its unfinished façade, all of this deeply speaks to my soul. Ah! If only I could forget! . . . A monk came up to me; instead of repulsion bordering to physical horror, I found in myself a friendly feeling towards him.”* Stendhal didn’t care for monks, but this one was an exception: he unlocked the transept where he saw Volterrano’s Sibyls.
My thoughts drifted to Chekhov’s “Black Monk,” the story that opens with a young scholar’s arrival at the estate of his former tutor, a famous horticulturalist, on a night when frost threatens the orchards. The young scholar—his name is Kovrin, and he studies philosophy and psychology—falls in love with the horticulturalist’s daughter, Tanya. They become engaged. One day, Kovrin tells Tanya a legend about a monk all in black, who appeared a thousand years ago in the deserts of Syria or Arabia. That monk projected a mirage, in the form of another monk, floating on the surface of a lake, before the eyes of a faraway fisherman. “From that mirage there was cast another mirage,” Kovrin explains, “so that the image of the black monk began to be repeated endlessly from one layer of the atmosphere to another,” from Africa, Spain, India, and the Arctic Circle, to Mars, to the Southern Cross.
According to this legend—Kovrin can’t remember where he heard it—the mirage will return to earth exactly one thousand years from the day the monk first walked in the desert. “And it seems that the thousand years is almost up . . . we may expect the black monk any day now.”
In fact, the black monk appears before Kovrin the very next day, notifying him that he, Kovrin, is a scholar of genius, one of the elect servants of the eternal truth. Kovrin realizes that he is hallucinating. “So what?” replies the monk. “You’re sick because you have overworked and exhausted yourself, and that means that you have sacrificed your health to an idea, and the time is near when you will give up to it life itself.” Intoxicated by his own martyrdom to mankind’s brilliant future, Kovrin gives himself up entirely to his studies and to the monk’s visits, which spur him to ever-greater heights of exaltation, scholarship, and irritability.
One day Tanya discovers her husband in a terrible state: he is talking to the monk, and is clearly insane. She takes him back to her father’s house, where they prevent him from working, and nurse him back to health. But the black monk had been trying to tell Kovrin something, and in that something resided the entire meaning of his life. “Why, why have you cured me?” he demands, cursing Tanya.
The horticulturalist dies of grief. Kovrin receives a coveted professorship, but is unable to accept: he has begun to cough blood. As he finally expires of a tubercular hemorrhage, the black monk appears to him, whispering “that he is a genius, and that he is dying only because his weak human body has lost its balance and is no longer able to serve as a container for genius.”
Among Chekhov’s stories, “The Black Monk” is notable for its Gothic overtones, its clinically accurate picture of megalomania, and the number and diversity of its critical interpretations. Badgered by readers to reveal its true relevance to his soul, Chekhov explained that the story had been inspired by a dream in which he saw a black monk moving toward him through a whirlwind. Why is it that no consciously invented stories ever point beyond themselves as multifariously as dreams?
One way to interpret “The Black Monk” is as a cautionary tale about academic scholarship as a form of madness. This madness affects not just Kovrin but also the horticulturalist, whose articles on seemingly “peaceful and impersonal” subjects—intercropping, the Russian Antonovsky apple—invariably devolve into venomous invectives against other horticulturalists. The endlessly proliferating monk may be read as a figure for scholarly mimetic contagion. From a Girardian perspective it is fitting for ambition, the true “Stendhal’s syndrome,” to assume the form of a monk: “every element in the distorted mysticism” of mimetic rivalry has its “luminous counterpart in Christian truth.”
In the black monk, one also glimpses the shadowy outline of Fyodorov, philosopher of bodily resurrection, abolisher of death. Like the black monk, Fyodorov saw before him the whole glorious future of humankind. Freed from the shackles of mortality, men would set forth to collect the corporeal dust of past generations that had been scattered throughout the cosmos by the once omnipotent hand of death. The earth itself would be transformed into a spaceship, dislodged from its orbit and propelled into space “by either photo, thermal, or electric energy.” The armies of the resurrected would colonize the universe, transforming it into a work of art.
Fyodorov, a Christian mystic, saw his project precisely in terms of an imitation of Christ. Only the mass, universal enactment of Christ’s rising from the dead and ascent to heaven would finally dissipate the artificial rivalries that divide the brotherhood of man. A new classless society would arise, devoted to the shared task of “cosmic agriculture”: a unity of perfect horticulturists.
Now the spaceship is poised for takeoff, the Sibyls look down from the ceiling, and the black monk shimmers briefly in the air, before dematerializing and reappearing somewhere else. Martians are transporting the ice palace to Saturn, for it to take its place among Ulughbek’s 1,018 stars. They’re hoping it will teach them to understand adverbs. Somewhere even further away, the beast waits in its thicket, watching the snow pile soundlessly on the hillside. Now the black monk is calling me—he says it’s time to go, time to start collecting the ashes. This is the kind of work that will kill you. But I’ll have you know, DJ Spinoza, that I haven’t given up. If I could start over today, I would choose literature again. If the answers exist in the world or in the universe, I still think that’s where we’re going to find them.
_____________
* Kozma Prutkov was a fictitious poet-playwright-bureaucrat invented in the 1850s by Alexei Tolstoy and his cousins. The moral of “The Conductor and the Tarantula” is “Don’t set out on a journey without any money” (lest you meet the same fate as the tarantula, who was kicked out of the carriage by the conductor).
* Other critics think that Dostoevsky was himself dissatisfied with the confession. In his edition of the Demons notebooks, Edward Wasiolek proposes that “somewhere between his plans for the first published version and the publication of subsequent versions, Dostoevsky came to realize that ‘Stavrogin’s Confession’ was all wrong”: the Stavrogin of the confession is “still struggling and failing with the temptations of repentance and pride,” whereas “the Stavrogin of the final version is beyond moral struggle, and only the possible loss of self-control threatens his glacial calm.” Wasiolek also suggests that the formation of Stavrogin from the drafts of other novelistic characters represents not the contingent exigencies of deadlines and book publishing, but the necessary trial and-error of literary creation: Dostoevsky “resists the real Stavrogin by evasions, twists, and wrong turns,” so that the notebooks themselves “are in large part a record of wrong Stavrogins.”