Andrei Vasilyich Kovrin

A young Master of Arts (magistr) and philosopher/psychologist who, worn out by overwork, goes to recover at the country estate of his former guardian, the horticulturist Yegor Semyonych Pesotsky, and marries Pesotsky's daughter Tanya. At the estate Kovrin begins seeing and conversing with an apparition, the Black Monk, who tells him he is one of God's chosen, a genius set apart from ordinary men. When Tanya discovers him talking to the empty air, he is diagnosed as mentally ill and "cured" with bromide, rest, and milk -- the cure leaves him listless, irritable, and cruel, and his marriage collapses. He takes a university chair, then loses it to recurring hemorrhages from the same consumptive illness that killed his mother; separated from Tanya and living with Varvara Nikolayevna, he dies of a final hemorrhage in a Crimean hotel room during one last vision of the Black Monk, a blissful smile fixed on his face.