ANDREEV, APOSTLE OF THE TERRIBLE
Of contemporary Russian fictionists, Leonid Nikolaevich Andreev rises largest with promise. Just past forty, he has for fourteen years been producing work of strength and individual flavor, and, now that Tolstoi is gone, his place is probably ahead of even Maxim Gorki—at least, he is primus inter pares.
Andreev’s life is best told in his own brief words:
“I was born in 1871, in Oryol, and studied there at the gymnasium. I studied poorly: while in the seventh class I was for a whole year known as the worst student, and my mark for conduct was never higher than 4, sometimes 3. The most pleasant time spent in school, which I recall to this day with pleasure, was recess time between the lectures, and also the rare occasions when I was sent out from the class-room. The sunbeams which penetrated some cleft, and which played with the dust in the hallway—all this was so mysterious, so interesting, so full of a peculiar, hidden meaning.
“When I studied at the gymnasium my father, an engineer, died, and while at the university I was in dire need. During my first year at the St. Petersburg University I even starved—not so much out of real necessity as because of my youth, inexperience, and inability to utilize the unnecessary parts of my costume. I am to this day ashamed to think that I went without food at a time when I had two or three pairs of trousers, two overcoats, and the like.
“It was then that I wrote my first story—about a starving student. I cried when I wrote it, and the editor who returned my manuscript—laughed. That story of mine remained unpublished.
“In 1894 I made an unsuccessful attempt to kill myself by shooting. As a result of this unsuccessful attempt, I was forced by the authorities into religious penitence, and I contracted heart trouble, though not of a serious nature, yet very annoying. During this time I made one or two unsuccessful attempts at writing. I devoted myself with greater pleasure and success to painting, which I loved from childhood on. I made portraits to order at three and five rubles apiece.
“In 1897 I received my diploma and became an assistant attorney, but I was sidetracked at the very outset of my career. I was offered a position on the Courier, for which I was to report court proceedings. I did not succeed in securing any practice as a lawyer. I had but one case, and lost it at every point.
“In 1898 I wrote my first story—for the Easter number—and since then I have devoted myself exclusively to literature. Maxim Gorki helped me considerably in my literary work by his always practical advice and suggestions.”
The anecdote is told that when this first story was published Gorki telegraphed the Courier, “Who is it who hides himself under the pseudonym of Leonid Andreev?” And later, when the Russian Life issued another of his stories, the poet Mereschkowsky asked if Andreev was the pseudonym of Gorki or of Chekhov.
But Andreev is best to be studied through his writings.
“The Friend” is an effective bit of impressionism which must have driven countless thousands to repentant kindness toward neglected animals.
Vladimir, the typical young Russian, is a promising writer, wrapped up in his work, and safely past the period of gay carousing. At night he returns to his room and his “only friend,” Vasyuk, a little black-haired dog, who adores his master. “My friend, my only friend,” are words often on Vladimir’s lips, but at length he comes to love Natalia, and Vasyuk gets his favorite dish of liver less often. One day the dog is taken ill, but in his haste to visit Natalia, Vladimir does not take Vasyuk to the veterinary. By and by it is too late. In months to come, Vladimir fails to make good his literary promise, and—
... then, like the cover of a coffin, heavy, dead oblivion fell upon him.
The woman had also forsaken him; she too considered herself deceived.
The fumy, vaporous nights went by, also the mercilessly punishing white days, and often, more often than before ... he lay in his bed ... and whispered:
“My friend, my only friend!”
And his quivering hand fell faintly upon the empty place.
From the foregoing, and even more from that which follows, we may conclude it to be a peculiar property of the sketch-form in fiction that its story may not be told in synopsis. Indeed, in the true sketch there is no story. Atmosphere, character-drawing, swift outlining of a situation, impressions of mood and feeling—all these permeate the sketch, but crises in human lives, complications arising therefrom, and the untangling of the plotted skein—these belong to the short-story and the novel.
For this reason much of Andreev’s shorter work defies our efforts to retell it; one must go to the writer himself for his final phrase, his subtly suggested situation, his almost uncanny evocation of mood. “Valia,” for example, is one of his sketches which baffle the second-hand narrator: as well try to reconstruct an old-time beauty by dressing up a lay-figure in hand-me-downs.
Valia is a sensitive child who is awakened from his unconscious joy in home by the hard, prickling kisses of a thin-lipped, long-necked woman who announces herself to be his mother. Indignantly, yet politely, the lad turns for denial to his supposed mother, rosy and sweet-lipped, but she tearfully confirms the claim—he had been abandoned in babyhood when he was inconvenient, but now that the mother was lonely she claimed the child. The impending separation tears the hearts of foster-father and -mother and the child himself. Valia becomes nervous, fearful of the dark, and pines almost to illness. But joy and new health come to them all when the courts, which have been invoked to aid the unnatural mother, decide against her claim. At length, however, the highest tribunal reverses the lower court, and the child must go away. The final scene leaves the real mother weeping because her stranger-child takes no pleasure in playthings. The situation is symbolical, for that is the only appeal a sordid, self-serving woman knows how to make to a spirituelle child who has drawn his spirituality not from her nature, but—who knows whence, if not from the breast of his foster-mother! And when the child at the last timidly approaches the weeping egoist and with gentle dignity promises to love her “all he can,” we see a triumph of impressionistic sketch-work.
Even more difficult to outline is “The Man Who Found the Truth.” It is the story told by himself of a man who at sixty is released from an unjust imprisonment, after having been convicted years before of murdering several members of his family in order to gain an inheritance. But when he realizes the stress of his old life out in the world, he has his room transformed into a model of his old cell, hires a keeper from his prison, and once more returns to a tranquil life. Its leit-motif is strikingly like that of Pierre Loti’s “The Wall Opposite.”
The last cry in mysticism is Andreev’s “A Story Which Will Never Be Finished.” Seek to lay your finger upon its precise meaning, and it flutters away like a gauzy-winged visitant; and yet every progressing line deepens an impression upon the soul. It is a pervasive, atmospheric thing, full of mysterious movements, potent though nameless—breaths of uncharted freedom whisper of an impinging world where our realities are unreal; sleeping senses, hitherto unsuspected, strangely stir to their awakening; yet they do not actually awaken. Is it war, is it death opening out into life, is it emancipation—one doesn’t quite know; yet it is all of these. Hawthorne was never more vaguely pregnant, and Poe never more perfectly conveyed the sense of an unnamed something which is just about to be.
Here indeed Andreev is like Poe. Now and then I hear him called “The Russian Poe.” The epithet is not satisfactory. Something of our American poet there is in the Russian, for both, like Hawthorne, are masters of introspection, and both know the ritual of fantasy as past-masters, but when Andreev depicts the weird there is always a basis of human reality. Poe could harrow the soul with a sense of fantastic horrors impending, but Andreev need only draw aside the curtains and show us truth unadorned, truth unrelieved by truth’s beautiful other half, and a deeper shudder rocks the soul than ever chilled the flesh at Poe’s phantasmagoric evocations. Really, this young titan is two men—one mystical like Hawthorne, a vein of melancholy in his pessimism, but sympathetic withal, and showing more pity for his characters than the realistic school approves. The other fairly makes revel with the gibbering images of war, abnormalities of soul rise and take on flesh at his bidding, and there is no spirit so gloomy, wicked, and repellent but he can conjure it into being for these terrible story-pictures. Which will be the artist’s final mood, one may not surely forecast. In either extreme he is not his best self, one may surmise. Certainly we should deplore the constant choice of a theme like that of “The Abyss,” his first important story, in which the love of a pure lad for a spotless girl is transformed into a vicious thing that leads at length to a revolting crime. At the other end of the gamut sounds the author’s idealistic note. “To the Stars,” his first drama, is as far removed in tone from “The Abyss” as the titles indicate. But Andreev’s dramas are worthy of a separate study.
Doubtless the mantle of fatalism which dropped from the shoulders of Turgenev and Tolstoi successively will some day be discarded by Russia’s younger prophets. Nietzsche influences Andreev strongly, but so do the former great Russian novelists; is it too much to expect that a spirit of hope may yet penetrate the heart of this genius who is still young? Just now the revolution is outwardly cowed, anticipation of better things has been rebuffed; but the spirit of progress rising everywhere else is not for nought, and out of the very blackness painted by Russia’s realists must come a determined and successful struggle for vital reforms. Think of a nation of which the recent Congress of Pathology at Moscow could report:
They all drink, the students, the collegians, and even the pupils of the primary schools. There are a great number of alcoholics among children of from seven to ten years of age. In the government of Perm, all the students in the primary school, without exception, drink vodka. In Livonia, 72 per cent. of the school-children drink systematically. At Moscow, 64 per cent. are given up to the vice.
These facts, on Russian authority, make one accept the essential truth of Andreev’s terrible revelations of depraved student life in his recent play, “The Days of Our Life.” If only this black realism be accepted as the prophet’s warning, its revolting character will be not without justification. It is, however, a paradoxical seer who can in his play, “Black Masks,” ridicule the spiritual struggle between darkness and light, and yet write to an admirer that he finds in the Bible the greatest teacher of all.
Four of Andreev’s longer stories deserve more than mere mention. “A Dilemma”—sometimes called “Thought,” which conforms to the Russian title, Mysl (1902)—is a long short-story. It is a remarkable psychological study of Kerzhentsev, a physician, who hovers between sanity and madness. In spite of his superb endowments of body and mind, he becomes obsessed with the desire to murder his best friend, Alexis Savelov, merely because Savelov had married the woman whom the physician desired. This murder he determines to commit under two conditions—the murder shall be known to the victim’s wife, yet the perpetrator must escape punishment. One night, while dining with the Savelovs, the doctor feigns a sort of mad fit, but for a whole month craftily does not renew the pretense. At length Kerzhentsev propounds his problem to his intended victim in a veiled way, and the victim argues that with a heavy metal paper-weight one might crush a man’s head, and bids the doctor go through such an action in dumb show. But the wife protests against such risks, for she has had a presentiment of evil. Soon after this the doctor actually does crush the head of Savelov, and in the confusion slips away to his home. Just as he is falling asleep, delighted with the success of his plan, a thought languidly enters his brain, as though a voice issued from another: It is very possible that Dr. Kerzhentsev is really insane. He thought that he simulated, but he is really insane—insane at this very instant.
Thus begins the terrible dilemma, “for he is fighting against himself for his own reason.” At length to save himself from the madhouse he confesses to the judges that he is not mad, but a criminal deserving of punishment.
“The Red Laugh” (1904), which has been translated into German, French, and English, is Andreev’s most terrible piece of realism. If this inspired picture of the Manchurian War is true, and one feels that it is, General Sherman was conservative. Those who thrill at war pictures and feel the power of patriotism in the call of battle will not enjoy the bloody horror of “The Red Laugh.” The story is a service—of the heroic remedy sort—which Andreev renders to the cause of peace. Naked, lustful, scheming war, hellish and brutal, that is the Russian’s picture—like Wiertz in his mad paintings of blood and torment. The title takes itself naturally from an incident which the narrator, an officer, tells early in the book, how that a young volunteer approaches him with a countenance so intensely white that the officer asks, “Are you afraid?” With that the young man’s face bursts into the red laugh—He has become a victim of war’s awful stroke, frightful, unspeakable.
Sidorov fell suddenly to the ground and stared at me in silence, with great, terrified eyes. Out of his mouth poured a stream of blood.
“Judas Iscariot and the Others” (1907) is a short novel truly notable for its unique motif—the traitorous apostle is not inspired to betray Jesus by mercenary motives, but in order to force the Master to manifest his power and demonstrate his Divinity. Thus were Judas a high-minded patriot instead of a contemptible bribe-taker.
“The Seven Who Were Hanged” (1907) is Andreev’s most distinguished work. As a novel, it is sincere, powerful, and provocative. Whatever one’s views of the death penalty for crime, the author makes a tremendous appeal to pity. Here are seven condemned ones who are to suffer “the horror and the iniquity of capital punishment,” and they surely are of “all sorts and conditions,” from Musya, whose large womanhood flows, a sustaining stream, to the least of her fellow victims, down to that miserable one whose inert soul suffers less than his brutalized body. The identity of each is not lost for a moment in the circumstances and occupations of imprisonment, nor yet in the midnight journey to the hanging place. They are individual, yet they are pitiably types. Oh, the sadness of it—we feel that to be the burden of the author’s soul, and so it becomes our own. It is a poignant, fearful picture, depressing and relentless, but more deeply imbued with pity than anything else Andreev has written.
“Silence,” which was published in 1900, and is therefore one of our author’s earliest stories, is a sketch whose iterant impressionism is felt in every line.