There was need, however, for a man who would not allow his passions to rule his emotions, whose voice could be heard and heeded above the popular outbursts, who would attempt a search into the motives and the value of life, and Leonid Andreyev was the man, the voice and the writer.
From his earliest childhood he had been obsessed by interrogations about life and he expressed them constantly in his writings; he seldom attempted an answer or a solution to the problems that pressed upon his mind, and when he did it, it was ambiguous. Dr. Kaun points out that Andreyev’s failure to define or to classify was due to his lack of philosophical theory and to his incapacity for detaching himself and viewing life in perspective; he dwelled in the reality, and disdained philosophy and theories. He was neither a student nor a reader. He would have his friends believe that he had been influenced by Schopenhauer and there is no doubt that he showed envy of Nietzsche, affection for Tolstoi and admiration for Gorky; but it is doubtful that he read them, save casually.
One appealing quality in Dr. Kaun as a critic is his unbiased opinion; he allows neither his admiration for the author nor his sympathy for the man to influence his judgment. He seeks no excuse for Andreyev’s lack of humour and lightness or for his egotism. He states his defects, and finds a reason for his admitted eminence among modern authors in his realism, which makes him address the public not as a teacher or a reformer but as an observer from the rank and file, who related what he saw and did not draw conclusions. He was neither propagandist nor missionary.
Andreyev’s aim was to describe man as he was, with all the repulsive instincts that make him a beast and all the qualities that identify him with divinity; but it was the worse side of human nature that chiefly appealed to him, and that he described at length. If we agree with Samuel Butler that “virtue has never yet been adequately represented by any who have had any claim to be considered virtuous,” and that “it is the subvicious who best understand virtue. Let the virtuous people stick to describing vice—which they can do well enough,” we must consider Leonid Andreyev the personification of virtue.
He stood aloof from literary circles, parties or affiliations all his life. Not even the revolution of 1905, which brought a split in the ranks of the intelligentsia, changed him; he retained his impersonal attitude, probing the conscience of man, “ringing his alarm bell” of man’s vices, analysing life, and attempting to explain only its illusions. He continually peered beneath the surface and questioned the reactions of mankind, discovering vices where virtue seemed to lie. He was a firm believer in the power of ideas over the actions of an individual, and he has shown in Thought how one unaccountable impulse will ruin the career of a man.
Andreyev was non-conformist to the last degree. He refused consistently to give way to the public’s tastes and held that sincerity was the first quality that one should find in an author. His sincerity was not to the taste of his readers. Andreyev neither approved of the “splendid isolation” of the Russian symbolists, decadents or other definite schools who refused to see beyond the limit of their ivory towers, nor did he join hands with the people. He confined his observations to their individual and immediate surroundings. But he also generalised events and expressed opinions that included the world in connection with an event that merely affected his country or his people. He extracted the essence of upheavals and carried them beyond his time. His passionate and ardent pen could describe horrors and cruelty better than the pen of any author of his time.
The thing that strikes one most forcibly in reading of Andreyev is the very brief period of his creative activity, fifteen years at the most. After 1902 his writings were merely repetitions or elaborations of former themes and his premise was always the same; a negative attitude toward man, life, human intellect and institutions. He involuted early, and the proof of it in his writing was that he no longer looked in the direction of hope and encouragement. He was like a man who hurries on an unfamiliar road hoping that he will arrive at a safe and comfortable stopping place before the darkness which is fast approaching enshrouds him. He became aware that his thinking faculties that once were brilliant had lost their flexibility: “I feel as though I were in a grave up to my waist.” “I am thinking of suicide, or is suicide thinking of me?” “I am living in a jolly little house with its windows opening on a graveyard”—these are entries in his diary that indicate his increasing melancholy. But this was not his only cross; he lacked money for the basic need of life. He was on the point of coming to this country “to combat the Bolsheviki, to tell the truth about them with all the power within him and to awaken in America a feeling of friendship and sympathy for that portion of the Russian people which is heroically struggling for the rejuvenation of Russia,” when he died of arteriosclerosis, as his friend, admirer and interpreter, Mr. Herman Bernstein, wrote in a letter to the New York Times.
A worthy biography of a great writer; it has the fascination of fiction and the satisfaction of fact.
Contrast of Ford Madox Ford’s book on Joseph Conrad with Henry Festing Jones’ book on Samuel Butler will show the difference between inspired and studious writing. One is life, the other is death; one is clay into which the breath of life has been breathed, tenuous, elastic, receptive, emissive; the other is inanimate, inert, rigid, and crumbles when you handle it.