Andreyev’s first story printed under that nom-de-plume in 1898 aroused the interest of Maxim Gorki, who sought out the future novelist and aided him greatly with advice and suggestions.
But between the two—between the singer of the people, the singer of humanity—Gorki, on the one hand, and the artist of individuality, the painter of thought, Andreyev, there is a vast difference and divergence. One is the captive of the realities of life, in which he loses himself, the other is the captive of fancies, of ever new problems of the soul, which he endeavors to illustrate by abstract schematism, but which he ultimately fails to solve.
In this phase of Russian history falls the series of Andreyev’s stories in which he chastises the Russian intelligent hypochondriac and the follower of Tchekhov. Maxim Gorki is to him the personification of the joy of life and of the will to battle, which permeates the earlier writings of Andreyev.
The stormy period of the political convulsion which shook Russia in the wake of the Japanese war, evoked a number of beautiful stories and essays from Andreyev’s pen, thrilled and aflame with the love of budding freedom. But even here the pessimism of Andreyev breaks through. In his charming story of the French Revolution, with which we begin this present volume, “When the King Loses His Head,” when liberty is in danger, when the Twentieth, the symbol of monarchy, is in the toils of the people, here and there the crowd cries “Long Live the Twenty-First,” ready to resume the badge of servitude.
In the “Abyss” Andreyev portrays the shameful fall of the young idealist, but in “The Marseillaise,” the prose-poem with which we conclude the present volume, written in 1905, Andreyev pictures the apotheosis of a hero hidden behind the absurd exterior of a physical weakling. “The Marseillaise” is an overture to the stirring drama of the brief but glorious epoch of the popular risings after the Japanese war.
But the monarchic power crushed the spirit of the people. A period of unparalleled persecutions, executions and repressions followed. “The Story of the Seven that were Hanged” is characteristic of this terrible period which preceded the World War. This story is dedicated to Tolstoy, and its motto might well be “Fear not them that kill the body, but cannot kill the soul.” Some of the passages of this story are so stirring that it is impossible to read them without shedding a tear.
After the fall of the Romanovs, a brief period of intoxicating sense of freedom overwhelmed Russia. It was not the time for literature. It was the time for action. But all too soon chaos ensued, and the artist dropped his art to defend outraged humanity. It was away from his country, with the whole world arrayed against Russia, and with Russia arrayed against herself, that Leonid Andreyev fell the victim of heart failure, induced, as the brief despatches from Finland state, by the shock of a bomb exploding in his vicinity.
The heroes of Andreyev’s stories are “people who stand apart,” solitary, lonely characters, walking among men like planets among planets, and a baneful atmosphere surrounds them. The idea of most of these stories and of most of his dramas is the conflict of the personality with fate and with the falsehood which man introduces into his fate.
He has a symbolic story named “The Wall”: it is the barrier which men cannot pass. The Wall is all bloodstained; at its base crawl lepers; centuries, nations strive to climb upon it. But the wall is immobile, while ever new heaps of corpses are piled up alongside.