"Then it appeared to Jacob Ivanovich that, up to this moment, he had never understood what death was. Now he understood, and what he saw was senseless, horrible, and irreparable!... The dead man would never know!"
The poignant irony of this story is not unusual with Andreyev.
It is again found in the short and symbolic story "The Laugh." A student, profiting by the fact that it is carnival time, disguises himself as a Chinaman and goes to the house of the girl he loves. The mute, immobile, and stupidly calm mask, and the whole "get-up" are so funny, that the unfortunate man rouses irresistible laughter wherever he goes. The young girl cannot help herself, and, while listening to his very touching and sincere declaration, which, at any other time, would have brought tears to her eyes, she bursts out laughing and cannot again become serious, although she realizes that a living and unhappy being is hidden under this impassive and foolish Chinaman's mask.
In "The Lie" we see a man who, by isolating himself from life, has lost the feeling of reality, and all capacity of discerning the true from the false. He suffers terribly from the feeling that something unknown is happening around him. This man, who would be ready to sacrifice everything, even his life, in order to know truth, guesses the lie that comes between him and the person who is dearest to him. He falls into a despair that soon turns to fury. In order to recover his calm, he begs the girl he loves, whom he suspects of having deceived him, to reveal the whole truth to him. But he cannot believe her protestations of innocence. One word bursts from his being, breaks forth from the depths of his soul: "Lies! Lies! Lies everywhere!"
"In looking at her beautiful pure forehead," he writes, "I dreamed that truth was there, on the other side of that thin barrier, and I felt a senseless desire to break that barrier and at least to see the truth. Lower down, beneath her white breast, I heard the beating of her heart, and I had a mad desire to open her breast so that I could read, at least once, what there was at the bottom of her heart."
He ends by killing that which he loved, and thinks that he is satisfied: he believes he has killed the lie.
In "The Thought" we see the gradual development of insanity during the period when it is doubtful, when the will is almost entirely annihilated and replaced by a fixed idea, and when conscience is not entirely abolished. Dr. Kerzhenzev kills his friend, obeying a mental suggestion, which now forbids him to do it, now urges him on. Then, like the "half-insane" or those sick people who feign madness in order more easily to attain their end, this man suggests to himself that he is in reality insane. This idea gets a hold on him after the murder and fills his soul with mortal terror, the exposure of which forms the most supremely pathetic part of the whole story. All this drama of a foundering intelligence, complicated by bizarre contradictions, is developed with a penetrating power of analysis.
Andreyev tells us that on the day of judgment the alienists are divided as to the insanity of Kerzhenzev. The story ends at this place. But the principal interest of the story does not lie in this or that solution of the problem, which is not mysterious, for the doctor is doubtlessly abnormal, and it is only as to the degree of insanity that there can be any question. The main interest lies in another direction, in the subtle analysis of this special mental condition, which is done with consummate art.
This story had the honor of occupying an entire meeting of the psychiatrists attached to the Academy of Medicine of St. Petersburg. According to the report of Dr. Ivanov, the assembly was almost unanimous in declaring the murderer insane. Another psychiatrist, who thought he saw proofs of an abnormal mentality in all the stories of Andreyev, pronounced the same verdict against Dr. Kerzhenzev, in a meeting of doctors.