Booklist 17:143 Ja ’21 Boston Transcript p5 S 29 ’20 310w + Cath World 112:269 N ’20 180w
ANDREIEFF, LEONID NIKOLAEVICH. Satan’s diary; authorized tr. *$2.25 (4c) Boni & Liveright
Satan has assumed human form in the person of a Chicago billionaire, Henry Wondergood and gives an account of his mundane exploits in the form of a diary. He finds that, with the body of Wondergood, he has also acquired some of his human qualities and is no longer proof against human emotions. Thus, when in Rome he meets one Magnus and his daughter Maria, a madonna-like woman, he falls in love with her and allows Magnus to out-satan him to the extent of robbing him of all his money and finally to blow him up in his palace after revealing to him that Maria the madonna, is not his daughter but his mistress. The story is a bitter satire on human life. In a long preface Herman Bernstein gives a brief sketch of Andreieff’s life.
“This is not only caustic comment on the conditions and problems of today on this world, it is a denunciation of all life, a renunciation of illusions and hopes. Without a doubt this latest and last work of Andreyev is for the time the last word in iconoclastic criticism.” W. T. R.
+ Boston Transcript p3 N 27 ’20 700w
“Many of the ideas are brought out in long, rambling conversations dealing in the characteristic Russian manner with the purely abstract phases of life, and tending to mystify rather than clarify. At other times the satire is quick and amusing in its unexpected turns of keen humour. Sometimes Andreyev shows a gentler side, one might almost say a romantic strain.” L. R. Sayler
+ − Freeman 2:381 D 29 ’20 460w
“A theme, this, to tempt one of the ‘masters of free irony and laughter,’ a Voltaire, an Anatole France. Its development in Andreyev’s hands is disappointing. We have too great a respect for the Satan of Job and of Milton to believe that he could have been so easily gulled. But the source of disappointment in the handling of the theme lies deeper. In this book, as in most of his other writings, Andreyev shrinks back appalled before the torturing riddle of human destiny. He hurls his vain questions against the blank wall.” Dorothy Brewster
− Nation 112:46 Ja 12 ’21 850w