... Believe me, monk, I have been in many cities and in many lands. Nowhere did I see a free man. I saw only slaves. I saw the cages in which they live, the beds on which they are born and die; I saw their hatreds and their loves, their sins and their good works. And I saw also their amusements, their pitiful attempts to bring dead joy back to life again. And everything that I saw bore the stamp of stupidity and unreason. He that is born wise turns stupid in their midst: he that is born cheerful hangs himself from boredom and sticks out his tongue at them. Amidst the flowers of the beautiful earth—you have no idea how beautiful the earth is, monk—they have erected insane asylums. And what are they doing with their children? I have never yet seen parents who do not deserve capital punishment; first because they begot children, and secondly, because, having begot them, they did not immediately commit suicide.
Well, how is this enfant terrible—the trumpeter of a popularized edition of Schopenhauer, Bakounin, Stirner, Nietzsche, etc., etc.—how is this “bad man” going to carry through his gigantic plans? In a very simple manner: he will destroy the wonder-working ikon of the Saviour, that made the monastery of his native town famous; he will place a bomb behind the ikon, and its explosion will open the eyes of the ignorant believers. A tempest in a cup of water! But hark and tremble:
When we are through with God, we’ll go for fellows like him. There are lots of them—Titian, Shakespeare, Byron. We’ll make a nice pile of the whole lot and pour oil over it. Then we’ll burn their cities.
Monologues, long and pretentious like those quoted, fill up the play to a point of dizziness; yet there are a few oases in that unhappy work, where you find the real Andreyev, the unrivalled painter of sorrow and suffering. Here is, for instance, one of the pilgrims, a man who had killed accidentally his son and has since been wandering from monastery to monastery, fasting, wearing heavy chains, and indulging in all sorts of self-chastisement. The cynical monks give him the cruel nickname of King Herod, which he bears, like his other burdens, with the joy of a martyr. Listen to his unsophisticated talk:
King Herod: I am wise. My sorrow has made me so. It is a great sorrow. There is none greater on earth. I killed my son with my own hand. Not the hand you are looking at, but the one which isn’t here.
Savva: Where is it?
King Herod: I burnt it. I held it in the stove and let it burn up to my elbow.
Savva: Did that relieve you?
King Herod: No. Fire cannot destroy my grief. It burns with a heat that is greater than fire.... No, young man, fire is weak. Spit on it and it is quenched.
Our hero, Savva, is naturally offended, for his motto is Ignis sanat, and he is determined to cure the world with fire. The pilgrim calmly rejoinds: