Essays on Russian Novelists

by William Lyon Phelps

Andreev himself says that he has learned much from Tolstoi, the great Tolstoi of the sixties and seventies, also from Nietzsche, whom he reads with enthusiasm, and whose most characteristic book, Also Sprach Zarathustra, he translated into Russian. He has read Poe with profit, but he testifies that his greatest teacher in composition is the Bible. In a letter to a young admirer, he wrote: "I thank you for your kind dedication. . . . I note that in one place you write about the Bible. Yes, that is the best teacher of all--the Bible."*

* Most of the biographical information in this paragraph I have taken from an interesting article in The Independent for 29 July 1909, by Ivan Lavretski.

Andreev has the gift of admiration, and loves to render homage where homage is due, having dedicated his first book to Gorki, and his story of ÊThe Seven Who Were Hanged to Tolstoi. His style, while marked by the typical yet always startling Russian simplicity, is nevertheless entirely his own, and all his tales and plays are stamped by powerful individuality. He is fast becoming an international celebrity. His terrible picture of war, The Red Laugh, has been translated into German, French, and English, two of his dramas, Anathema and To the Stars, have been published in America, and other of his short stories are known everywhere in Germany.

The higher the scale in human intelligence, the more horrible and the more ridiculous does war appear. That men engaged in peaceful and intellectual pursuits should leave their families, their congenial work, their pleasant associations, and go out to torture and murder men of similar tastes and activities, and become themselves transformed into hideous wild beasts, has a combination of horror and absurdity that peculiarly impresses a people so highly sensitive, so thoroughly intellectual, and so kind-hearted as the Russians. All Russian war-literature, and there is much of it, points back to Tolstoi's Sevastopol, where the great novelist stripped warfare of all its sentiment and patriotic glitter, and revealed its dull, sordid misery as well as its hellish tragedies. What Tolstoi did for the Crimean War, Garshin did for the war with Turkey in the seventies. I have not seen it mentioned, but I suspect that Andreev owes much to the reading of this brilliant author. Garshin was an unquestionable genius; if he had lived, I think he might have become the real successor to Tolstoi, a title that has been bestowed upon Chekhov, Gorki, and Andreev, and has not yet been earned by any man. But like nearly all Russian authors, he suffered from intense melancholia, and in 1888 committed suicide at the age of thirty-three. His short story Four Days on the Field of Slaughter first brought him into public notice. One cannot read Andreev's Red Laugh to-day without thinking of it.

"On the edge of the wood there was visible something red, floating here and there. Sidorov fell suddenly to the ground and stared at me in silence with great, terrified eyes. Out of his mouth poured a stream of blood. Yes, I remember it very well." This is the red laugh of Andreev, though until the appearance of his book it lacked the appropriate name. Garshin describes how a Russian soldier stabs a Fellah to death with his bayonet, and then, too badly injured to move, lies for four days and nights, in shivering cold and fearful heat, beside the putrefying corpse of his dead antagonist. "I did that. I had no wish to do it. I wished no one evil, as I left home for the war. The thought that I should kill a man did not enter my head. I thought only of my own danger. And I went to him and did this. Well, and what happened? O fool, O idiot! This unfortunate Egyptian is still less guilty. Before they packed them on a steamer like herrings in a box, and brought them to Constantinople, he had never heard of Russia, or of Bulgaria. They told him to go and he went."

In the Diary of Private lvanov, Garshin gave more pictures of the hideous suffering of war, with a wonderful portrait of the commander of the company, who is so harshly tyrannical that his men hate him, and resolve to slay him in the battle. But he survives both open and secret foes, and at the end of the conflict they find him lying prostrate, his whole body shaken with sobs, and saying brokenly, "Fifty-two! Fifty-two!" Fifty-two of his company had been killed, and despite his cruelty to them, he had loved them all like children.

Garshin wrote other tales, among them a poetically beautiful story of a tree, Attalea Princeps, that reminds one somewhat of Björnson. But his chief significance is as a truthful witness to the meaningless maiming and murder of war, and his attitude is precisely similar to that of Andreev, and both follow Tolstoi.

Andreev's Red Laugh ought to be read in America as a contrast to our numerous war stories, where war is pictured as a delightful and exciting tournament. This book has not a single touch of patriotic sentiment, not a suggestion of "Hurrah for our side!" The soldiers are on the field because they were sent there, and the uninjured are too utterly tired, too tormented with lack of sleep, too hungry and thirsty to let out a single whoop. The first sight of the Red Laugh reminds us of the picturesque story of Napoleon's soldier that Browning has immortalised in the Incident of the French Camp. Tolstoi mentions the same event in Sevastopol, and his version of it would have pleased Owen Wister's Virginian more than Browning's. In Andreev there is no graceful gesture, no French pose, no "smiling joy"; but there is the nerve-shattering red laugh. The officer who tells the story in the first half of the book narrates how a young volunteer came up to him and saluted. The appearance of his face was so tensely white that the officer enquires, "Are you afraid?" Suddenly a stream of blood bursts from the young man's body, and his deadly pale face turns into something unspeakable, a toothless laugh--the red laugh.

In this gruesome tale of the realities of war, Andreev has given shocking physical details of torn and bleeding bodies, but true to the theme that animates all his books, he has concentrated the main interest on the Mind. Soldiers suffer in the flesh, but infinitely more in the mind. War points chiefly not to the grave, nor to the hospital, but to the madhouse. All forms of insanity are bred by the horror and fatigue of the marches and battles: many shoot themselves, many become raging maniacs, many become gibbering idiots. Every man who has studied warfare knows that the least of all perils is the bullet of the enemy, for only a small proportion are released by that. The innumerable and subtle forms of disease, bred by exposure and privation, constitute the real danger. Andreev is the first to show that the most common and awful form of disease among Russian soldiers is the disease of the brain. The camp becomes a vast madhouse, with the peculiar feature that the madmen are at large. The hero of the story loses both his legs, and apparently completely recovered in health otherwise, returns home to his family, and gazes wistfully at his bicycle. A sudden desire animates him to write out the story of the Japanese war; in the process he becomes insane and dies. His brother then attempts to complete the narrative from the scattered, confused notes, but to his horror, whenever he approaches the desk, the phantom of the dead man is ever there, busily writing: he can hear the pen squeak on the paper.

No more terrible protest against war has ever been written than Andreev's Red Laugh. It shows not merely the inexpressible horror of the battlefield and the dull, weary wretchedness of the men on the march, but it follows out the farthest ramifications flowing from the central cause: the constant tragedies in the families, the letters received after the telegraph has announced the death of the writer, the insane wretches who return to the homes they left in normal health, the whole accumulation of woe.