Of contemporary Russian fictionists, Leonid Nikolaevich Andreev rises
largest with promise. Just past forty, he has for fourteen years been
producing work of strength and individual flavor, and, now that Tolstoi
is gone, his place is probably ahead of even Maxim Gorki--at least, he
is _primus inter pares_.
Andreev’s life is best told in his own brief words:
“I was born in 1871, in Oryol, and studied there at the gymnasium. I
studied poorly: while in the seventh class I was for a whole year known
as the worst student, and my mark for conduct was never higher than 4,
sometimes 3. The most pleasant time spent in school, which I recall
to this day with pleasure, was recess time between the lectures, and
also the rare occasions when I was sent out from the class-room. The
sunbeams which penetrated some cleft, and which played with the dust in
the hallway--all this was so mysterious, so interesting, so full of a
peculiar, hidden meaning.
“When I studied at the gymnasium my father, an engineer, died, and
while at the university I was in dire need. During my first year at
the St. Petersburg University I even starved--not so much out of real
necessity as because of my youth, inexperience, and inability to
utilize the unnecessary parts of my costume. I am to this day ashamed
to think that I went without food at a time when I had two or three
pairs of trousers, two overcoats, and the like.
“It was then that I wrote my first story--about a starving
student. I cried when I wrote it, and the editor who returned my
manuscript--laughed. That story of mine remained unpublished.
“In 1894 I made an unsuccessful attempt to kill myself by shooting. As
a result of this unsuccessful attempt, I was forced by the authorities
into religious penitence, and I contracted heart trouble, though not
of a serious nature, yet very annoying. During this time I made one or
two unsuccessful attempts at writing. I devoted myself with greater
pleasure and success to painting, which I loved from childhood on. I
made portraits to order at three and five rubles apiece.
“In 1897 I received my diploma and became an assistant attorney, but
I was sidetracked at the very outset of my career. I was offered a
position on the _Courier_, for which I was to report court proceedings.
I did not succeed in securing any practice as a lawyer. I had but one
case, and lost it at every point.
“In 1898 I wrote my first story--for the Easter number--and since then
I have devoted myself exclusively to literature. Maxim Gorki helped me
considerably in my literary work by his always practical advice and
suggestions.”
* * * * *
The anecdote is told that when this first story was published Gorki
telegraphed the _Courier_, “Who is it who hides himself under the
pseudonym of Leonid Andreev?” And later, when the Russian _Life_ issued
another of his stories, the poet Mereschkowsky asked if Andreev was the
pseudonym of Gorki or of Chekhov.
But Andreev is best to be studied through his writings.
“The Friend” is an effective bit of impressionism which must have
driven countless thousands to repentant kindness toward neglected
animals.
Vladimir, the typical young Russian, is a promising writer, wrapped
up in his work, and safely past the period of gay carousing. At
night he returns to his room and his “only friend,” Vasyuk, a little
black-haired dog, who adores his master. “My friend, my only friend,”
are words often on Vladimir’s lips, but at length he comes to love
Natalia, and Vasyuk gets his favorite dish of liver less often. One
day the dog is taken ill, but in his haste to visit Natalia, Vladimir
does not take Vasyuk to the veterinary. By and by it is too late. In
months to come, Vladimir fails to make good his literary promise, and--
... then, like the cover of a coffin, heavy, dead oblivion fell
upon him.
The woman had also forsaken him; she too considered herself
deceived.
The fumy, vaporous nights went by, also the mercilessly punishing
white days, and often, more often than before ... he lay in his bed
... and whispered:
“My friend, my only friend!”
And his quivering hand fell faintly upon the empty place.
From the foregoing, and even more from that which follows, we may
conclude it to be a peculiar property of the sketch-form in fiction
that its story may not be told in synopsis. Indeed, in the true sketch
there _is_ no story. Atmosphere, character-drawing, swift outlining of
a situation, impressions of mood and feeling--all these permeate the
sketch, but crises in human lives, complications arising therefrom, and
the untangling of the plotted skein--these belong to the short-story
and the novel.
For this reason much of Andreev’s shorter work defies our efforts to
retell it; one must go to the writer himself for his final phrase,
his subtly suggested situation, his almost uncanny evocation of
mood. “Valia,” for example, is one of his sketches which baffle the
second-hand narrator: as well try to reconstruct an old-time beauty by
dressing up a lay-figure in hand-me-downs.
Valia is a sensitive child who is awakened from his unconscious joy in
home by the hard, prickling kisses of a thin-lipped, long-necked woman
who announces herself to be his mother. Indignantly, yet politely, the
lad turns for denial to his supposed mother, rosy and sweet-lipped,
but she tearfully confirms the claim--he had been abandoned in
babyhood when he was inconvenient, but now that the mother was lonely
she claimed the child. The impending separation tears the hearts of
foster-father and -mother and the child himself. Valia becomes nervous,
fearful of the dark, and pines almost to illness. But joy and new
health come to them all when the courts, which have been invoked
to aid the unnatural mother, decide against her claim. At length,
however, the highest tribunal reverses the lower court, and the child
must go away. The final scene leaves the real mother weeping because
her stranger-child takes no pleasure in playthings. The situation
is symbolical, for that is the only appeal a sordid, self-serving
woman knows how to make to a spirituelle child who has drawn his
spirituality not from her nature, but--who knows whence, if not from
the breast of his foster-mother! And when the child at the last timidly
approaches the weeping egoist and with gentle dignity promises to love
her “all he can,” we see a triumph of impressionistic sketch-work.
Even more difficult to outline is “The Man Who Found the Truth.” It
is the story told by himself of a man who at sixty is released from
an unjust imprisonment, after having been convicted years before
of murdering several members of his family in order to gain an
inheritance. But when he realizes the stress of his old life out in the
world, he has his room transformed into a model of his old cell, hires
a keeper from his prison, and once more returns to a tranquil life.
Its _leit-motif_ is strikingly like that of Pierre Loti’s “The Wall
Opposite.”
The last cry in mysticism is Andreev’s “A Story Which Will Never Be
Finished.” Seek to lay your finger upon its precise meaning, and it
flutters away like a gauzy-winged visitant; and yet every progressing
line deepens an impression upon the soul. It is a pervasive,
atmospheric thing, full of mysterious movements, potent though
nameless--breaths of uncharted freedom whisper of an impinging world
where our realities are unreal; sleeping senses, hitherto unsuspected,
strangely stir to their awakening; yet they do not actually awaken.
Is it war, is it death opening out into life, is it emancipation--one
doesn’t quite know; yet it is all of these. Hawthorne was never more
vaguely pregnant, and Poe never more perfectly conveyed the sense of an
unnamed something which is just about to be.
Here indeed Andreev is like Poe. Now and then I hear him called “The
Russian Poe.” The epithet is not satisfactory. Something of our
American poet there is in the Russian, for both, like Hawthorne,
are masters of introspection, and both know the ritual of fantasy
as past-masters, but when Andreev depicts the weird there is always
a basis of human reality. Poe could harrow the soul with a sense of
fantastic horrors impending, but Andreev need only draw aside the
curtains and show us truth unadorned, truth unrelieved by truth’s
beautiful other half, and a deeper shudder rocks the soul than ever
chilled the flesh at Poe’s phantasmagoric evocations. Really, this
young titan is two men--one mystical like Hawthorne, a vein of
melancholy in his pessimism, but sympathetic withal, and showing more
pity for his characters than the realistic school approves. The other
fairly makes revel with the gibbering images of war, abnormalities
of soul rise and take on flesh at his bidding, and there is no spirit
so gloomy, wicked, and repellent but he can conjure it into being for
these terrible story-pictures. Which will be the artist’s final mood,
one may not surely forecast. In either extreme he is not his best self,
one may surmise. Certainly we should deplore the constant choice of a
theme like that of “The Abyss,” his first important story, in which the
love of a pure lad for a spotless girl is transformed into a vicious
thing that leads at length to a revolting crime. At the other end of
the gamut sounds the author’s idealistic note. “To the Stars,” his
first drama, is as far removed in tone from “The Abyss” as the titles
indicate. But Andreev’s dramas are worthy of a separate study.
Doubtless the mantle of fatalism which dropped from the shoulders
of Turgenev and Tolstoi successively will some day be discarded by
Russia’s younger prophets. Nietzsche influences Andreev strongly, but
so do the former great Russian novelists; is it too much to expect that
a spirit of hope may yet penetrate the heart of this genius who is
still young? Just now the revolution is outwardly cowed, anticipation
of better things has been rebuffed; but the spirit of progress rising
everywhere else is not for nought, and out of the very blackness
painted by Russia’s realists must come a determined and successful
struggle for vital reforms. Think of a nation of which the recent
Congress of Pathology at Moscow could report:
They all drink, the students, the collegians, and even the pupils
of the primary schools. There are a great number of alcoholics
among children of from seven to ten years of age. In the government
of Perm, all the students in the primary school, without exception,
drink vodka. In Livonia, 72 per cent. of the school-children drink
systematically. At Moscow, 64 per cent. are given up to the vice.
These facts, on Russian authority, make one accept the essential
truth of Andreev’s terrible revelations of depraved student life in
his recent play, “The Days of Our Life.” If only this black realism
be accepted as the prophet’s warning, its revolting character will be
not without justification. It is, however, a paradoxical seer who can
in his play, “Black Masks,” ridicule the spiritual struggle between
darkness and light, and yet write to an admirer that he finds in the
Bible the greatest teacher of all.
Four of Andreev’s longer stories deserve more than mere mention. “A
Dilemma”--sometimes called “Thought,” which conforms to the Russian
title, _Mysl_ (1902)--is a long short-story. It is a remarkable
psychological study of Kerzhentsev, a physician, who hovers between
sanity and madness. In spite of his superb endowments of body and
mind, he becomes obsessed with the desire to murder his best friend,
Alexis Savelov, merely because Savelov had married the woman whom
the physician desired. This murder he determines to commit under two
conditions--the murder shall be known to the victim’s wife, yet the
perpetrator must escape punishment. One night, while dining with the
Savelovs, the doctor feigns a sort of mad fit, but for a whole month
craftily does not renew the pretense. At length Kerzhentsev propounds
his problem to his intended victim in a veiled way, and the victim
argues that with a heavy metal paper-weight one might crush a man’s
head, and bids the doctor go through such an action in dumb show. But
the wife protests against such risks, for she has had a presentiment
of evil. Soon after this the doctor actually does crush the head of
Savelov, and in the confusion slips away to his home. Just as he is
falling asleep, delighted with the success of his plan, a thought
languidly enters his brain, as though a voice issued from another: _It
is very possible that Dr. Kerzhentsev is really insane. He thought that
he simulated, but he is really insane--insane at this very instant._
Thus begins the terrible dilemma, “for he is fighting against himself
for his own reason.” At length to save himself from the madhouse he
confesses to the judges that he is not mad, but a criminal deserving of
punishment.
“The Red Laugh” (1904), which has been translated into German, French,
and English, is Andreev’s most terrible piece of realism. If this
inspired picture of the Manchurian War is true, and one feels that it
is, General Sherman was conservative. Those who thrill at war pictures
and feel the power of patriotism in the call of battle will not enjoy
the bloody horror of “The Red Laugh.” The story is a service--of the
heroic remedy sort--which Andreev renders to the cause of peace. Naked,
lustful, scheming war, hellish and brutal, that is the Russian’s
picture--like Wiertz in his mad paintings of blood and torment. The
title takes itself naturally from an incident which the narrator,
an officer, tells early in the book, how that a young volunteer
approaches him with a countenance so intensely white that the officer
asks, “Are you afraid?” With that the young man’s face bursts into the
red laugh--He has become a victim of war’s awful stroke, frightful,
unspeakable.
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.
“Judas Iscariot and the Others” (1907) is a short novel truly notable
for its unique motif--the traitorous apostle is not inspired to
betray Jesus by mercenary motives, but in order to force the Master
to manifest his power and demonstrate his Divinity. Thus were Judas a
high-minded patriot instead of a contemptible bribe-taker.
“The Seven Who Were Hanged” (1907) is Andreev’s most distinguished
work. As a novel, it is sincere, powerful, and provocative. Whatever
one’s views of the death penalty for crime, the author makes a
tremendous appeal to pity. Here are seven condemned ones who are to
suffer “the horror and the iniquity of capital punishment,” and they
surely are of “all sorts and conditions,” from Musya, whose large
womanhood flows, a sustaining stream, to the least of her fellow
victims, down to that miserable one whose inert soul suffers less than
his brutalized body. The identity of each is not lost for a moment
in the circumstances and occupations of imprisonment, nor yet in
the midnight journey to the hanging place. They are individual, yet
they are pitiably types. Oh, the sadness of it--we feel that to be
the burden of the author’s soul, and so it becomes our own. It is a
poignant, fearful picture, depressing and relentless, but more deeply
imbued with pity than anything else Andreev has written.
“Silence,” which was published in 1900, and is therefore one of our
author’s earliest stories, is a sketch whose iterant impressionism is
felt in every line.
SILENCE
_By Leonid Andreev_
I
It was a moonlight night in May, and the nightingales were singing,
when the wife of Father Ignatius entered his chamber. Her countenance
expressed suffering, and the little lamp she held in her hand trembled.
Approaching her husband, she touched his shoulder, and managed to say
between her sobs:
“Father, let us go to Verochka!”
Without turning his head, Father Ignatius glanced severely at his wife
over the rims of his spectacles, and looked long and intently, till she
waved her unoccupied hand and dropped on a low divan.
“That one toward the other should be so pitiless!” she pronounced
slowly, with emphasis on the final syllables, and her good plump face
was distorted with a grimace of pain and exasperation, as if thus she
would express what stern people they were--her husband and daughter.
Father Ignatius smiled and arose. Closing his book, he took off his
spectacles, put them in the case, and meditated. His long black beard,
inwoven with silver threads, lay dignified on his breast, and slowly
heaved at every deep breath.
“Well, let us go,” said he.
Olga Stepanovna quickly arose and entreated in an appealing, timorous
voice:
“Only don’t revile her, Father! You know the sort she is.”
* * * * *
Vera’s chamber was in the attic, and the narrow, wooden stair bent and
creaked under the heavy tread of Father Ignatius. Tall and ponderous,
he bent his head to avoid striking the floor of the upper story, and
frowned disdainfully when the white jacket of his wife brushed his
face. Well he knew that nothing would come of their talk with Vera.
“Why do you come?” asked Vera, raising a bared arm to her eyes. The
other arm lay on top of a white summer blanket, hardly distinguishable
from the fabric, so white, translucent, and cold was its aspect.
“Verochka----” began her mother, but, sobbing, she grew silent.
“Vera,” said her father, making an effort to soften his dry and hard
voice--“Vera, tell us, what troubles you?”
Vera was silent.
“Vera, do not your mother and I deserve your confidence? Do we not
love you? And is there some one nearer to you than we? Tell us about
your sorrow, and, take the word of an experienced old man, you’ll feel
better for it. And we too. Look at your aged mother, how much she
suffers!”
“Verochka!”
“And I----” The dry voice trembled, truly something had broken in it.
“And I--do you think I find it easy? As if I did not see that some
sorrow is gnawing at you--and what is it? And I, your father, do not
know what it is. Do you think that right?”
Vera was silent. Father Ignatius very cautiously stroked his beard, as
if afraid that his fingers would enmesh themselves involuntarily in it,
and continued:
“Against my wish you went to St. Petersburg--did I pronounce a curse
upon you, you who disobeyed me? Or did I deny you money? Or, perhaps, I
have not been kind? Well, why, then, are you silent? There, you’ve had
your St. Petersburg!”
Father Ignatius became silent, and there loomed before him an image
of something huge, granite, and terrible, full of invisible dangers
and of strange and indifferent people. And it was there that, alone
and weak, his Vera had gone, and it was there they had lost her. An
awful hatred against that terrible and mysterious city arose in the
soul of Father Ignatius, and an anger against his daughter, who was
silent--obstinately silent.
“St. Petersburg has nothing to do with it,” said Vera morosely, and
closed her eyes. “And nothing is the matter with me. Better go to bed,
it is late.”
“Verochka, my child,” whimpered her mother, “do tell me!”
“_Akh_, Mamma!” Vera impatiently interrupted her.
Father Ignatius sat down on a chair and laughed.
“Well, then, it’s nothing?” he inquired ironically.
“Father,” sharply ejaculated Vera, raising herself from the pillow,
“you know that I love you and Mother. Well, I do feel a little weary.
But that will pass. Do go to sleep, and I also wish to sleep. And
to-morrow, or some other time, we’ll have a chat.”
Father Ignatius arose so impetuously that the chair hit the wall, and
he took his wife’s hand.
“Let us go.”
“Verochka!”
“Let us go, I tell you!” shouted Father Ignatius. “If she has
forgotten God, shall we----”
Almost forcibly he led Olga Stepanovna out of the room, and when they
descended the stairs, his wife, decreasing her gait, said in a harsh
whisper:
“It was you, priest, who have made her such! From you she learned her
ways. And you’ll answer for it. _Akh_, unhappy creature that I am!”
She burst into tears, and, as her vision grew dim, her foot, missing a
step, would descend with a sudden jolt, as if she were eager to fall
into some abyss which waited below.
From that day Father Ignatius ceased to speak to his daughter, but she
seemed not to notice it. As before, she lay in her room, or walked
about, continually with the palms of her hands wiping her eyes, as if
they contained some irritating foreign substance. And, crushed between
these two silent people, the jolly, fun-loving wife of the priest
quailed and seemed lost, not knowing what to say or do.
Occasionally Vera took a stroll. A week after the interview she went
out in the evening, as was her habit. She was not seen again alive, as
that night she threw herself under the train, and it cut her in two.
Father Ignatius himself directed the funeral. His wife was not present
in church, for at the news of Vera’s death she was prostrated by a
stroke. She lost control of her feet, hands, and tongue, and when the
church bells rang out she lay motionless in the half-darkened room. She
heard the people intone the chants as they issued out of church and
passed the house, and she made an effort to raise her hand to make the
sign of the cross, but her hand refused to obey; she wished to say,
“Farewell, Vera!” but the tongue lay in her mouth huge and heavy. And
her attitude was so calm that it gave one an impression of restfulness,
or of sleep. Only, her eyes remained open.
At the funeral, in church, were many people who knew Father Ignatius,
and many strangers. All bewailed Vera’s terrible death, and tried to
detect in the movements and voice of Father Ignatius tokens of a deep
sorrow. They did not love Father Ignatius, because of his severity and
proud manners, his scorn of sinners, his unforgiving spirit, his envy
and covetousness, his habit of utilizing every opportunity to extort
money from his parishioners. They all wished to see him suffer, to see
his spirit broken, to see him conscious in his two-fold guilt for the
death of his daughter--as a cruel father and a bad priest--incapable of
preserving his own flesh from sin. They cast searching glances at him,
and he, feeling these glances directed toward his back, made efforts
to hold erect its broad and strong expanse, and his thoughts were not
concerning his dead daughter, but concerning his own dignity.
“A hardened priest!” with a shake of his head said Karzenoff, a
carpenter, to whom Father Ignatius owed five rubles for frames.
And thus, hard and erect, Father Ignatius reached the burial-ground;
and in the same manner he returned. Only at the door of his wife’s
chamber did his backbone relax a little, but this may have been due
to the fact that the height of the door was insufficient to admit
his tall figure. The change from broad daylight made it hard for him
to distinguish the face of his wife, but, after scrutiny, he was
astonished at its calmness, and because the eyes showed no tears. And
there was neither anger nor sorrow in the eyes--they were dumb, though
they kept silent with difficulty, reluctantly, as did the entire round
and helpless body that pressed against the feather bedding.
“Well, how do you feel?” inquired Father Ignatius.
But the lips were dumb; the eyes too were silent. Father Ignatius laid
his hand on her forehead; it was cold and moist, and Olga Stepanovna
did not show in any way that she had felt the contact of the hand.
When Father Ignatius removed his hand there gazed at him, immobile, two
deep gray eyes, from the dilated pupils seeming almost entirely dark,
and there was neither sadness in them nor anger.
“I am going into my own room,” said Father Ignatius, who began to feel
cold and terror.
He passed through the drawing-room, where, as usual, everything
appeared neat and in order, and where, attired in white covers, stood
tall chairs, like corpses in their shrouds. In one window hung an empty
wire cage, with the door open.
“Nastasya,” shouted Father Ignatius. His own voice seemed to him
coarse, and he felt ill at ease because he raised it to so high a pitch
in these silent rooms, so soon after his daughter’s funeral.
“Nastasya!” he called more softly, “where is the canary?”
“It flew away, to be sure.”
“Why did you let it out?”
Nastasya began to weep, and, wiping her face with the edges of her
calico headkerchief, said through her tears:
“It was my young mistress’s soul. Was it right to hold it?”
And it seemed to Father Ignatius that the happy little yellow canary,
always singing with side-tilted head, was actually the soul of Vera,
and if it had not flown away it wouldn’t have been possible to say that
Vera had died. He became even more incensed at the maid-servant and
shouted:
“Off with you!”
And because Nastasya did not vanish on the instant he added:
“Fool!”