| | 141 | Author: | Kayden, Eugene M. | Add | | | Title: | Leonid Andreyev: 1871-1919  | | | | Published: | 1998 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | BETWEEN THE TWO REVOLUTIONS of 1905 and 1917
Leonid Andreyev was without a doubt the foremost writer in
Russia. His name was always spoken with veneration, in
mysterious whispers, as a grim portentous magician who descended
into the ultimate depths of the nether side of life and fathomed the
beauty and tragedy of the struggle. Leonid Nickolayevitch was born
in the province of Oryol, in 1871, and studied law at the University
of Moscow. Those were days of suffering and starvation; he gazed
into the abyss of sorrow and despair. In January 1894 he made an
unsuccessful attempt to kill himself by shooting, and then was
forced by the authorities to severe penitence, which augmented the
natural morbidness of his temperament. As a lawyer his career was
short-lived, and he soon abandoned it for literature, beginning as a
police-court reporter on the Moscow Courier. In 1902 he published
the short story In the Fog, which for the first time brought him
universal recognition. He was imprisoned during the revolution of
1905, together with Maxim Gorky, on political charges. Such are
the few significant details of his personal life, for the true Andreyev
is entirely in his stories and plays. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 142 | Author: | Lowell, Percival | Add | | | Title: | Mars / Lowell, Percival | | | | Published: | 1998 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | AMID the seemingly countless stars that on a clear night
spangle the vast dome overhead, there appeared last autumn to be a
new-comer, a very large and ruddy one, that rose at sunset through
the haze about the eastern horizon. That star was the planet Mars,
so conspicuous when in such position as often to be taken for a
portent. Large as he then looked, however, he is in truth but a
secondary planet traveling round a secondary sun; but his interest
for us is out of all proportion to his actual size or his relative
importance in the cosmos. For that sun is our own; and that planet
is, with the exception of the moon, our next to nearest neighbor in
space, Venus alone ever approaching us closer. From him,
therefore, of all the heavenly bodies, may we expect first to learn
something beyond celestial mechanics, beyond even celestial
chemistry; something in answer to the mute query that man
instinctively makes as he gazes at the stars, whether there be life
in worlds other than his own. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
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