University of Virginia Library

Leonid Andreyev: 1871-1919

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.

Andreyev belongs to that great fellowship of Russian authors who did not accept the scientific advance of the century with its unquestioning ambition and belief in the saving grace of mere action and work. An unflinching realist seeking truth with a terrible zeal, he divested things of their good nature and gloss, and his chosen themes were the failure of the cultured man in the face of all-pervading coarseness, and the moral decay of middle-class correctness and order. At first he told himself that it was best to live without theories and misgivings, and unheeding joy seemed the solution, which he expressed in There Was, In Springtime, On the River, A Present, Holiday, and others. "Neither truth nor falsehood will conquer," he then wrote; "only that will conquer which is in complete consonance with the foundation of life itself." But aloofness was foreign to his nature, and the themes which won undiminished ascendancy in his writings were the problems of man's solitude in the midst of conventional social life, his loneliness before inexplicable fate, and his eager yearning for human solidarity, for a moral — not economic — bond in human existence. In the everyday kingdom of mere things, in contact with our joyless existence and the adamantean wall of social customs and falsehoods, he saw nothing but confusion, madness, death. Not life itself was terrible, but its debasement to meaner ends, our fierce absorption in inconsequential aims and activities, and the employment of intelligence in works that negate civilization, although presumptuously and solemnly undertaken to ameliorate and save. It was man's haughty belief in his power to be master of his fate, and of the dark mysterious forces compassing our life, that was the cause of confusion and madness. Pride of intellect, in the face of endless time and space, only increases man's desolation and makes his ruin certain. Andreyev's lone-faring man saw reason overtopping itself, sufficiency and philistinism making a cursed waste of life where dreams of excellence are squandered in sin's distress, and his existence tended to withdraw from external activity and achievement deeper into the silences of mental life; in the place of ambition, action, love, we have the tragedy of the intellect and the sufferings of lonely thought. This was the tragedy of his Dr. Kerzhentsev, who wanted by his intellect and will alone to span the abyss of doubt, committing a crime in the name of culture. It is no less the tragedy of the gray little average man who revolts against the idea that he has no other destiny than to be a means of "general" happiness, a "social manure." Sergey Petrovich would not enslave nor be enslaved, and so he dies, following the pitiless injunction of Zarathustra, "If thy life is not successful, if a venomous worm is gnawing at thy heart, know that death will succeed."

A pessimist? True. But Andreyev does not end with pessimism. He was not the brilliant author toying with his changeful moods and fancies, but a fiery soul gripped by the world's sorrow, and seeing visions of new worlds and beauty. By temperament a man of combat, he yearned for a wider heaven and real people. Denying life he yet

vibrates with love and sorrow of life, convinced that life is great, invincible. Refuting life, he believes in the symbol. The dying will thirsts for the impossible, looking for the miracle in the order of gloom and bestiality. Before the impenetrable Wall, against which are piled the dead of generations and ages, it is the leper who cries: "Let it stand. But is not each corpse a step to the summit? We are many, and our life is burdensome. Let us cover the earth with our bodies, body on body, and we shall reach the very summit. And if one of us should remain — he will behold the new world." Here was faith within fear and confusion, a bugle call to action for the sake of one short shuddering step to the Unseen, to the doorway of the new life; here was a sufficient answer to the question why struggle and die. Young revolutionary Russia heard the call. The mysticism which Andreyev accepted was not the comfort of an undisturbed faith, but a mysticism born out of great combat and striving, a mysticism of belief and asseveration. No wonder then that with the revolution of 1905 the cordial swiftness of Andreyev's art and his infinite love for the thwarted hopes and agonies of his people had completely captivated the imagination and the deep worship of his compatriots. No pessimist could have produced in rapid succession the individual and social dramas which followed after 1905: To the Stars, Savva, King Hunger, Life of Man, and Anathema. In these Andreyev reached the acme of his poetic utterance.

The light which was breaking through the gloom and confusion of Andreyev's early work was the conception of man as the son of eternity, a citizen of countless worlds, a sun-snarer. "Earth is wax in man's hands," cries the dreamy worker Treitch, in To the Stars, who would light a new sun with his own blood if the old were to go out. What if the noble and the beautiful spirits, like the student Nicholas, perish in the struggle? Man knows no death; the earth is full with his perfume. Treitch understands the old father astronomer who dreams of untriangulated stars and "the mystery of things above us" where he discerns the birth of unknown friends "seven hundred years from now." Earth and sky join hands, revolutionist and astronomer are equally seekers through the dusk of struggle and failure for the living spark, to get where life begins anew. And the astronomer sends Marie to die as Nicholas died, and he promises her immortality. To the stars! Work and combat on earth in the name of a wonderful dream.

The revolutionary character unfolds itself fully in Savva, the man who could not forgive all those who turned the world into "a cesspool, a slaughter-house." Savva came to sweep away the civilization of centuries and clear the way for great deeds, to give thought its wings. "It is necessary to strip the earth naked, Lippa," he cries to his sister; "to strip away all the hideous old rags! Earth is worthy of a royal mantle, but what have they done with her? She is dressed in coarse fustian, in prisoner's rags." He would sweep away all the past, all that imprisons man within the iron round of things already accomplished. Only the brave will remain, only those who will build up a new life, new beauty. Savva burns with a beautiful passion and a mad love for an ideal. He, too, is lonely; he loves only the society of children. But he too must perish, for life is a continuous process, and humanity an old man, refusing to be decompounded and rebuilt to the linear utopianism of the dreamer and theorist, come out of the silence with his ideal to be foisted on unregenerate society. Old Kondraty thinks that man is sly, that he would hide and save something of the old order and then backslide into his former ways. With his sister Lippa, Andreyev cannot forget the unfortunate victims: "No, Savva, you don't love anyone. You love only yourself and your dreams. He who loves men will not take away from them all they love. He will not regard his own wishes more than their lives. Destroy everything! Destroy Golgotha? Consider: destroy Golgotha! The brightest, the most glorious hope that ever was on earth! All right, you don't believe in Christ. But if you have a single drop of nobility in your nature, you must respect and honor His noble memory. He also was unhappy. He was crucified — crucified, Savva! You are silent?"

Andreyev cannot forget the individual "speck of dust," our common brother who is demanded as a sacrifice to brotherhood. He tells many stories of the life of the ordinary "gray" men, souls lost and bewildered, and yet dreaming of excellence. He cannot reconcile himself to man doomed to nothing. In Life of Man we see him suffering for this gray man of the crowd. He chooses common incidents — poverty, heedless pleasures of youth, ambition, rise to wealth, family happiness, dreams of home and big fireplaces, comfort at maturity, the loss of the only son, and man's bewilderment before misfortune and unknown fate. Imperceptibly we begin to understand that the tragedy of the modern individualist consists in his failure to relate himself organically with the plangent life about him, to establish an immediate bond between himself and the larger social life, in the absence of which personal achievement hangs like a pall that shrouds dullness and vacancy.

But though the soul is lost, and the sick beast defiles man, he is reaching out for indissoluble truth. This is the eternal ageless reality so significant to Andreyev, for it is a power which flouts deformity and laughs at failure. This common concrete circumstance Andreyev traces out divinely on the walls of man's thought. He pursues this fateful idea of man thinking himself the center of the universe, demanding happiness and reason, while life goes on heedless of man's desires and sufferings, until he creates the symbols Anathema and King Hunger, spirits which at once despise and love man, suffering for him, betraying him, and striving to cast the chaos of life into some mold of rational conscious will. Anathema is modern and original. Not Milton's reason rising against God, nor Byron's fallen spirit of romantic daring and protest, nor the cold, calculating, disdainful spirit of Goethe's creation; Anathema is "gray," cautious and bold, lying and yet truthful, ambitious, loving work and fame, seeking justice and eternity. He is the "devil" of an oppressed and enslaved industrial people; self-confident reason struggling towards happiness and truth. Anathema is in science only — in numbers, weight, and measure; in a word, a modern parvenu. He would prove to the Guardian at the Gate in heaven that misery is eternal, man worthless, and compassion futile. The poor Jew David should be the test. Anathema brings millions to David, and David goes forth to give joy to all men. The masses come to him "like four oceans of tears," he gives them everything until he is poor again, and when he is powerless to satisfy the unending poverty of the earth, he would try a miracle — only to give them happiness. He deceives their hopes and expectations, and David, who was ready to squeeze his heart "like a sponge between the millstones of his palms," perishes at their hands. Love and compassion end in hatred and death. But in spite of the great evil done, the Guardian at the Gate affirms the deathlessness of love. David is immortal. "He lives in the immortality of fire which is life." Anathema, who is numbers and measures, cannot understand. A tragic solution this — the failure and the immortality of David. But is Andreyev wrong? Has love ever vanquished by mere giving of wealth away? Has Christianity won by the mere surrendering of the two coats? David was only a philanthropist, a poor man after all. Love does not bind men this way, and money charity does not make society one and organic. Riches only stirred in David the fear of death whom he waited as a friend when he was poor. David has no essential beauty. Nevertheless this moral outgoing of man, spanning the chasm between self and the world, is precious. Truth saves mankind. Truth is immortal in David, in man's emotional yearning for man, but truth must perish in Anathema, who is numbers and measures.

King Hunger appeared at a moment of universal desperation when the defeat of the revolutionary movement produced a state of chaos in the life and literature of Russia. Andreyev seized the spirit of the desperate condition of the struggle, the tragic spirit of rebellion among the peasants, and the monstrosity of a spiritually barren class in a position of power. The dramatic pictures of King Hunger reveal the masterful broad strokes of a great artist's brush. We feel the presence of Stygian shadows; they waver, fading into transparent colossal shapes, incomprehensible and gruesome as the figures of Time, Death, and King Hunger. We hear earth groaning, we hear the weeping of her children. The despotic power of the machine crushes the life and blood of the earth and her fair children. Time is waiting for man to grow indignant and to revolt. King Hunger knows that nature is gathering her gigantic force to hurl into oblivion the whole burden of false, man-destroying culture, its shames and lies, and the arrogance of privilege. This releasing force is both the revolution and the inauguration of the new world. Not unlike destiny, playing with social forces, King Hunger is dual in nature. He is lackey and leader. He fawns on the rich, their pride and over-confidence in perpetuating themselves in power; he instigates the underworld of thieves, paupers, strumpets — the legitimate counterpart of the mercantile order — to murder, violence, and destruction. Among the laborers, in the factory, he appears as leader. He sees their unceasing toil without beginning or end, he hears their demands for joy and life, he feels the reserve power of great spirits and their inarticulate cries, and he calls them to revolt. "Let us give back to man his might and beauty! Let's fling him again into the torrent of infinite motion!" Man must cease to be the thrall of the machine. Only free man can live in joy of life; only such can love; only love proclaims itself in pure artistic impulses and creative thought.

Into this fantastic struggle of social forces Andreyev projected the dark mood of The Girl in Black. She represents the best and noblest instincts of the ruling classes, who, confronted with a dreadful social overthrow, and exhausted under the pressure of historic evolution, blindly strive to live with their backward faith. She cannot merge herself with the hopes and struggles of the masses, her princely offering of sympathy is spurned, but she would not

"laugh at the fallen." The cruelty and cynicism of her class exasperate her. She feels that their greed and malice have produced delusions and monsters. Moving in a class which can no longer fight for its power as an ideal, she can only advise them "to meet death dancing," to die beautifully. She knows that the growing solidarity of the toiling masses will end all passive submission to the myth of authority. Her mood of defeat seizes the ruling class on the night of the great revolt, when hope rebounds on the barricades and the prophecy of Cassandra rings in the air. They can only see "shaggy, half-naked monsters" in revolt, slaying women and children, burning libraries and art galleries. She and her class can only hear voices roaring revenge and poison. Deceived by the immediate utterances of indignation, blind to the deeper and nobler instincts demanding a worthy share in the joys of life whose physical sustenance shall no longer exhaust man's forces in weary service, she and her class mistake the true nature of the great upheaval. But — "I am not Stephano, but a cramp." She and her class are the "cramp" of the social revolution.

The revolt is drowned in blood. The devourers of the people triumph. But is there not another King, not King Hunger? In the factory scene, one workingman demands sternly, "To go to freedom over violence?" He believes in another King, but does not know his name. He is young and daring, consumptive, and thinks that a new world will blossom on his blood. The picture of collective man at work, creating, is not found in Andreyev: he lacked enthusiasm and the strength of a soul willing to give itself to those who blunderingly but earnestly labor for a larger life. Andreyev was not the man to reveal the subterranean ideas and passions generating within life itself. He was never the conscience of Russia, with lips touched by divine living fire, as Tolstoy was, but the mood of Russia, falling and rising with the dreams and hopes of the struggle.

In 1905 the revolt was blind and elemental, and apparently without constructive force. It was a trial of strength. But the young consumptive workingman, and Andreyev's mood, look forward to a King yet to come. They have faith in the final victory; they feel that the human race, like Chekhov's Cherry-Tree Garden, though blasted for a while, will bloom again in the end. The powers of evil will die, poisoned by their own crimes and greed. A new order will be born. The workingmen of Andreyev are different from Hauptmann's weavers; they do not demolish machines, cut belts, quench boilers. They have no hatred of persons and machines. Hunger leads them to collective solidarity and consciousness. Mutilated and decimated, they will conquer in the end, rising on their dead selves, from the tears and sweat and blood of the torment. The dead field, of the last scene, strewn with the bodies of the perished and slain, the field on which the victors laugh and jeer at the fallen, breathes lasting defiance and resistance. A thousand-strong murmur rises on the dead field, the voice of the united armies of labor: "We shall yet come! We shall yet come! Woe to the victorious!" And the victors run. The dead are rising.