Chapter IV: Front Matter (4)

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_