Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 2, 2025
Their best characters are abnormal; they have some fatal taint in the mind which turns this goodly frame, the earth, into a sterile promontory; this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, into a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. Neither Chekhov nor Andreev have attempted to lift that black pall of despair that hangs over Russian fiction.
To an educated native Slav, or to a professor of the Russian language, twenty or thirty Russian authors would no doubt seem important; but the general foreign reading public is quite properly mainly interested in only five standard writers, although contemporary novelists like Gorki, Artsybashev, Andreev, and others are at this moment deservedly attracting wide attention.
His own standpoint was that of the Artist, and each man must be judged by his main purpose. Here is where he differs most sharply from Tolstoi, Dostoevski, and Andreev, and explains why the Russians admire him more than they love him. To him the truth about life was always the main thing.
Garshin wrote other tales, among them a poetically beautiful story of a tree, "Attalea Princeps," that reminds one somewhat of Bjornson. 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.
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.
In some characters, such as those Dostoevski has given us, it leads to deeds of wild absurdity; in Andreev, it usually leads to madness. One of Andreev's books is indeed a whole commentary on the remark of Merezhkovski quoted above. No one should read this story unless his nerves are firm, for the outcome of the tale is such as to make almost any reader for a time doubt his own sanity.
But he is really not in the least like Poe. Poe's horrors are nearly all unreal fantasies, that vaguely haunt our minds like the shadow of a dream. Andreev is a realist, like his predecessors and contemporaries. His style is always concrete and definite, always filled with the sense of fact. There is almost something scientific in his collection of incurables.
It is, however, not sentimentally conventional, but original. The poetic quality in Andreev animates all his dramas, particularly "To the Stars." *Translated in "Current Literature," New York, for September 1910. As Tolstoi, Garshin, and Andreev have shown the horrors of war, so Kuprin* has shown the utter degradation and sordid misery of garrison life.
They resemble the dramatic work of Gorki, Andreev, and for that matter of practically all Russian playwrights, in being formless and having no true movement; but they contain some of his best Russian portraits, and some of his most subtle interpretations of Russian national life.
Chekhov, like Gorki and Andreev, was a dramatist as well as a novelist, though his plays are only beginning to be known outside of his native land.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking