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Updated: May 2, 2025
Andreev has the gift of admiration, and loves to render homage where homage is due, having dedicated his first book to Gorki, and his story of "The Seven Who Were Hanged" to Tolstoi. His style, while marked by the typical yet always startling Russian simplicity, is nevertheless entirely his own, and all his tales and plays are stamped by powerful individuality.
When Andreev, the most modern of all modern Russian writers, came to pay his respects to Tolstoy some months before his death, he was received with cordiality, although Tolstoy, as he expressed himself afterwards, felt that there was a great gulf fixed between them. Literature, as literature, had lost its charm for him.
Leonid Andreev is at this moment regarded by many Russians as the foremost literary artist among the younger school of writers. He was born at Orel, the birthplace of Turgenev, in 1871, and is thus only two years younger than Gorki. He began life as a lawyer at Moscow, but according to his own statement, he had only one case, and lost that.
Later on, when Varvara Petrovna allowed him to live in a separate house, we enjoyed greater freedom than before. Twice a week we used to meet at his house. We were a merry party, especially when he was not sparing of the champagne. The wine came from the shop of the same Andreev.
Nothing but silence, and the steady approach of madness. Andreev is an unflinching realist, with all the Russian power of the concrete phrase. He would never say, in describing a battle, that the Russians "suffered a severe loss." He would turn a magnifying glass on each man. But, although he is a realist and above all a psychologist, he is also a poet.
But when he published in this newspaper a short story, Gorki sent a telegram to the office, demanding to know the real name of the writer who signed himself Leonid Andreev. He was informed that the signature was no pseudonym. This notice from Gorki gave the young man immediate prominence.
And last of all, where am I, where is my old self, strong as steel, firm as a rock, when now some Andreev, our orthodox clown with a beard, pent briser man existence en deux" and so on. As for Stepan Trofimovitch's son, he had only seen him twice in his life, the first time when he was born and the second time lately in Petersburg, where the young man was preparing to enter the university.
Andreev himself says that he has learned much from Tolstoi, the great Tolstoi of the sixties and seventies, also from Nietzsche, whom he reads with enthusiasm, and whose most characteristic book, "Also Sprach Zarathustra," he translated into Russian. He has read Poe with profit, but he testifies that his greatest teacher in composition is the Bible.
In considering Russian novelists of to-day, and the promise for the future, Andreev seems to be the man best worth watching he is the most gifted artist of them all.
Just at the moment when Chekhov appeared to stand at the head of young Russian writers, Gorki appeared, and his fame swept from one end of the world to the other. In Russia, his public was second in numbers only to Tolstoi's; Kuprin and Andreev both dedicated books to him; in Germany, France, England, and America, he became literally a household word.
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