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Updated: May 2, 2025
As an artist, he will not bear a moment's comparison with Andreev; but some of his short stories and his play, "The Night Asylum," have the genuine Russian note of reality, and a rude strength much too great for its owner's control. He has never written a successful long novel, and his plays have no coherence; but, after all, the man has the real thing vitality.
In this gruesome tale of the realities of war, Andreev has given shocking physical details of torn and bleeding bodies, but true to the theme that animates all his books, he has concentrated the main interest on the Mind. Soldiers suffer in the flesh, but infinitely more in the mind. War points chiefly not to the grave, nor to the hospital, but to the madhouse.
The normal interests him even more than the abnormal, which is the great difference between his work and that of Gorki and Andreev, as it was the most striking difference between Shakespeare and his later contemporaries. To reveal ordinary people just as they really are, sometimes in terrific excitement, sometimes in humdrum routine, this was his aim.
And the farther, apparently, it is from life the more abstract, the more fiery is their thought, the deeper it enters into their lives. O strange young Russia!" Merezhkovski is talking of the heroes of Dostoevski; but his remark is applicable to the work of nearly all Russian novelists, and especially to Chekhov and Andreev.
Among recent writers Chekhov is at the farthest remove from his friend Gorki, and most akin to Andreev. It is probable that Andreev learned something from him. Unlike Turgenev, both Chekhov and Andreev study mental disease.
As for Andreev, he was nothing more or less than our local shopkeeper, a very eccentric fellow, a self-taught archaeologist who had a passion for collecting Russian antiquities and sometimes tried to outshine Stepan Trofimovitch in erudition and in the progressiveness of his opinions.
He is happily still a young man, and perhaps he may yet achieve the masterpiece that ten years ago we so confidently expected from his hands. He is certainly not a great teacher, but he has the power to ask awkward questions so characteristic of Andreev, Artsybashev, and indeed of all Russian novelists. We cannot answer him with a shrug of the shoulders or a sceptical smile.
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