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The death of the actor is awful; it is as though you gave the spectator a sudden box on the ear apropos of nothing without preparing him in any way. How the baron got into the doss-house and why he is a baron is also not sufficiently clear. Andreyev's "Thought" is something pretentious, difficult to understand, and apparently no good, but it is worked out with talent.
A certain harmony between the imaginative and the real element is characteristic of the best of Andreyev's productions, especially his last stories: "The Red Laugh," "The Governor," "The Shadows," and "The Seven Who Were Hanged." "The Red Laugh" is the symbol, the incarnation, of the bloody and implacable cynicism of war.
When the curtain falls, Gloukortzev, intoxicated, is weeping; at his side is Olga, also weeping, while Onoufry and the officer are singing: "The days of our lives are as short as the life of a wave." This drama, as well as most of Andreyev's plays, has been produced with great success in Russia and also in Europe.
III. #Translations# #When the King Loses His Head, and Other Stories#, by Leonid Andreyev. In previous years I have called attention to other selections of Andreyev's stories. The present collection includes the best from the other volumes, with some new material. "Judas Iscariot" and "Lazarus" are the best of the prose poems.
While "Anathema" is an abstract character, whose form resembles more an algebraic formula than a living process of human relations, another of Andreyev's plays, "The Love of the Student," written a short time before "Anathema," gives us a little picture of customs, alert and painted with the touch of a master.
If we carefully study a few of Andreyev's characters we can more easily understand his feelings and his style. Here is, for instance, Serge Petrovich, a student. Although he is not very intelligent, he is above the average. His mind is preoccupied with all sorts of questions; he reads Nietzsche, he ponders over many things, but he does not know how to think for himself.
Sometimes I seem to coast the very shore of Beauty or Truth, and hear the surf breaking on those shining sands. Then some offshore wind of weariness or prejudice bears me away again. Have you ever come across Andreyev's Confessions of a Little Man During Great Days? One of the honest books of the War. The Little Man ends his confession thus
What, then, constitutes the essence of Andreyev's talent is an extreme impressionability, a daring in descriptions of the negative sides of reality, melancholy moods and the torments of existence. As he usually portrays general suffering and sickness rather than definite types, his heroes are mostly incarnations and symbols.
Most of Andreyev's characters, like those of Dostoyevsky, are abnormal, madmen and neurasthenics in whom are distinguishable marked traces of degeneration and psychic perversion. They are beings who have been fatally wounded in their life-struggle, whose minds now are completely or partially powerless.
And this faithful portrayal of events, events so frequent that they no longer move us from our indifference, when we find the echo of them in the press, will raise in the conscience of Andreyev's readers a cry of horror and pity.
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