Leonid Andreyev

The Blood Red Pond (1894) by the Belgian painter William Degouve de Nuncques makes a fitting frontispiece for the stories of Russian writer Leonid Andreyev.

As a young man, Andreyev (1871-1919), from the rural province of Oryo,l came to Moscow to study law, but soon gave up his unremunerative practice for the equally uncertain life of a journalist.

Using his experiences as a police court reporter, Andreyev began to publish stories in Moscow neswpapers . The established writer Maxin Gorki became a friend and a colleague in the political struggles that would culminate in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Dismayed by the totalitarian direction the revolution took, Andreyev, with his wife and step-son Vadim, sought exile in Finland where he died at the age of forty-two from heart failure. Poverty, bitterness, and despair haunted his last years.

Andreyev's first published collection of stories (1901) made him a star in Moscow literary circles, selling an impressive quarter million copies. The best-known story reprinted in the current collection, Visions, is Seven Who Were Hanged, an exploration of the interior lives of five revolutionaries and two ordinary criminals as they come to terms with the inevitability of their executions - right or wrong.


Andreyev's writing blends psychological insights with political events. His characters' interior lives are in tension with the exterior world in a way that we recognize as modern. In The Thought, Anton Kerzhentsev uses his position as a doctor to try to cover up a murder committed out of romantic jealousy. The Thief is the story of the final days of Fyodor Yurasov, a petty criminal whose needless theft of a wallet from an old man sets in motion the downward spiral that leads to his pathetic death. And The Abyss, with surprising insight for 1902, describes the events that turn two young people, Zinotchka and Nemotevsky, out on an evening walk, into a victim and a beast.

The most impressive tale is The Red Laugh (a novella, actually), inspired by Andreyev's revulsion at the violence of the failed 1905 revolutionary uprising. Andreyev's profound pessimism caused the initial rift between himself and Gorki. His depiction of warfare, its confusions, distortions, and hallucinations, should have left no one to be surprised at the horrors awaiting the soldiers of World War I. Out of this maelstrom, Andreyev discerns the lineaments of what we now call nuclear warfare. If all this sounds like literature too dark to be endured, that would be unfortunate. Andreyev is one of the great Russian writers of the 20th century and his work is not to be missed. His succinctness, in contrast with the expansiveness of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, is a powerful catapult into the writing of the 20th century.

Leonid Andreyev took up photography, using the new autochrome technique, introduced by the Lumiere Brothers of France in 1907. More than 300 of these photos graphs are in the Leeds Russian Archive of the British Royal Photographic Society, from which the images accompanying this article are taken. Road Near Vamelsuu from c.1908-14 gives a sense of the Russian countryside Andreyev grew up in. Self-Portrait was taken in 1910 when the writer was twenty-nine. The portrait of his step-son Vadim (Olga Carlisle's father) was taken the year before and hints at the uncomfortable relationship between the two.

VISIONS: Stories and Photographs of Leonid Andreyev, translated by Henry & Olga Andreyev Carlisle, edited and with an introduction by Olga Andreyev Carlisle, San Diego, Harcourt, Brace & Jovanovich: 1987 891.733 AND