'And the spring snow was just as soft and fresh; the spring air was just as strong and fragrant. And on the snow lay Sergey’s black rubber-shoe, wet, trampled underfoot.

Thus did men greet the rising sun.'

Thus ends one of the 20th century’s great novellas. But for that bit about a trampled black rubber-shoe, this could have been a moving paean to a new day, a new millennium even, hopeful and bright. The repeat ‘and’ opening the sentences gives to them a certain unhurried, limpid grace which merges beautifully in the tribute to the rising sun.

But the sun was rising on a landscape not yet wiped clean of the bloody foam dribbling out of twisted necks and swollen tongues. The freshly-hanged corpses had just been carted away, but the dawn was still heavy with their lately-exhaled breath. Leonid Andreyev rounds off The Seven Who Were Hanged with searing irony. Here was spring arrived to claim seven young lives, and yet nothing seemed to be amiss. The air was as fragrant as the snow was fresh. And the sun as bright.

The Seven Who Were Hanged was published in 1908 when, after the 1905 Revolution had virtually run its course, the Czarist autocracy was pushing back relentlessly against the reforms the revolution had brought about. Political repression was intense and summary executions of dissidents were rife in the main cities. The revolution had briefly dissolved Andreyev’s scoffing distrust of mass action and he had embraced the ideals of democracy and social progress with evident enthusiasm, taking part even in public debates on the objectives of the revolution.

The reaction troubled him deeply and the untimely death of his wife in 1906 was another devastating blow. Once he resumed writing after a lull, however, Andreyev plunged into his work with feverish energy, producing some of his most important short stories and plays. But much of the writing of this period is coloured by a sense of hopelessness, of dark despair.

The Seven Who Were Hanged has not escaped the overarching pessimism of the period, but in its sophisticated probing of the emotional states of the protagonists – the seven men and women on death row – as they confront their life’s sudden end, the story becomes an engrossing human document. Like a consummate psychologist, Andreyev particularises each character’s inner life, so that there is no blurring of the lines between them and each one is seen to be walking – or stumbling – along their own path to final destruction.

In his introduction to the English translation of the novella published in the US in 1909, Andreyev says that in writing the book, he was focussed on tearing the veil from ‘’the horror and the iniquity of capital punishment’’. Tongue in cheek, he claims that he did not attempt ‘’to condemn the Government, the fame of whose wisdom and virtues has already spread far beyond the boundaries of our unfortunate fatherland”. And he claims that in writing as he did, he had stayed firmly on the right side of Russian law:

That I have treated ruling and slaughtering Russia with restraint and mildness may best be gathered from the fact that the Russian censor has permitted my book to circulate. This is sufficient evidence when we recall how many books, brochures and newspapers have found eternal rest in the peaceful shade of the police stations, where they have risen to the patient sky in the smoke and flame of bonfires.

One does not know if the censors of the ‘wise and virtuous Government’ of Russia ever got wind of this audacious commentary on its rectitude and the nobility of its heart. It would have been an extraordinarily obtuse censor indeed who failed to read through this quite thin subterfuge.

But death and decay are themes that run right through Andreyev’s oeuvre. As a young man, he had attempted suicide more than once. When asked by Maxim Gorky, with whom he had become friends, how the palm of his hand had been pierced by a bullet so that the fingers were all crooked, Andreyev replied, jauntily yet sincerely:

A grimace of youthful romanticism. You yourself know: a man who hasn’t attempted to kill himself isn’t worth much.

He then went on to tell Gorky how, in his teens, he had once jumped under a goods train. Luckily for Andreyev, he had landed alongside the rails, so that the train had hurtled along above him, merely deafening him. He recounted the story with great relish, embellishing it with vivid detail. Clearly, the thought of courting death fascinated him still. Gorky remarks how Andreyev’s mind “always tended obstinately to look into the darkest recesses of the heart”, though, since it was “light and capriciously original, it easily assumed forms of humour and the grotesque”.

But this capacity for humour, for the witty repartee was seldom called into play by Andreyev the writer. His stories are grim, even sombre, and a certain distrust of reason and the free will is underscored in many of them. The 1902 story The Abyss – which was considered Andreyev’s response to the moralistic underpinnings of Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata and created quite a sensation when it first appeared– tells the dark tale of a young, idealistic couple being overtaken by three drunks inside a forest one summer evening. Inevitably, the girl is raped even as her friend, thrashed and knocked about by the men, lies unconscious. When he comes to, however, the young man’s sense of disgust and desolation is soon overcome by a craving for the woman’s body which lies inert and naked in the dark. The story ends as he proceeds, in the stillness of the night, to make love to the insensate body of the woman with whom, only a few hours before, he was eagerly exchanging notes on eternal love and the pure spirit.

Leonid Andreyev was born on August 21, 1871, in Orel, not far from Moscow, to a Russian land-surveyor and his wife of aristocratic, albeit impoverished, Polish descent. The father, a man of refined tastes, was an alcoholic and died early. Leonid, the eldest of the siblings, was obliged to lend a hand to his mother in running the family after that. An indifferent student at school, he went on nevertheless to obtain a law degree from the Moscow University, set up in a none-too-successful legal practice, and eventually became a police-court reporter for a Moscow daily. An early exposure to the work of Schopenhauer, coupled perhaps with a streak of melancholia he may have imbibed from his father, confirmed Andreyev in a sceptical, despairing view of life, and he suffered bouts of depression, followed by manic bursts of energy, all his life.

Also read: Living Under the Shadow of Death, Chekhov Spun Tales Around the Theme

To begin with, he had aimed to be a painter rather than a writer, and achieved some limited success with his portraits, too. His first-published short story, Bergamot and Garaska (1898), a conventional Easter tale told with a charming freshness of tone, caught the eye of Maxim Gorky, who was already a writer with an established reputation. Gorky sought out the young Andreyev, introduced him to Moscow’s literary circles, and helped him publish many of his short stories in the next few years.

The two men soon became friends, a bond that survived the many vicissitudes in Andreyev’s personal history till the aftermath of the October (November) Revolution of 1917 set them irreconcilably apart. While Gorky welcomed the revolution warmly, Andreyev thought of it as a catastrophe. He died in self-imposed exile in Finland on September 12, 1919, lonely, bitter and in acute depression, in a gigantic, rococo castle he had built as his home in happier times. He had just turned forty-eight.

Andreyev always thought of himself as apolitical and, unlike Gorky, was generally aloof from the strong currents of political dissidence sweeping over Russia in the first years of the 20th century. Only the revolution of 1905 broke down his defences and, as we have seen already, he briefly came out in support of social and political change. Even here, though, he was circumscribed by an instinctive distrust of the efficacy of human action that ran very deep in him.

In the story When The King Loses His Mind, an allegory of the French Revolution, he does not forget to remind his reader of the persistent chants of ‘Long live Twenty-first’ – ‘Twentieth’ being the deposed monarch and ‘Twenty-first’ presumably the next in line of descent – that erupt now and then across the charred landscape of the upheaval. After the first rhapsodic days of the uprising, when “the new and delicious sensations of freedom (had passed), ... again new threads of distrust and fear spread like dark veins running through white marble”. And the revolution’s ‘clock-master’, whose job it is to keep the state’s giant clock in good working order, is a feckless one-eyed layabout who slumbers as mephitic clouds hover overhead. Also, even after the revolution, the clock’s pendulum swings at the same, unvarying pace, “smiling all over its brazen face and roaring, ‘’Twas ever thus! ‘Twill ever be! ‘Twas ever thus! ‘Twill ever be!”

After the euphoria around the 1905 revolution had died out, political reaction surged back with renewed fury and engulfed Russian society in dark storm waters. A long period of repression, of numerous executions and summary imprisonments, set in. The story Father Vassili took shape in those terrible years.

Also read: Fyodor Dostoyevsky: The Bard of a City in Ferment

Misfortune dogs Vassili, a poor parish priest, every inch of his way. When his only son is drowned, his wife takes to the bottle to drown her sorrow. She conceives again and bears an idiot, a misshapen monster of a male child a look at whom gives people the creeps. Next the drunken woman accidentally sets the house on fire and dies in the conflagration. Father Vassili still manages to hold precariously on to his faith in his Maker but never knows when his faith has turned insane.

In a requiem mass over a dead villager, he calls upon God to work a miracle by restoring the dead man to life. He is then left alone with the corpse as all the villagers, alarmed at his fanatical supplications to God, take to their heels. Vassili bids the corpse to rise, only to find inside the coffin a lookalike of his own son, the frightful idiot. To the demented priest, it seems his god was mocking him. Fleeing desperately from the phantom, Vassili dies a cruel death. Seldom has the morbid, the macabre dominated the canvas of any artistic work with such singleminded ruthlessness. Only Francisco Goya with his Caprichos comes close.

But here also there is a difference. The theme around which Goya created his Caprichos is captured in the title of the first engraving of the series: ‘The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters’. Despite the unmitigated blackness of their mood, therefore, the etchings were meant to flag the sinister concomitants of unreason. In a story like Father Vassili, however, there is a great deal of ambivalence of messaging, and it looks as though man’s life is inscrutable like a dark night, unredeemed except by flashes of lightning.

This may be why Andreyev is likened so often to Edgar Allan Poe. But while death with Poe is often mystically beautiful, with Andreyev it remains a blighting, hideous curse. To Andreyev as to Poe, man is essentially a loner; but while the individual in the world of Poe is a tragic figure vested with the nobility of spirit, Andreyev’s man is an insignificant, pitiable individual teetering for ever on the brink of ruin. For him, the acuteness of his perceptions is not a blessing, it merely heightens his sense of doom.

 This pall of despair hangs over most of what Andreyev wrote in his final years. It is only rarely that light breaks through this dark canopy and hope seems just a little less chimerical. The Marseillaise – written in the brief spring of the 1905  revolution–reads like an overture to the stirring drama of social revolution.  

We were singing. Down upon us gazed the barrels of rifles; ominously clicked their triggers; menacingly stretched the points of bayonets towards our hearts – and ever more loudly, ever more joyously rang out the stern hymn, while in the tender hands of fighters gently rocked the black coffin.

We were singing the Marseillaise.

Sadly, this proved to be but a brief interregnum in Andreyev’s  life-long battle with the aridity of hopelessness. Twelve years later, when Russia stepped into a new epoch of hope, Andreyev could not bring himself to keep faith with change. Confined to his baroque castle, he imagined he was being witness to the Apocalypse.

Anjan Basu freelances as a literary critic, translator and commentator. He can be reached at basuanjan52@gmail.com.

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