Analysis of individual works by L. N
The story "Thought" was published in the journal "The World of God" in 1902, a year later, a rumor quickly spread among readers and critics about the madness of the author himself. At first, Leonid Andreev did not consider it necessary to make any objections, which only added fuel to the fire of gossip. But when in February 1903 the psychiatrist I. I. Ivanov, in his report on the story "Thought", read in St. Petersburg at a meeting of the Society of Normal and Pathological Psychology, completely repeated the rumor about the author's possible insanity, Andreev began to write angry letters to the editors. But it was too late, the stigma was set.
"Thought" is a kind of confession of the protagonist, Anton Kerzhentsev, who killed a childhood friend, Alexei Savelov. Kerzhentsev (a doctor by profession) is in a psychiatric clinic for examination and sets out in writing to the medical commission his talented idea - to feign insanity, so that later he can commit a crime and not be punished. The crime is portrayed as a theatrical performance, during which the protagonist easily convinces others of his mental illness. Having committed the murder, Dr. Kerzhentsev begins to doubt whether he is really sane and only successfully played the role of an insane criminal. The boundaries between reason and madness blurred and shifted, and actions and their motivations turned out to be just as uncertain: Kerzhentsev was only playing a madman or was he really crazy?
In the course of the revelations of Dr. Kerzhentsev, one can trace the split of consciousness into a hero-actor and a hero-philosopher. Andreev interweaves both facets with phrases that he highlights in italics. This technique keeps the reader aware that the hero is still crazy: “... I don’t know if she remembers that she laughed then; probably does not remember - she had to laugh so often. And then remind her: on the fifth of September she laughed. If she refuses - and she will refuse - then remind her how it was. I, this strong man who never cried, who was never afraid of anything - I stood in front of her and trembled ... "or" ... but after all, I crawled? Did I crawl? Who am I - justifying crazy or healthy, driving himself crazy? Help me, you learned men! Let your authoritative word tip the scales in one direction or another ... ". The first "italics" found in the story speaks of laughter - a topic that Andreev raised more than once in his works ("Laughter", "Lie", "Darkness" ...). From that moment on, Dr. Kerzhentsev's head begins to see a plan for a brilliant murder. It should be especially noted that laughter is precisely female - this feature plays a very important role in the work of Leonid Andreev ("Darkness", "In the Fog", "Christians"). Perhaps the origins of this problem should be sought in the biography of the writer ...
The theatricality of the behavior of the protagonist becomes clear literally from the first pages - Kerzhentsev often and happily talks about his talent as an actor: “The tendency to pretense has always been in my character and was one of the forms in which I strove for inner freedom. Even at the gymnasium, I often feigned friendship: I walked along the corridor embracing, as real friends do, skillfully forged friendly and frank speech ... ”. It is worth noting that even in front of an invisible medical commission, the hero behaves a la on stage. He reproduces the smallest and most unnecessary details of his dark past, gives advice on his own treatment, invites the chairman of the commission, professor of psychiatry Drzhembitsky, partly to plunge into madness himself. By the way, it is worth noting the similarity of surnames in the composition of consonant letters. This can be seen as an additional hint at the similarity of the two doctors - we also recall that the "patient" suggests Drzhembitsky to swap places of interrogators and interrogated for a while. Another feature of Kerzhentsev’s theatrical behavior is the aphoristic statements: “when a woman falls in love, she becomes insane”, “is anyone who tells the truth crazy?”, “You will say that you cannot steal, kill and deceive, because this is immorality and a crime , and I will prove to you that it is possible to kill and rob, and that this is very moral. We will return to the last statement. Andreev furnishes with theatricality even the very moment of the murder: “Slowly, smoothly, I began to raise my hand, and Alexei just as slowly began to raise his, all without taking his eyes off me. “Wait!” I said sternly. Alexei's hand stopped, and, still not taking his eyes off me, he smiled incredulously, palely, with his lips alone. Tatyana Nikolaevna shouted something terribly, but it was too late. I hit the temple with a sharp end ... ". In truth, the smoothness and slowness of everything that happens is very reminiscent of a theatrical performance with real actors. An hour and a half after the murder, Dr. Kerzhentsev will lie on the sofa, contented and with his eyes closed, and will repeat this “wait a minute.” Then he will understand that "he thought he was pretending, but he really was crazy."
The other side of Dr. Kerzhentsev is a madman who personifies the Nietzschean superman. In order to become a "superman" according to F. Nietzsche, the hero of the story stands on the other side of "good and evil", steps over moral categories, rejecting the norms of universal morality. It is well known that Leonid Andreev was fond of the work and ideas of the German philosopher, and in the speech of his hero he puts an almost direct quote about the death of God. Doctor Kerzhentsev considers the nurse assigned to watch over the patients, Masha, to be crazy. He asks the medical commission to pay attention to her "noiselessness", "shyness" and asks to observe her "somehow imperceptibly for her." He calls her a person who is only capable of “serving, receiving and taking away,” but ... Masha is the only person who speaks about God in the story, prays and crosses Kerzhentsev three times according to Christian custom. And it is she who gets Nietzsche’s “hymn”: “In one of the dark closets of your simple house there lives someone very useful to you, but this room is empty for me. He died long ago, the one who lived there, and on his grave I erected a magnificent monument. He died. Masha, died - and will not rise again. The line of Nietzscheanism can also be traced in Kerzhentsev's last notes: "I will blow up your accursed land, which has so many gods and there is no single eternal God." Recall that "God is dead" - the words of F. Nietzsche, which he associated with the main, from his point of view, event of modern times - the disclosure of complete emptiness in everything that culture and civilization lived, the failure of morality and spirituality in Nothing, the triumph of nihilism. Nihilism cast aside all hypocrisy, all play of propriety and nobility, "cast its shadow over the whole of Europe." Nietzsche declared Christianity to be the culprit for the “death of God” for perverting what Jesus brought to people: “We killed him - you and me! We are all his killers!” From here - all the coming catastrophes, through which we have to go through 200 years, in order to then go on a new path. The expression of madness in "Thoughts" is expressed by the transmission of visual metamorphoses and kinesthetic sensations of Dr. Kerzhentsev. “The mouth twists to the side, the muscles of the face tense like ropes, the teeth bare like a dog, and from the dark opening of the mouth comes this disgusting, roaring, whistling, laughing, howling sound ...”. “Would you like to crawl on all fours? Of course you don't, because what healthy person would want to crawl! Well, but still? Don't you have such a slight desire, very slight, quite trifling, that you want to laugh at - to slide off your chair and crawl a little, just a little? ... ”Here you should pay attention to the images of the face, the dog and crawling people. It is very typical for Andreev to convey madness through the modification of the face and the addition of any animal attributes to a person - animalization, in other words. Similar things can be found in "Darkness", "The Life of Basil of Thebes" and "Red Laughter". Let's focus on the last one. The "facial" aspect of madness in both "Thought" and "Red Laughter" is of two types: "calm" and "violent." Dr. Kerzhentsev, noting the madness of the nurse, speaks of her "strangeness, pale and alien smile", and the main characters of "Red Laughter" note the "yellowness of the faces and dumb eyes, like the moon." Violent faces are manifested in "broken facial expressions, crooked smiles" and "terribly burning eyes and blood-colored, upside-down views", respectively. The movements of the madmen in "Thoughts" have the qualities of "sliding", "crawling" and "wild, animal impulses, in an effort to tear clothes" - we talked about this before. "Red Laughter" shows people in "calm lethargy and heaviness of the dead" or "with jerky movements, start at every knock, constantly looking for something behind them, trying to gesticulate to excess." One can see the theatrical aspect in this: the characteristic facial expressions, the peculiar “upturned” and “broken” manner of movements are more inherent in the stage than in the theater of military operations. (After a certain time, such theatricality will find its response in the work of such artists as A. Blok, A. Bely and A. Vertinsky ...) Leonid Andreev shows animalization and images of animals either in a metaphorical comparison - the image of a servant "give - bring" or downtroddenness, fear" or, conversely, in serpentine qualities ("swiftness and bites" in "Thoughts", "barbed wire" in the imagination of the soldiers of "Red Laughter") and canine "grins, howls and squeals". Separately, it should be noted that Andreev's "Thoughts" introduces the image of Ouroboros - a snake biting its own tail, thereby symbolizing the infinity and irreversibility of the ongoing madness. The philosophical "methodology" of madness, inherent in Kerzhentsev's Thought, will continue to be developed and used by Andreev. After only two years in Red Laughter, it is not difficult to trace the development "You will say that you cannot steal, kill and deceive, because this is immorality and a crime, and I will prove to you that it is possible to kill and rob, and that this is very moral." in “a crazy old man shouted, stretching out his arms: - Who said that you can’t kill, burn and rob? We will kill and rob and burn. But such aggressive Nietzscheanism, as Andreev convinces the reader, means intellectual death - this is precisely what Dr. Kerzhentsev pays for.
The stigma of "crazy" Leonid Andreev rejected. In 1908, he published another open letter that refuted the assumptions about his illness. However, in 1910, three articles were already published, in which it was stated that the writer had gone mad and was suffering from an acute nervous breakdown. He replied to these articles with a new open letter entitled "The Madness of L. Andreev." In it, not without a hint of foolishness, he wrote: “I'm tired of questions about health. But still, I will support this rumor that I have lost my mind; like crazy, everyone will be afraid of me and will finally let me work in peace.” But Andreev was not allowed to work quietly.
Leonid Andreev
On December 11, 1900, Doctor of Medicine Anton Ignatievich Kerzhentsev committed a murder. Both the entire set of data in which the crime was committed, and some of the circumstances that preceded it, gave reason to suspect Kerzhentsev of an abnormality in his mental abilities.
Put on probation at the Elisavetinskaya psychiatric hospital, Kerzhentsev was subjected to strict and careful supervision by several experienced psychiatrists, among whom was Professor Drzhembitsky, who had recently died. Here are the written explanations that were given about what happened by Dr. Kerzhentsev himself a month after the start of the test; Together with other materials obtained by the investigation, they formed the basis of a forensic examination.
Sheet one
Until now, Messrs. experts, I hid the truth, but now circumstances force me to reveal it. And, having recognized it, you will understand that the matter is not at all as simple as it may seem to the profane: either a fever shirt or shackles. There is a third thing here - not shackles and not a shirt, but, perhaps, more terrible than both combined.
Alexei Konstantinovich Savelov, whom I killed, was my friend at the gymnasium and the university, although we differed in specialties: as you know, I am a doctor, and he graduated from the law faculty. It cannot be said that I did not love the deceased; he was always sympathetic to me, and I never had closer friends than he. But with all the sympathetic qualities, he did not belong to those people who can inspire respect in me. The amazing softness and suppleness of his nature, the strange inconsistency in the field of thought and feeling, the sharp extreme and groundlessness of his constantly changing judgments made me look at him as a child or a woman. People close to him, who often suffered from his antics and at the same time, due to the illogicality of human nature, loved him very much, tried to find an excuse for his shortcomings and their feelings and called him an "artist". And indeed, it turned out that this insignificant word completely justifies him and that which for any normal person would be bad, makes it indifferent and even good. Such was the power of the invented word that even I at one time succumbed to the general mood and willingly excused Alexei for his petty shortcomings. Small ones - because he was incapable of big things, like everything big. This is sufficiently evidenced by his literary works, in which everything is petty and insignificant, no matter what short-sighted criticism may say, greedy for the discovery of new talents. Beautiful and worthless were his works, beautiful and worthless was he himself.
When Alexei died, he was thirty-one years old, a little over a year younger than me.
Alexei was married. If you have seen his wife now, after his death, when she is in mourning, you cannot imagine how beautiful she once was: she has become so much, so much uglier. The cheeks are grey, and the skin on the face is so flabby, old, old, like a worn glove. And wrinkles. These are wrinkles now, and another year will pass - and these will be deep furrows and ditches: after all, she loved him so much! And her eyes no longer sparkle and laugh, and before they always laughed, even at the time when they needed to cry. I saw her for just one minute, accidentally bumping into her at the investigator's, and was amazed at the change. She couldn't even look at me angrily. So pathetic!
Only three - Alexei, me and Tatyana Nikolaevna - knew that five years ago, two years before Alexei's marriage, I made an offer to Tatyana Nikolaevna, and it was rejected. Of course, it is only assumed that there are three, and, probably, Tatyana Nikolaevna has a dozen more girlfriends and friends who are fully aware of how Dr. Kerzhentsev once dreamed of marriage and received a humiliating refusal. I don't know if she remembers that she laughed then; probably does not remember - she had to laugh so often. And then remind her: On the fifth of September she laughed. If she refuses - and she will refuse - then remind her how it was. I, this strong man who never cried, who was never afraid of anything - I stood before her and trembled. I was trembling and I saw her biting her lips, and I already reached out to hug her when she looked up and there was laughter in them. My hand remained in the air, she laughed, and laughed for a long time. As much as she wanted. But then she did apologize.
Excuse me, please,” she said, her eyes laughing.
And I smiled too, and if I could forgive her for her laughter, I would never forgive that smile of mine. It was the fifth of September, at six o'clock in the evening, St. Petersburg time. Petersburg, I add, because we were then on the station platform, and now I can clearly see the big white dial and the position of the black hands: up and down. Alexei Konstantinovich was also killed at exactly six o'clock. The coincidence is strange, but able to reveal a lot to a quick-witted person.
One of the reasons for putting me here was the lack of a motive for the crime. Now you see that the motive existed. Of course, it wasn't jealousy. The latter presupposes in a person an ardent temperament and weakness of mental abilities, that is, something directly opposite to me, a cold and rational person. Revenge? Yes, rather revenge, if an old word is really needed to define a new and unfamiliar feeling. The fact is that Tatyana Nikolaevna once again made me make a mistake, and this always angered me. Knowing Alexei well, I was sure that in marriage with him Tatyana Nikolaevna would be very unhappy and regret me, and therefore I insisted so much that Alexei, then just in love, should marry her. Just a month before his tragic death, he told me:
It is to you that I owe my happiness. Really, Tanya?
Yes, brother, you gave a blunder!
This inappropriate and tactless joke shortened his life by a whole week: I originally decided to kill him on the eighteenth of December.
Yes, their marriage turned out to be happy, and it was she who was happy. He did not love Tatyana Nikolaevna much, and in general he was not capable of deep love. He had his favorite thing - literature - which brought his interests beyond the bedroom. And she loved him and lived only for him. Then he was an unhealthy person: frequent headaches, insomnia, and this, of course, tormented him. And she even looked after him, the sick, and fulfill his whims was happiness. After all, when a woman falls in love, she becomes insane.
And so, day after day, I saw her smiling face, her happy face, young, beautiful, carefree. And I thought: I did it. He wanted to give her a dissolute husband and deprive her of himself, but instead of that, he gave her a husband whom she loves, and he himself remained with her. You will understand this strangeness: she is smarter than her husband and loved to talk with me, and after talking, she went to sleep with him - and was happy.
I don't remember when the idea first came to me to kill Alexei. Somehow imperceptibly she appeared, but from the first minute she became so old, as if I had been born with her. I know that I wanted to make Tatyana Nikolaevna unhappy, and that at first I came up with many other plans that were less disastrous for Alexei - I have always been an enemy of unnecessary cruelty. Using my influence with Alexei, I thought of making him fall in love with another woman or making him a drunkard (he had a propensity for this), but all these methods were not suitable. The fact is that Tatyana Nikolaevna would have managed to remain happy, even giving it to another woman, listening to his drunken chatter or accepting his drunken caresses. She needed this man to live, and she somehow served him. There are such slave natures. And, like slaves, they cannot understand and appreciate the power of others, not the power of their master. There were smart, good and talented women in the world, but the world has not yet seen and will not see a fair woman.
L. Andreev about "crime and punishment" in the story "Thought"; expression of the narrative, the role of images-symbols.I
The spiritual picture of the beginning of the 20th century is distinguished by contradictory views, a sense of catastrophic, crisis of being. Artists of the early 20th century lived and worked in the times preceding the Russo-Japanese War and the Revolution of 1905, the First World War and the two revolutions of 1917, when old concepts and values, centuries-old foundations collapsed, noble culture disintegrated, the nervous life of cities grew - the city enslaved with its mechanics.
At the same time, there are many events in the field of science (the theory of relativity, x-rays). Discoveries of this kind have led to the feeling that the world is fragmenting, a crisis of religious consciousness is coming.
In February 1902, Leonid Andreev wrote a letter to Gorky, in which he says that much has changed in life: “... People do not know what will happen tomorrow, they are waiting for everything - and everything is possible. The measure of things is lost, Anarchy is in the very air. The inhabitant jumped off the shelf, surprised, confused and sincerely forgot what is possible and what is not.
The measure of things is lost - this is the main feeling of a person at the beginning of the century. A new concept was required, a new moral system of the individual. The criteria for good and evil were blurred. In search of answers to these questions, the Russian intelligentsia turned to two great thinkers of the 19th century - Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.
But it was F.M. Dostoevsky who turned out to be close to “the sick society of the early 20th century, it was to him that the artists of the turn of the century turned in search of answers to the questions of what happens to a person, what does he deserve: punishment or justification?
The theme of "crime and punishment", deeply explored by F.M. Dostoevsky, again attracted attention at the turn of the century.
The traditions of Dostoevsky in the works of L. Andreev are more often spoken of, referring to the early, so-called realistic stories of the writer (for example, the general attention for artists to the “little man” is emphasized). In many respects Andreev also inherits Dostoevsky's methods of psychological analysis.
The “Silver Age” of Russian literature is not so much a phenomenon corresponding to a certain historical period that gave Russia and the world a galaxy of brilliant literary talents, but a new type of artistic thinking, born of a complex, controversial era that absorbed two wars and three revolutions. This type of thinking was formed in the philosophical, aesthetic atmosphere of the previous decades, and its characteristic features were a decrease in social determination, deep philosophical and intellectual validity, and the non-mass nature of the aesthetic concepts it created.
Russian classical literature has always responded to the "cursed questions" of our time, paid attention to the ideas that "was in the air", sought to reveal the secrets of the inner world of a person, to express spiritual movements as accurately and vividly as a person does not do in everyday life.
The place of Dostoevsky and Andreev in the Russian classics is affirmed as a priority in the formulation of the most acute and daring philosophical and psychological questions by the writers.
In L. Andreev's story "Thought" and F. Dostoevsky's novel "Crime and Punishment", moral problems are posed: crimes - sin and punishment - retribution, the problem of guilt and moral judgment, the problem of good and evil, norms and madness, faith and unbelief.
The story of Raskolnikov and the story of Kerzhentsev can be called the story of an intellect lost in the darkness of unbelief. Dostoevsky saw a gaping abyss of ideas that deny God, when all sacred things are rejected, evil is openly glorified.
“Thought” is one of Andreev’s most significant and most pessimistic works on the topic of the unreliability of thought, reason as a tool for a person to achieve his goals, the possibility of “treason” and “rebellion” of thought against its owner.
... "Thought" by L. Andreev is something pretentious, incomprehensible and, apparently, unnecessary, but talentedly executed. There is no simplicity in Andreev, and his talent resembles the singing of an artificial nightingale (A, P. Chekhov. From a letter to M. Gorky, 1902).
For the first time - in the journal "God's World", 1902, No. 7, with a dedication to the wife of the writer Alexandra Mikhailovna Andreeva.
On April 10, 1902, Andreev informed M. Gorky from Moscow to the Crimea: “I finished Mysl; now she is being rewritten and will be with you in a week. Be a friend, read it carefully and if something goes wrong - write. Is such an end possible: “The jury went to deliberate?” The story does not satisfy artistic requirements, but this is not so important for me: I am afraid whether it is sustained in relation to the idea. I think that I do not give ground for the Rozanovs and Merezhkovskys; one cannot speak directly about God, but what exists is rather negative” (LN, vol. 72, p. 143). Further in the letter, Andreev asked M. Gorky, after reading "Thoughts", to send the manuscript to AI Bogdanovich in the journal "The World of God". M. Gorky approved the story. On April 18-20, 1902, he answered the author: “The story is good<...>Let the tradesman be afraid to live, fetter his vile licentiousness with iron hoops of despair, pour terror into an empty soul! If he endures all this, he will recover, but he will not endure, he will die, he will disappear - cheers! (ibid., vol. 72, p. 146). Andreev accepted M. Gorky's advice to remove the last phrase in the story: "The jurors retired to the conference room" and end "Thought" with the word - "Nothing." On June 30, 1902, the Courier informed readers about the release of the book "The World of God" with Andreev's story, calling Andreev's work a psychological study, and defining the idea of the story with the words: "The bankruptcy of human thought." Andreev himself in October 1914. called "Thought" - a sketch "in forensic medicine" (see "Birzhevye Vedomosti", 1915, No. 14779, morning issue April 12). In "Thoughts" Andreev seeks to rely on the artistic experience of F. M. Dostoevsky. Doctor Kerzhentsev, who commits murder, is to a certain extent conceived by Andreev as a parallel to Raskolnikov, although the very problem of “crime and punishment” was solved by Andreev and F. M. Dostoevsky in different ways (see: Ermakova M. Ya. Novels by F. M. Dostoevsky and creative searches in Russian literature of the XX century. - Gorky, 1973, pp. 224-243). In the image of Dr. Kerzhentsev, Andreev debunks the Nietzsche "superman", who opposed himself to people. To become a "superhuman"
F. Nietzsche, the hero of the story, stands on the other side of "good and evil", steps over moral categories, rejecting the norms of universal morality. But this, as Andreev convinces the reader, means the intellectual death of Kerzhentsev, or his madness.
For Andreev, his "Thought" was through and through a journalistic work in which the plot has a secondary, side role. Just as secondary for Andreev is the solution of the question - is the killer insane, or is he just impersonating a madman in order to avoid punishment. “By the way: I don’t understand a thing in psychiatry,” Andreev wrote on August 30-31, 1902 to A. A. Izmailov, “and I didn’t read anything for“ Thought ”(RL, 1962, No. 3, p. 198). However, the image of Dr. Kerzhentsev confessing his crime, so vividly written out by Andreev, obscured the philosophical problems of the story. According to critic Ch. Vetrinsky, the “heavy psychiatric apparatus” “eclipsed the idea” (“Samarskaya Gazeta”, 1902, No. 248, November 21).
A. A. Izmailov classified "Thought" in the category of "pathological stories", calling it by impression the most powerful after the "Red Flower" by Vs. Garshin and "The Black Monk" by A.P. Chekhov ("Birzhevye Vedomosti", 1902, No. 186, July 11).
Andreev explained the dissatisfaction of critics with "Thought" by the artistic shortcomings of the story. In July - August 1902, he confessed in a letter
V. S. Mirolyubov about “Thoughts”: “I don’t like it for some of its dryness and ornateness. There is no great simplicity” (LA, p. 95). After one of his conversations with M. Gorky, Andreev said: “... When I write something that especially excites me, it’s as if the bark falls off my soul, I see myself more clearly and see that I am more talented than what I wrote. Here is Thought. I was expecting it to amaze you, and now I myself see that this is, in essence, a polemical work, and it has not yet hit the mark ”(Gorky M. Poln. sobr. soch., vol. 16, p. 337).
III
In 1913, Andreev completed work on the tragedy "Thought" ("Doctor Kerzhentsev"), in which he used the plot of the story "Thought".
His hero, Dr. Kerzhentsev, using the weapon of logic (and not at all resorting to the idea of God) destroyed "fear and trembling" in himself and even subdued the monster from the abyss, proclaiming Karamazov's "everything is allowed." But Kerzhentsev overestimated the power of his weapon, and his carefully thought out and brilliantly executed crime (the murder of a friend, the husband of the woman who rejected him) ended in complete failure for him; the simulation of madness, played out seemingly flawlessly, itself played a terrible joke on Kerzhentsev's mind. The thought, obedient only yesterday, suddenly betrayed him, turning into a nightmarish guess: “He thought he was pretending, but he really is crazy. And now he's crazy." The mighty will of Kerzhentsev lost its only reliable support - thought, the dark beginning prevailed, and it was this, and not the fear of retribution, not remorse, that broke through the thin door that separates the mind from the terrible abyss of the unconscious. The superiority over the "little people", embraced by the "eternal fear of life and death", turned out to be imaginary.
So the first of Andreev's pretenders to the superhumans turns out to be a victim of the abyss opened by the writer. “... I am thrown into the emptiness of infinite space,” writes Kerzhentsev. “... An ominous loneliness, when I am only an insignificant particle of myself, when in myself I am surrounded and strangled by gloomy silent, mysterious enemies.”
In the artistic world of Andreev, a person is initially in a state of "terrible freedom", he lives at a time when there are "so many gods, but there is no single eternal god." At the same time, the worship of the "mental idol" is of particular interest to the writer.
Existential man, like the heroes of Dostoevsky, is in a state of overcoming the "walls" that stand in his way to freedom. Both writers are interested in those people who "allowed themselves to doubt the legitimacy of the court of nature and ethics, the legitimacy of the court in general and expect that The “weightless” is about to become heavier than the weighty, in spite of self-evidence and self-evidence-based judgments of the mind, which has already thrown not only the “laws of nature”, but also the laws of morality onto its scales.
Irrationality, perhaps, can be called one of the main features of the heroes of L. Andreev. In his work, a person becomes a completely unpredictable, fickle creature, ready at every moment for fractures and spiritual upheavals. Looking at him, sometimes I want to say in the words of Mitya Karamazov: "The man is too wide, I would narrow it down."
The special attention of Dostoevsky and Andreev to the deformed human psyche is reflected in their work both on the borders of the mind and madness, and on the borders of being and otherness.
In Dostoevsky's novel and in Andreev's story, the crime is committed from certain moral and psychological positions. Raskolnikov is literally burned with anxiety about the humiliated and insulted, the fate of the disadvantaged turned him to an individualistic boot, to a Napoleonic solution to a social problem. Kerzhentsev, on the other hand, is a classic example of a Nietzschean superman without the slightest glimpse of compassion. Merciless contempt for the weak is the only reason for bloody violence against a defenseless person.
Kerzhentsev continues those traditions of Raskolnikov, which were absolutized by the German philosopher Nietzsche. According to Raskolnikov’s theory, “people, according to the law of nature, are generally divided into two categories: the lowest (ordinary), that is, so to speak, into the material that serves only for the birth of their own kind, and actually into people, that is, those who have the gift or talent to speak in environment a new word.
Contempt for the "ordinary" makes Raskolnikov the forerunner of Kerzhentsev. He confesses frankly, expressing his anti-human nature: "I would not have killed Alexei even if the criticism were right and he really would have been such a major literary talent." Feeling "free and master over others", he controls their lives.
One hypostasis of Raskolnikov - namely, the starting individualistic position, which does not exhaust the complex content of his personality, finds its further development first in the philosophy of Nietzsche, and then in the reasoning and actions of the Andreev hero.
Kerzhentsev is proud that, due to his exclusivity, he is lonely and deprived of internal connections with people. He likes that not a single curious glance penetrates into the depths of his soul with "dark chasms and abysses, on the edge of which the head is spinning." He admits that he loves only himself, "the strength of his muscles, the strength of his thought, clear and precise." He respected himself as a strong man who never cried, was not afraid, and loves life for "cruelty, for ferocious vindictiveness and satanic fun playing with people and events."
Kerzhentsev and Raskolnikov, although their individualistic claims are somewhat similar, are still very different from each other. Raskolnikov is occupied with the idea of shedding human blood according to conscience, that is, in accordance with universally binding morality. In an ideological conversation with Sonya, he still wrestles with the question of the existence of God. Kerzhentsev, on the other hand, consciously denies moral norms rooted in the recognition of an absolute principle. Addressing the experts, he says: “You will say that you cannot steal, kill and deceive, because it is immoral and a crime, and I will prove to you that it is possible to kill and rob and that this is very moral. And you will think and speak, and I will think and speak, and we will all be right, and none of us will be right. Where is the judge who can judge us and find the truth? There is no criterion of truth, everything is relative and therefore everything is allowed.
The problem of the dialectical relationship of consciousness, subconsciousness and superconsciousness - the position from which Andreev portrayed the inner drama of the individualist hero, was not considered by researchers.
Like Raskolnikov, Kerzhentsev is obsessed with the thought of his exclusivity, of permissiveness. As a result of the murder of Savelov, the idea of the relativity of good and evil perishes. Madness is the penalty for violating the universal moral law. It is this conclusion that follows from the objective meaning of the story. Mental illness is associated with the loss of faith in the power and accuracy of thought, as the only saving reality. It turned out that in himself Andreev's hero found spheres unknown and incomprehensible to him. It turned out that in addition to rational thinking, a person also has unconscious forces that interact with thought, determining its nature and course.
Once sharp and clear, now, after the crime, the thought became "eternally lying, changeable, illusory" because it ceased to serve his individualistic mood. He felt in himself some mysterious spheres unknown to him, which turned out to be beyond the control of his individualistic consciousness. “And they changed me. Vile, insidious, as women, serfs and - thoughts change. My castle has become my prison. Enemies attacked me in my castle. Where is the salvation? But there is no salvation, because "I - I am the only enemy of my Self."
In a roll call with Dostoevsky, Andreev leads Kerzhentsev through a test of faith. Masha, a nurse in a hospital, quiet and selfless, a simplified version of Sonya Marmeladova, interested Kerzhentsev with her frenzied faith. True, he considered her a “limited, stupid creature,” at the same time possessing a secret inaccessible to him: “She knows something. Yes, she knows, but she can't or doesn't want to say." But unlike Raskolnikov, he is not able to believe and survive the process of rebirth: “No, Masha, you will not answer me. And you don't know anything. In one of the dark rooms of your simple house there lives someone who is very useful to you, but this room is empty for me. He died long ago, the one who lived there, and on his grave I erected a magnificent monument. He died, Masha, he died - and will not rise again. He buried God like Nietzsche.
Kerzhentsev is far from remorse, from remorse. Nevertheless, the punishment followed. Kerzhentsev, like Raskolnikov, reacted to the shedding of human blood with illness. One was delirious, the other lost his self-control and power over thought. In himself, Kerzhentsev felt the struggle of opposing forces. The turmoil of internal separation is expressed by him in the following words: “A single thought was broken into a thousand thoughts, and each of them was strong, and they were all hostile. They danced wildly." In himself, he felt the struggle of hostile principles and lost the unity of personality.
The inconsistency of Raskolnikov's theory is proved by its incompatibility with the "nature" of a person, the protest of a moral feeling. Andreev's story depicts the process of spiritual decay of a criminal who is dramatically experiencing a decrease in his intellectual potential.
Andreev came close to Dostoevsky, united with him with the moral pathos of his work: he showed that the violation of an objectively existing moral law is accompanied by punishment, a protest of the inner spiritual “I” of a person.
Complete internal isolation due to a crime that cut off the last ties with humanity makes Kerzhentsev mentally ill. But he himself is far from the moral judgment of himself and is still full of individualistic claims. “For me there is no judge, no law, no forbidden. Everything is possible,” he says, and seeks to prove it when he invents an explosive substance “stronger than dynamite, stronger than nitroglycerin, stronger than the very thought of it.” He needs this explosive to blow into the air "a cursed land that has so many gods and no single eternal god." And yet the punishment triumphs over the sinister hopes of the criminal. Human nature itself protests against such nihilistic abuse of itself. Everything ends with complete moral devastation. In his defense at the trial, Kerzhentsev did not say a word: “With dull, as if blind eyes, he looked around the ship and looked at the audience. And those on whom this heavy, unseeing gaze fell, experienced a strange and painful feeling: as if from the empty orbits of the skull, indifferent and dumb death itself looked at them. Dostoevsky, on the other hand, leads his individualist hero to a moral revival through rapprochement with representatives of the people's environment, through an internal conflict, through love for Sonya.
List of used literature
ANDREEV L.N. From the diary //Source. 1994. N2. -S.40-50 Y. ANDREEV L.N. From letters to K.P. Pyatnitsky //Questions of Literature 1981. N8
ANDREEV L.N. Unpublished letters. Introductory article, publication and commentary by V.I. Vezzubov // Scientific Notes of the Tartu University. Issue 119. Works on Russian and Slavic Philology. V. - Tartu. 1962.
ANDREEV L.N. Unpublished letter of Leonid Andreev //Questions of Literature. 1990. N4.
ANDREEV L.N. Correspondence of L. Andreev with I. Bunin // Questions of Literature. 1969. N7.
ANDREEV L.N. Collected Op. in 17 tons, -Pg .: Book publisher. writers in Moscow. 1915-1917
ANDREEV L.N. Collected Op. in 8 volumes, St. Petersburg: ed. t-va A.F. Marks 1913
ANDREEV L.N. Collected Op. in b t., -M .: Khudozh. literature. 1990
ARABAZHIN K.I. Leonid Andreev. Results of creativity. -SPb.: Public benefit. 1910.
Dostoevsky F.M. Sobr. op. in 15 volumes, -L .: Nauka. 1991
Dostoevsky F. Crime and punishment. – M.: AST: Olimp, 1996.
GERSHEnzon M.Ya. The life of Vasily of Fiveysky // Weinberg L.O. Critical allowance. T.IV. Issue 2. -M., 1915.
Evg.L. A new story by Mr. Leonid Andreev // Bulletin of Europe. 1904, Nov. -S.406-4171198. ERMAKOVA M.Ya. L.Andreev and F.M.Dostoevsky (Kerzhentsev and Raskolnikov) //Uch. app. Gorky ped. institute. T.87. Series of Philological Sciences. 1968.
EVNIN F. Dostoevsky and militant Catholicism in 1860-1870 (on the genesis of "The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor") // Russian Literature. 1967. N1.
S.A. Esenin Mary's Keys. Sobr. op. in 3 vols., v.Z, -M. : Twinkle. 1970.
Esin A.B. Artistic psychologism as a theoretical problem // Bulletin of the Moscow University. Series 9. Philology. 1982. N1.
Esin A.B. Psychologism of Russian classical literature. Book for teachers. -M.: Enlightenment. 1988.
ZHAKEVICH 3. Leonid Andreev in Poland //Uch. app. Higher teacher, school (Opole). Russian philology. 1963. N 2. -S.39-69 (translated by Pruttsev B.I.)
Iezuitova L.A. Creativity of Leonid Andreev.- L., 1976.
Shestov L. Works in two volumes. - T. 2.
Yasensky S. Yu. The art of psychological analysis in creativity
Andreev from his youth was surprised at the undemanding attitude of people to life, and he denounced this undemandingness. “The time will come,” Andreev, a schoolboy, wrote in his diary, “I will draw people an amazing picture of their life,” and I did. Thought is the object of attention and the main tool of the author, who is turned not to the flow of life, but to reflections on this flow.
Andreev is not one of the writers whose multi-color play of tones gives the impression of living life, as, for example, in A.P. Chekhov, I.A. Bunin, B.K. Zaitsev. He preferred the grotesque, the anguish, the contrast of black and white. A similar expressiveness, emotionality distinguishes the works of F. M. Dostoevsky, beloved by Andreev V. M. Garshin, E. Po. His city is not big, but "huge", his characters are oppressed not by loneliness, but by "fear of loneliness", they do not cry, but "howl". Time in his stories is "compressed" by events. The author seemed to be afraid of being misunderstood in the world of the visually and hearing impaired. It seems that Andreev is bored in the current time, he is attracted by eternity, the "eternal appearance of man", it is important for him not to depict the phenomenon, but to express his evaluative attitude towards it. It is known that the works "The Life of Basil of Thebes" (1903) and "Darkness" (1907) were written under the impression of the events told to the author, but he completely interprets these events in his own way.
There are no difficulties in the periodization of Andreev’s work: he always painted the battle between darkness and light as a battle of equivalent principles, but if in the early period of his work there was an illusory hope for the victory of light in the subtext of his works, then by the end of his work this hope was gone.
Andreev by nature had a special interest in everything inexplicable in the world, in people, in himself; desire to see beyond the boundaries of life. As a young man, he played dangerous games that allowed him to feel the breath of death. The characters of his works also look into the "kingdom of the dead", for example, Eleazar (the story "Eleazar", 1906), who received there "cursed knowledge" that kills the desire to live. Andreev's work also corresponded to the eschatological mindset that was then developing in the intellectual environment, the aggravated questions about the laws of life, the essence of man: "Who am I?", "Meaning, meaning of life, where is he?", "Man? Of course, both beautiful and proud, and impressive - but where is the end? These questions from Andreev's letters lie in the subtext of most of his works. The skeptical attitude of the writer caused all theories of progress. Suffering from his unbelief, he rejects the religious path of salvation: "To what unknown and terrible limits will my denial reach?.. I will not accept God..."
The story "The Lie" (1900) ends with a very characteristic exclamation: "Oh, what madness to be a man and seek the truth! What a pain!" Andreevsky narrator often sympathizes with a person who, figuratively speaking, falls into the abyss and tries to grab at least something. "There was no well-being in his soul," G. I. Chulkov reasoned in his recollections of a friend, "he was all in anticipation of a catastrophe." A. A. Blok also wrote about the same thing, feeling “horror at the door” while reading Andreev4. There was a lot of the author himself in this falling man. Andreev often "entered" his characters, shared with them a common, according to K. I. Chukovsky, "spiritual tone."
Paying attention to social and property inequality, Andreev had reason to call himself a student of G. I. Uspensky and C. Dickens. However, he did not understand and represent the conflicts of life in the same way as M. Gorky, A. S. Serafimovich, E. N. Chirikov, S. Skitalets, and other “knowledge writers”: he did not indicate the possibility of their solution in the context of the current time. Andreev looked at good and evil as eternal, metaphysical forces, perceived people as forced conductors of these forces. A break with the bearers of revolutionary convictions was inevitable. VV Borovsky, crediting Andreev "predominantly" in the "social" writers, pointed to his "incorrect" coverage of the vices of life. The writer was not his own either among the "right" or among the "left" and was weighed down by creative loneliness.
Andreev wanted, first of all, to show the dialectic of thoughts, feelings, the complex inner world of the characters. Almost all of them, more than hunger, cold, are oppressed by the question of why life is built this way and not otherwise. They look into themselves, trying to understand the motives of their behavior. Whoever his hero is, everyone has "his own cross", everyone suffers.
“It doesn’t matter to me who“ he ”is, the hero of my stories: non, official, good-natured or cattle. The only thing that matters to me is that he is a man and as such bears the same hardships of life.”
In these lines of Andreev's letter to Chukovsky there is a bit of exaggeration, his author's attitude to the characters is differentiated, but there is also truth. Critics rightly compared the young prose writer with F. M. Dostoevsky - both artists showed the human soul as a field of collisions of chaos and harmony. However, a significant difference between them is also obvious: Dostoevsky, in the end, provided that humanity accepted Christian humility, predicted the victory of harmony, while Andreev, by the end of the first decade of his work, almost excluded the idea of harmony from the space of his artistic coordinates.
The pathos of many of Andreev's early works is due to the characters' desire for a "different life". In this sense, the story "In the basement" (1901) about embittered people at the bottom of life is noteworthy. Here comes a deceived young woman "from society" with a newborn. She was not without reason afraid of meeting with thieves, prostitutes, but the baby relieves the tension that has arisen. The unfortunate are drawn to a pure "gentle and weak" being. They wanted to keep the boulevard woman away from the child, but she heart-rendingly demands: “Give!.. Give!.. Give!..” And this “careful, two-finger touch on the shoulder” is described as a touch on a dream: , like a light in the steppe, vaguely called them somewhere ... The young prose writer passes the romantic "somewhere" from story to story. A dream, a Christmas tree decoration, a country estate can serve as a symbol of "another", bright life, other relationships. The attraction to this "other" in Andreev's characters is shown as an unconscious, innate feeling, for example, as in the teenager Sashka from the story "Angel" (1899). This restless, half-starved, offended by the whole world “wolf cub”, who “at times ... wanted to stop doing what is called life”, accidentally got into a rich house on a holiday, saw a wax angel on the Christmas tree. A beautiful toy becomes for the child a sign of "a wonderful world where he once lived," where "they do not know about dirt and abuse." She must belong to him! .. Sashka endured a lot, defending the only thing he had - pride, for the sake of an angel, he falls on his knees in front of the "unpleasant aunt." And again passionate: "Give! .. Give! .. Give! .."
The position of the author of these stories, who inherited pain for all the unfortunate from the classics, is humane and demanding, but unlike his predecessors, Andreev is tougher. He sparingly measures offended characters a fraction of peace: their joy is fleeting, and their hope is illusory. The “dead man” Khizhiyakov from the story “In the basement” shed happy tears, it suddenly seemed to him that he “will live a long time, and his life will be beautiful,” but, the narrator concludes his word, at his head “the predatory death was already silently seated” . And Sashka, having played enough of an angel, falls asleep happy for the first time, and at that time the wax toy melts either from the breath of a hot stove, or from the action of some fatal force: Ugly and motionless shadows were carved on the wall ... "The author dashedly indicates the presence of this force almost in each of his works.The characteristic figure of evil is built on various phenomena: shadows, night darkness, natural disasters, obscure characters, mystical "something", "someone", etc. knocking on hot stoves. " A similar fall will have to endure Sasha.
The errand boy from the city barbershop will also survive the fall in the story "Petka in the Country" (1899). The "aged dwarf", who knew only labor, beatings, hunger, also strove with all his heart to the unknown "somewhere", "to another place about which he could not say anything." Having accidentally found himself in the master's country estate, "entering into complete harmony with nature," Petka is externally and internally transformed, but soon a fatal force in the person of the mysterious owner of the barbershop pulls him out of the "other" life. The inhabitants of the barbershop are puppets, but they are described in sufficient detail, and only the master-puppeteer is depicted in the outline. Over the years, the role of the invisible black force in the vicissitudes of the plots becomes more and more noticeable.
Andreev has no or almost no happy endings, but the darkness of life in the early stories was dispelled by glimpses of light: the awakening of Man in man was revealed. The motive of awakening is organically connected with the motive of Andreev's characters striving for "another life". In "Bargamot and Garaska" the awakening is experienced by antipodal characters, in whom, it seemed, everything human had died forever. But outside the plot, the idyll of a drunkard and a policeman (a "relative" of the guard Mymretsov G. I. Uspensky, a classic of "collar propaganda") is doomed. In other typologically similar works, Andreev shows how difficult and how late a person wakes up in a person ("Once Upon a Time", 1901; "Spring", 1902). With the awakening, Andreev's characters often come to realize their callousness ("The First Fee", 1899; "No Forgiveness", 1904).
Very in this sense, the story "Hoste" (1901). The young apprentice Senista is waiting for Master Sazonka in the hospital. He promised not to leave the boy "a victim of loneliness, illness and fear." But Easter came, Sazonka went on a spree and forgot his promise, and when he arrived, Senista was already in the dead room. Only the death of a child, "like a puppy thrown into the garbage," revealed to the master the truth about the darkness of his own soul: "Lord! - Sazonka cried<...>raising your hands to the sky<...>"Aren't we humans?"
The difficult awakening of Man is also mentioned in the story "Theft was Coming" (1902). The man who was about to "maybe kill" is stopped by pity for the freezing puppy. The high price of pity, "light<...>in the midst of deep darkness ... "- this is what it is important to convey to the reader to the humanist narrator.
Many of Andreev's characters are tormented by their isolation, their existential worldview. In vain are their often extreme attempts to free themselves from this ailment ("Valya", 1899; "Silence" and "The Story of Sergei Petrovich", 1900; "Original Man", 1902). The story "The City" (1902) speaks of a petty official, depressed by both life and life, flowing in the stone bag of the city. Surrounded by hundreds of people, he suffocates from the loneliness of a meaningless existence, against which he protests in a pathetic, comical way. Here Andreev continues the theme of the "little man" and his desecrated dignity, set by the author of "The Overcoat". The narration is filled with participation to the person who has the disease "influenza" - the event of the year. Andreev borrows from Gogol the situation of a suffering person defending his dignity: "We are all people! All brothers!" - drunken Petrov cries in a state of passion. However, the writer changes the interpretation of a well-known theme. Among the classics of the golden age of Russian literature, the "little man" is overwhelmed by the character and wealth of the "big man." For Andreev, the material and social hierarchy does not play a decisive role: loneliness crushes. In the "City" the gentlemen are virtuous, and they themselves are the same Petrovs, but at a higher rung of the social ladder. Andreev sees tragedy in the fact that individuals do not constitute a community. A noteworthy episode: a lady from the "institution" meets with laughter Petrov's proposal to marry, but "squeals" understandingly and in fear when he spoke to her about loneliness.
Andreev's misunderstanding is equally dramatic, both inter-class, intra-class, and intra-family. The divisive force in his artistic world has a wicked sense of humor, as presented in the short story "The Grand Slam" (1899). For many years "summer and winter, spring and autumn" four people played vint, but when one of them died, it turned out that the others did not know if the deceased was married, where he lived ... Most of all, the company was struck by the fact that the deceased will never know about his luck in the last game: "he had the right grand slam."
This power overwhelms any well-being. Six-year-old Yura Pushkarev, the protagonist of the story "The Flower Under the Foot" (1911), was born into a wealthy family, loved, but, depressed by the mutual misunderstanding of his parents, is lonely, and only "pretends that life in the world is very fun." The child "leaves people", escaping in a fictional world. To an adult hero named Yuri Pushkarev, outwardly a happy family man, a talented pilot, the writer returns in the story "Flight" (1914). These works constitute a small tragic dilogy. Pushkarev experienced the joy of being only in the sky, where in his subconscious a dream was born to remain forever in the blue expanse. A fatal force threw the car down, but the pilot himself "on the ground ... never returned."
"Andreev, - wrote E. V. Anichkov, - made us feel the terrible, chilling consciousness of the impenetrable abyss that lies between man and man."
Disunity breeds militant selfishness. Dr. Kerzhentsev from the story "Thought" (1902) is capable of strong feelings, but he used all his mind to plan the insidious murder of a more successful friend - the husband of his beloved woman, and then to play with the investigation. He is convinced that he owns the thought, like a swordsman, but at some point the thought betrays and plays tricks on its bearer. She was tired of satisfying "outside" interests. Kerzhentsev lives out his life in a lunatic asylum. The pathos of this Andreevsky story is opposite to the pathos of M. Gorky's lyrical-philosophical poem "Man" (1903), this hymn to the creative power of human thought. Already after the death of Andreev, Gorky recalled that the writer perceived thought as "a cruel joke of the devil on man." About V. M. Garshin, A. P. Chekhov they said that they awaken the conscience. Andreev awakened the mind, or rather, anxiety for its destructive potentialities. The writer surprised his contemporaries with unpredictability, predilection for antinomies.
“Leonid Nikolaevich,” M. Gorky wrote with a table of reproach, “strangely and painfully sharply for himself, he dug himself in two: in the same week he could sing “Hosanna!” to the world and proclaim to him “Anathema!”.
That is how Andreev revealed the dual essence of man, "divine and insignificant", according to the definition of V. S. Solovyov. The artist again and again returns to the question that disturbs him: which of the "abysses" prevails in man? Regarding the relatively light story "On the River" (1900) about how a "stranger" man overcame hatred for the people who offended him and, risking his life, saved them in the spring flood, M. Gorky enthusiastically wrote to Andreev:
"You love the sun. And this is great, this love is the source of true art, real, the very poetry that enlivens life."
However, soon Andreev creates one of the most terrible stories in Russian literature - "The Abyss" (1901). This is a psychologically convincing, artistically expressive study of the fall of the human in man.
It's scary: a pure girl was crucified by "subhumans". But it is even more terrible when, after a short internal struggle, an intellectual, a lover of romantic poetry, a young man tremblingly in love behaves like an animal. A little more "before" he did not even suspect that the beast-abyss lurked in him. "And the black abyss swallowed him" - this is the final phrase of the story. Some critics praised Andreev for his bold drawing, while others urged readers to boycott the author. At meetings with readers, Andreev insisted that no one was immune from such a fall.
In the last decade of creativity, Andreev spoke much more often about the awakening of the beast in man than about the awakening of Man in man. Very expressive in this series is the psychological story "In the Fog" (1902) about how a prosperous student's hatred of himself and the world found an outlet in the murder of a prostitute. Many publications mention the words about Andreev, the authorship of which is attributed to Leo Tolstoy: "He scares, but we are not afraid." But it is unlikely that all readers who are familiar with the named works of Andreev, as well as with his story "Lie", written a year before "The Abyss", or with the stories "Curse of the Beast" (1908) and "Rules of Good" (1911) will hardly agree with this. , telling about the loneliness of a person doomed to fight for survival in the irrational stream of being.
The relationship between M. Gorky and L. N. Andreev is an interesting page in the history of Russian literature. Gorky helped Andreev enter the literary field, contributed to the appearance of his works in the almanacs of the "Knowledge" partnership, introduced "Wednesday" to the circle. In 1901, at the expense of Gorky, the first book of Andreev's stories was published, which brought fame and approval to the author of L. N. Tolstoy, A. P. Chekhov. "The only friend" called Andreev senior comrade. However, all this did not straighten their relationship, which Gorky characterized as "friendship-enmity" (an oxymoron could be born when he read Andreev's letter1).
Indeed, there was a friendship of great writers, according to Andreev, who beat "on one petty-bourgeois snout" of complacency. The allegorical story "Ben-Tobit" (1903) is an example of St. Andrew's blow. The plot of the story moves like a dispassionate narration about outwardly unrelated events: a “kind and good” inhabitant of a village near Golgotha has a toothache, and at the same time, on the mountain itself, the decision of the trial of “some Jesus” is being carried out. The unfortunate Ben-Tobit is outraged by the noise outside the walls of the house, it gets on his nerves. "How they scream!" - this man is indignant, "who did not like injustice", offended by the fact that no one cares about his suffering.
It was a friendship of writers who sang the heroic, rebellious beginnings of personality. The author of "The Tale of the Seven Hanged Men" (1908), which tells about a sacrificial feat, but more about the feat of overcoming the fear of death, wrote to V.V. Veresaev: "A beautiful person is when he is bold and mad and tramples death with death."
Many of Andreev's characters are united by the spirit of opposition, rebellion is an attribute of their essence. They rebel against the power of gray life, fate, loneliness, against the Creator, even if the doom of protest is revealed to them. Resistance to circumstances makes a person a Human - this idea underlies Andreev's philosophical drama "The Life of a Human" (1906). Mortally wounded by the blows of an incomprehensible evil force, the Man curses her at the edge of the grave, calling for a fight. But the pathos of resistance to the "walls" in Andreev's writings weakens over the years, the author's critical attitude to the "eternal image" of man intensifies.
First, a misunderstanding arose between the writers, then, especially after the events of 1905-1906, something really resembling enmity. Gorky did not idealize a person, but at the same time he often expressed the conviction that the shortcomings of human nature are, in principle, correctable. One criticized the "balance of the abyss", the other - "peppy fiction". Their paths diverged, but even during the years of alienation, Gorky called his contemporary "the most interesting writer ... of all European literature." And one can hardly agree with Gorky's opinion that their controversy interfered with the cause of literature.
To a certain extent, the essence of their differences is revealed by a comparison of Gorky's novel "Mother" (1907) and Andreev's novel "Sashka Zhegulev" (1911). In both works, we are talking about young people who have gone into the revolution. Gorky begins with naturalistic figurativeness, ends with romantic. Andreev's pen goes in the opposite direction: he shows how the seeds of the bright ideas of the revolution germinate in darkness, rebellion, "senseless and merciless."
The artist considers phenomena in the perspective of development, predicts, provokes, warns. In 1908, Andreev completed work on the philosophical and psychological story-pamphlet My Notes. The main character is a demonic character, a criminal convicted of a triple murder, and at the same time a seeker of truth. "Where is the truth? Where is the truth in this world of ghosts and lies?" - the prisoner asks himself, but in the end, the newly-minted inquisitor sees the evil of life in people's desire for freedom, and feels "tender gratitude, almost love" to the iron bars on the prison window, which revealed to him the beauty of limitation. He alters the well-known formula and states: "Lack of freedom is a conscious necessity." This "masterpiece of controversy" confused even the writer's friends, since the narrator hides his attitude to the beliefs of the "iron lattice" poet. It is now clear that in "Notes" Andreev approached the popular in the 20th century. genre of dystopia, predicted the danger of totalitarianism. The builder of the "Integral" from the novel "We" by E. I. Zamyatin, in his notes, in fact, continues the reasoning of this character Andreev:
"Freedom and crime are as inextricably linked as ... well, like the movement of an aero and its speed: the speed of an aero is 0, and it does not move, the freedom of a person is 0, and it does not commit crimes."
Is there one truth "or there are at least two of them," Andreev joked sadly and examined the phenomena from one side, then the other. In "The Tale of the Seven Hanged Men" he reveals the truth on one side of the barricades, in the story "The Governor" - on the other. The problems of these works are indirectly connected with revolutionary affairs. In The Governor (1905), a representative of the authorities doomedly awaits the execution of a death sentence pronounced on him by a people's court. A crowd of strikers "of several thousand people" came to his residence. First, impracticable demands were put forward, and then the pogrom began. The governor was forced to order the firing. Children were also among those killed. The narrator realizes both the justice of the people's anger and the fact that the governor was forced to resort to violence; he sympathizes with both sides. The general, tormented by pangs of conscience, finally condemns himself to death: he refuses to leave the city, travels without guards, and the "Law-Avenger" overtakes him. In both works, the writer points out the absurdity of life in which a person kills a person, the unnaturalness of a person's knowledge of the hour of his death.
The critics were right, they saw in Andreev a supporter of universal values, a non-party artist. In a number of works on the subject of revolution, such as "Into the Dark Distance" (1900), "La Marseillaise" (1903), the most important thing for the author is to show something inexplicable in a person, the paradox of an act. However, the "Black Hundred" considered him a revolutionary writer, and, fearing its threats, the Andreev family lived for some time abroad.
The depth of many of Andreev's works was not immediately revealed. So it happened with "Red Laughter" (1904). The author was prompted to write this story by newspaper news from the fields of the Russo-Japanese War. He showed war as madness that breeds madness. Andreev stylizes his narrative as fragmentary recollections of a front-line officer who has gone mad:
"This is red laughter. When the earth goes crazy, it starts laughing like that. There are no flowers or songs on it, it has become round, smooth and red, like a head that has been torn off the skin."
V. Veresaev, a participant in the Russo-Japanese War, the author of the realistic notes "At War", criticized Andreev's story for not being true. He spoke about the property of human nature to "get used" to all sorts of circumstances. According to Andreev's work, it is precisely directed against the human habit of elevating to the norm what should not be the norm. Gorky urged the author to "improve" the story, to reduce the element of subjectivity, to introduce more concrete, realistic depictions of the war. Andreev answered sharply: “To heal means to destroy the story, its main idea ... My topic: madness and horror." It is clear that the author valued the philosophical generalization contained in the "Red Laughter" and its projection into the coming decades.
Both the already mentioned story "Darkness" and the story "Judas Iscariot" (1907) were not understood by contemporaries who correlated their content with the social situation in Russia after the events of 1905 and condemned the author for "an apology for betrayal." They ignored the most important - philosophical - paradigm of these works.
In the story "Darkness", a selfless and bright young revolutionary hiding from the gendarmes is struck by the "truth of a brothel", revealed to him in the question of the prostitute Lyubka: what right does he have to be good if she is bad? He suddenly realized that his and his comrades' rise had been bought at the price of the fall of many unfortunates, and concluded that "if we cannot illuminate all the darkness with flashlights, then let's put out the fires and climb into the darkness." Yes, the author highlighted the position of an anarchist-maximalist, to which the bomber switched, but he also highlighted the "new Lyubka", who dreamed of joining the ranks of "good" fighters for another life. This plot twist was dismissed by critics, who condemned the author for what they felt was a sympathetic portrayal of a renegade. But the image of Lyubka, which later researchers ignored, plays an important role in the content of the story.
The story "Judas Iscariot" is tougher, in it the author draws the "eternal image" of mankind, who did not accept the Word of God and killed the one who brought it. "Behind her," A. A. Blok wrote about the story, "the author's soul is a living wound." In the story, the genre of which can be defined as "The Gospel of Judas", Andreev does not change much in the storyline outlined by the evangelists. He attributes episodes that could take place in the relationship between the Teacher and the students. All the canonical gospels also differ in episodes. At the same time, Andreev's, so to speak, legal approach to characterizing the behavior of participants in biblical events reveals the dramatic inner world of the "traitor." This approach reveals the predestination of tragedy: without blood, without the miracle of the resurrection, people do not recognize the Son of Man, the Savior. The duality of Judas, which was reflected in his appearance, his tossings, mirrors the duality of Christ's behavior: they both foresaw the course of events and both had reason to love and hate each other. "And who will help poor Iscariot?" - Christ meaningfully answers Peter to the request to help him in power games with Judas. Christ bows his head sadly and understandingly when he hears the words of Judas that in another life he will be the first to be next to the Savior. Judas knows the price of evil and good in this world, painfully experiences his rightness. Judas executes himself for betrayal, without which the Coming would not have taken place: the Word would not have reached mankind. The act of Judas, who, until the very tragic end, hoped that the people on Golgotha were about to see the light, see and realize who they were executing, is "the last stake of faith in people." The author condemns all mankind, including the apostles, for being impervious to goodness3. Andreev has an interesting allegory on this subject, created simultaneously with the story - "The snake's story about how it got poisonous teeth." The ideas of these works will germinate in the final work of the prose writer - the novel Satan's Diary (1919), published after the author's death.
Andreev was always attracted by an artistic experiment in which he could bring together the inhabitants of the real world and the inhabitants of the manifest world. Quite originally, he brought both of them together in the philosophical fairy tale "Earth" (1913). The Creator sends angels to the earth, wishing to know the needs of people, but, having learned the "truth" of the earth, the messengers "give", they cannot keep their clothes unstained and do not return to heaven. They are ashamed to be "clean" among people. A loving God understands them, forgives them, and reproachfully looks at the messenger who visited the earth, but kept his white clothes clean. He himself cannot descend to earth, for then people will not need heaven. There is no such condescending attitude towards humanity in the latest novel, which brings together the inhabitants of opposite worlds.
Andreev for a long time tried on the "wandering" plot associated with the earthly adventures of the incarnated devil. The implementation of the long-standing idea to create "the devil's notes" was preceded by the creation of a colorful picture: Satan-Mephistopheles is sitting over the manuscript, dipping his pen in the ink pot1. At the end of his life, Andreev enthusiastically worked on a work about the stay on earth of the leader of all the unclean with a very non-trivial ending. In the novel "Satan's Diary" the fiend is a suffering person. The idea of the novel can already be seen in the story "My Notes", in the image of the protagonist, in his reflections that the devil himself with all his "reserve of hellish lies, cunning and cunning" can be "led by the nose". The idea for the composition could have originated with Andreev while reading The Brothers Karamazov by F. M. Dostoevsky, in the chapter about the devil who dreams of becoming a naive merchant's wife: my suffering." But where Dostoevsky's devil wanted to find peace, an end to "suffering." The Prince of Darkness Andreeva is just beginning his suffering. An important originality of the work is the multidimensionality of the content: on one side the novel is turned to the time of its creation, on the other - to "eternity". The author trusts Satan to express his most disturbing thoughts about the essence of man, in fact, casts doubt on many ideas of his earlier works. "Satan's Diary", as Yu. Babicheva, a long-time researcher of L. N. Andreeva's work, noted, is also "the personal diary of the author himself."
Satan, in the guise of a merchant he killed and using his own money, decided to play with humanity. But a certain Thomas Magnus decided to take possession of the alien's funds. He plays on the alien's feelings for a certain Mary, in whom the devil saw the Madonna. Love has transformed Satan, he is ashamed of his involvement in evil, the decision has come to become just a man. To atone for past sins, he gives the money to Magnus, who promised to become a benefactor of people. But Satan is deceived and ridiculed: the "earthly Madonna" turns out to be a figurehead, a prostitute. Thomas ridiculed diabolical altruism, took possession of money in order to blow up the planet of people. In the end, in the scientific chemist, Satan sees the illegitimate son of his own father: "It is hard and insulting to be this little thing, which is called a man on earth, a cunning and greedy worm ..." - reflects Satan1.
Magnus is also a tragic figure, a product of human evolution, a character who suffered his misanthropy. The narrator equally understands both Satan and Thomas. It is noteworthy that the writer endows Magnus with an appearance reminiscent of his own (this can be seen by comparing the portrait of the character with the portrait of Andreev, written by I. E. Repin). Satan gives a person an assessment from the outside, Magnus - from the inside, but in the main their assessments coincide. The culmination of the story is parodic: the events of the night are described, "when Satan was tempted by man." Satan is crying, having seen his reflection in people, the earthly ones are laughing "at all ready devils."
Crying - the leitmotifs of Andreev's works. Many and many of his characters shed tears, offended by the powerful and evil darkness. God's light cried - darkness cried, the circle closes, there is no way out for anyone. In "The Diary of Satan" Andreev came close to what L. I. Shestov called "the apotheosis of groundlessness."
At the beginning of the 20th century in Russia, as well as throughout Europe, theatrical life was in its heyday. People of creativity argued about the ways of development of performing arts. In a number of publications, primarily in two "Letters on the Theater" (1911 - 1913), Andreev presented his "theory of the new drama", his vision of the "theater of pure psychism" and created a number of plays that corresponded to the tasks put forward2. He proclaimed "the end of everyday life and ethnography" on the stage, and opposed the "obsolete" A. II. Ostrovsky to the "modern" A.P. Chekhov. It is not the moment that is dramatic, Andreev argues, when the soldiers shoot the rebellious workers, but the one when the factory owner struggles "with two truths" on a sleepless night. He leaves the spectacle for the cafeteria and the cinema; the theater stage, in his opinion, should belong to the invisible - the soul. In the old theatre, the critic concludes, the soul was "contraband". Andreev the prose writer is recognizable in the innovator-playwright.
Andreev's first work for the theater was the romantic-realistic play "To the Stars" (1905) about the place of the intelligentsia in the revolution. Gorky was also interested in this topic, and for some time they worked together on the play, but co-authorship did not take place. The reasons for the gap become clear when comparing the problems of two plays: "To the Stars" by L. N. Andreev and "Children of the Sun" by M. Gorky. In one of Gorky's best plays, born in connection with their common idea, one can detect something "Andreev", for example, in contrasting "children of the sun" with "children of the earth", but not much. It is important for Gorky to imagine the social moment of the intelligentsia's entry into the revolution; for Andreev, the main thing is to correlate the purposefulness of scientists with the purposefulness of revolutionaries. It is noteworthy that Gorky's characters are engaged in biology, their main tool is a microscope, Andreev's characters are astronomers, their instrument is a telescope. Andreev gives the floor to the revolutionaries who believe in the possibility of destroying all "walls", to the petty-bourgeois skeptics, to the neutrals who are "above the fray", and all of them have "their own truth". The movement of life forward - an obvious and important idea of the play - is determined by the creative obsession of individuals, and it does not matter whether they give themselves to the revolution or science. But only people who live with their souls and thoughts turned to the "triumphant immensity" of the Universe are happy with him. The harmony of the eternal Cosmos is opposed to the insane fluidity of the life of the earth. The cosmos is in harmony with the truth, the earth is wounded by the collision of "truths".
Andreev has a number of plays, the presence of which allowed contemporaries to talk about "the theater of Leonid Andreev." This series opens with the philosophical drama The Life of a Man (1907). Other most successful works of this series are Black Masks (1908); "Tsar-Hunger" (1908); "Anatema" (1909); "Ocean" (1911). Andreev's psychological works are close to the named plays, for example, such as "Dog Waltz", "Samson in Chains" (both - 1913-1915), "Requiem" (1917). The playwright called his compositions for the theater "representations", thereby emphasizing that this is not a reflection of life, but a play of the imagination, a spectacle. He argued that on the stage the general is more important than the particular, that the type speaks more than the photograph, and the symbol is more eloquent than the type. Critics noted the language of modern theater found by Andreev - the language of philosophical drama.
In the drama "Life of Man" the formula of life is presented; the author "frees himself from everyday life", goes in the direction of maximum generalization1. There are two central characters in the play: Human, in whose person the author proposes to see humanity, and Someone in gray, called He, - something that combines human ideas about the supreme third-party force: God, fate, fate, the devil. Between them - guests, neighbors, relatives, good people, villains, thoughts, emotions, masks. Someone in gray acts as a messenger of the "circle of iron destiny": birth, poverty, work, love, wealth, fame, misfortune, poverty, oblivion, death. The transience of human stay in the "iron circle" is reminiscent of a candle burning in the hands of a mysterious Someone. The performance involves characters familiar from ancient tragedy - a messenger, moira, a choir. When staging the play, the author demanded that the director avoid halftones: "If kind, then like an angel; if stupid, then like a minister; if ugly, then so that the children are afraid. Sharp contrasts."
Andreev strove for unambiguity, allegorism, for symbols of life. It has no symbols in the symbolist sense. This is the manner of lubok painters, expressionist painters, icon painters, who depicted the earthly path of Christ in squares bordered by a single salary. The play is tragic and heroic at the same time: despite all the blows of outside forces, the Man does not give up, and at the edge of the grave he throws down the glove to the mysterious Someone. The finale of the play is similar to the finale of the story "The Life of Basil of Thebes": the character is broken, but not defeated. A. A. Blok, who watched the play staged by V. E. Meyerhold, in his review noted the non-randomness of the hero’s profession - he, in spite of everything, is a creator, an architect.
"Human Life" is a vivid proof that Man is a man, not a puppet, not a miserable creature doomed to decay, but a wonderful phoenix that overcomes the "icy wind of boundless spaces". Wax melts, but life does not decrease.
A peculiar continuation of the play "The Life of a Man" is the play "Anatema". In this philosophical tragedy reappears Someone blocking the entrances - impassive and powerful guardian of the gates beyond which stretches the Beginning of the beginnings, the Great Mind. He is the guardian and servant of eternity-truth. He is opposed Anatema, the devil cursed for rebellious intentions to know the truth
Universe and equal with the Great Mind. The evil spirit, cowardly and vainly curling around the feet of the guardian, is a tragic figure in its own way. "Everything in the world wants good," the damned one thinks, "and does not know where to find it, everything in the world wants life - and meets only death ..." He comes to doubts about the existence of Mind in the Universe: is the name of this rationality a Lie? ? From despair and anger that it is not possible to know the truth on the other side of the gate, Anatema tries to know the truth on this side of the gate. He puts cruel experiments on the world and suffers from unjustified expectations.
The main part of the drama, which tells about the feat and death of David Leizer, "the beloved son of God", has an associative connection with the biblical legend of the humble Job, with the gospel story of the temptation of Christ in the wilderness. Anatema decided to test the truth of love and justice. He endows David with enormous wealth, pushes him to create a "miracle of love" for his neighbor, and contributes to the formation of David's magical power over people. But the diabolical millions are not enough for all those who suffer, and David, as a traitor and deceiver, is stoned to death by his beloved people. Love and justice turned into deception, good - evil. The experiment was set, but Anatema did not get a "clean" result. Before his death, David does not curse people, but regrets that he did not give them the last penny. The epilogue of the play repeats its prologue: the gate, the silent guardian Someone and the truth-seeker Anathema. With the circular composition of the play, the author speaks of life as an endless struggle of opposite principles. Soon after the writing of the play, staged by V.I. Nemirovich-Danchenko, it was a success at the Moscow Art Theater.
In the work of Andreev, artistic and philosophical beginnings merged together. His books feed an aesthetic need and awaken thought, disturb conscience, awaken sympathy for a person and fear for his human component. Andreev sets up a demanding approach to life. Critics have spoken of his "cosmic pessimism," but his tragedy is not directly related to pessimism. Probably, foreseeing a misunderstanding of his works, the writer has repeatedly argued that if a person cries, this does not mean that he is a pessimist and does not want to live, and vice versa, not everyone who laughs is an optimist and has fun. He belonged to the category of people with a heightened sense of death due to an equally heightened sense of life. People who knew him closely wrote about Andreev's passionate love for life.
