Contemporary Russian Novelists Part 15

Besides, "The Gulf" and "In the Fog" are compositions which are exceptional in the work of Andreyev. The idea that he mostly presents is not the power of b.e.s.t.i.a.l instincts, but rather the indestructible vitality of human feelings and aspirations towards a better existence, which sometimes comes to light among the most miserable and depraved people, and even among those who are in the most abject material condition.

In the destiny of these beings, there are, however, rays of hope.

The slightest incident serves to transform them; suddenly their hearts begin to beat happily, tears of tenderness moisten their eyes, they vaguely feel the existence of something luminous and good. A profound sensibility, an ardent love of life bursts forth in their souls. This sensibility, this attachment to existence, form the theme of four touching stories: "He Was," "Petka in the Country," "The Cellar," and "The Angel."

The action of "He Was" takes place in a hospital, where a deacon, a foolishly debonair man, who is attached to his stunted existence, and a pessimistic merchant, thoroughly satiated, are at the point of death. The deacon has an incurable sickness, and his days are numbered. But he does not know it, and speaks with enthusiasm of the pilgrimage he is going to make after he is cured, and of the apple-tree in his garden, which he expects will bear a great deal of fruit. The fourth Friday of Lent he is taken into the amphitheatre.

He comes back, very much moved and making the sign of the cross.

"Ah! my brothers," he says, "I am all upset. The doctor made me sit down in a chair and said to the students: 'Here you see a sick man.'

Ah! how painful it was to hear him add: 'He was a deacon!'"

"The unfortunate man stopped, and continued in a choking voice: '"He was a deacon," the doctor told them. He told them the story of my whole life, he even spoke about my wife. It was terrible! One would have said that I was dead already, and that he was talking over my coffin.'

"And as the deacon is thus speaking, all of the others see clearly that he is going to die. They see it as clearly as if death itself was standing there, at the foot of the bed...."

The merchant is a very different sort of man: he does not believe in G.o.d; he has had enough of life and is not afraid of death. All of his strength he has spent unnecessarily, without any appreciable result, without joy. When he was young he had stolen meat and fruit from his master. Caught in the act, he had been beaten, and he detested those who had struck him. Later on, having become rich, he crushed the poor with his fortune and scorned those who, on falling into his hands, answered his hate with scorn. Finally, old age and sickness had come; people now began to steal from him, and he, in turn, beat those whom he caught terribly. And thus his life had been spent; it had been nothing but a series of transgressions and hatreds, where the flames of desire, in dying out, had left nothing but cold ashes in his soul. He refuses to believe that any one can love this existence, and he disdainfully looks at the sallow face of the deacon, and mutters: "Fool!" Then, he looks at the third man in the room, a young student who is asleep. This student never fails to embrace his fiancee, a pretty young girl, whenever she comes to see him. As he looks the merchant, more bitterly than before, repeats: "Fool!"

But death approaches; and this man who thinks himself superior and who scorns the deacon because he dreams of light and the sun, now feels disturbed in his turn. In making up the balance-sheet of this existence which, up to this time, he believed he hated, he remembers a stream of warm light which, during the day, used to come in through the window and gild the ceiling; and he remembers how the sun used to s.h.i.+ne on the banks of the Volga, near his home. With a terrible sob, beating his hands on his breast, he falls back on his bed, right against the deacon, whom he hears silently weeping.

"And thus they wept together. They wept for the sun which they were never to see again, for the apple-tree with fruit which they were not going to eat, for the shadow that was to envelop them, for dear life and cruel death!"

Petka--the hero of "Petka in the Country"--is, at ten years of age, a barber's apprentice. He does not yet smoke as does his thirteen year old friend Nicolka, whom he wants to equal in everything.

Petka's princ.i.p.al occupation, in the rare moments when the shop is empty, is to look out of the window at the poorly dressed men and women who are sitting on the benches of the boulevard. In the meantime, Nicolka goes through the streets of ill fame, and comes back and tells Petka all his experiences. The precocious knowledge of Nicolka astonishes the child, whose one ambition is to be like his friend one of these days. While waiting, he dreams of a vague country, but he cannot guess its location nor its character. And no one comes to take him there. From morning till evening he always hears the same jerky cry: "Some water, boy!"

But one morning his mother, the cook Nadezhda, tells the barber that her master and mistress have told her to take Petka to the country for a few days. Then begins for him an enchanted existence. He goes in bathing four times a day, fishes, goes on long walks, climbs trees, rolls in the gra.s.s. When, at the end of a week, the barber claims his apprentice, the child does not understand: he has completely forgotten the city and the dirty barber-shop; and the return is very sad. Again is heard the jerky cry: "Some water, boy!"

followed by a menacing murmur of "Come! Come!" if the child spills any of the water, or has not understood the orders.

"And, during the night, in the place where Petka and Nicolka sleep side by side, a weak little voice speaks of the country, of things that do not exist, of things that no one has ever heard of or seen!..."

"The Cellar" is inhabited by absolutely fallen people. A baby has just been born there. With down-bent necks, their faces unconsciously lighted up by strangely happy smiles, a prost.i.tute and a miserable drunkard look at the child. This little life, "weak as a fire in the steppe," calls to them vaguely, and it seems to promise them something beautiful, clear, and immortal. Among the inhabitants of this cellar, the most unfortunate of all, is a man named Kizhnakov; he is pale, sickly, worn by work, almost devoured by suffering and alcohol; death already lies in wait for him. The most terrible thing for this man is the necessity of having to begin to live again each day. He would like to lie down all day and think of suicide under the heap of rags that serve him as a covering. He would like best to have some one come up back of him, and shoot him.

He fears his own voice and his own thoughts. And it is on him that the baby produces the deepest impression. Since the birth of the child Kizhnakov does not sleep any more; he tries to protect himself from the cold, and weeps softly, without sadness and without convulsions, like those who have pure and innocent hearts, like children.

"'Why do I weep?' he asks himself.

"Not finding a suitable answer, he replies: 'It is thus....'

"And the meaning of his words is so deep that a new flood of tears come to the eyes of the man whose life is so sad and solitary."

We find the same theme again in "The Angel." A child who also lives in a cellar comes back from a Christmas-tree; he brings with him a toy, and a pretty little wax angel, which he shows to his father.

The latter has seen better days, but in the last few years he has been sick with consumption, and now he is awaiting death, silent and continually exasperated by the sight of social injustice. However, the delight of the child infects the father, and both of them have a feeling "of something that joins all hearts into one, and does away with the abyss which separates man from man, and makes him so solitary, unfortunate, and weak." The poor dying man seems to hear a voice from this better world, where he once lived and from which he had been sent forever.

But these are only the dreams of a dying man, the last rays of light of the life which is being extinguished. The ray, penetrating this sick soul, is like the weak sunlight which pa.s.ses through the dirty windows of a dark hovel.

In his two stories, "The Stranger" and "The Obscure Future,"

Andreyev shows us two men of entirely different character, animated by generous feelings and a firm will. One of them, a young student, being disgusted with the miseries of Russian life and having decided to expatriate himself, suddenly changes his mind, as a result of the patriotism of one of his friends, a Servian, named Raiko. He makes it his duty never to leave his country, although life there is so terrible and hopeless. There is, in this new feeling, an immense joy and a terrible sadness. The other, the hero of the second story, having one day expressed to his father the hatred he has for the bourgeois life that he is leading, leaves his family, who love him, in order to penetrate the "obscure future."

Evidently, these are people who are fitted to struggle. However, these strugglers, so infrequent in the work of Andreyev, have, in spite of all, something sickly and savage in them; instead of real fighting courage, they possess only extreme audaciousness, mystical rapture, or nervous exaltation. The "obscure future" toward which their eyes are turned is not lighted up by the rays of faith and hope.

The question is whether Andreyev himself believes in the triumph of the elements of life over the elements of death, the horror of which he excels in portraying for us. It is in the following manner that he expresses himself in one of his essays ent.i.tled, "Impressions of the Theatre": "In denying everything, one arrives immediately at symbols. In refuting life, one is but an involuntary apologist. I never believe so much in life as when I am reading the father of pessimism, Schopenhauer! As a result, life is powerful and victorious!... It is truth that always triumphs, and not falsehood; it is truth which is at the basis of life, and justifies it. All that persists is useful; the noxious element must disappear sooner or later, will inevitably disappear."

What, then, const.i.tutes the essence of Andreyev's talent is an extreme impressionability, a daring in descriptions of the negative sides of reality, melancholy moods and the torments of existence. As he usually portrays general suffering and sickness rather than definite types, his heroes are mostly incarnations and symbols. The very t.i.tles of some of his stories indicate the abstract character of his work. Such are: "Silence," "The Thought," and "The Lie." In this respect he has carried on the work of Poe, whose influence on him is incontestable. These two writers have in common a refined and morbid sensibility, a predilection for the horrible and a pa.s.sion for the study of the same kind of subjects,--solitude, silence, death. But the powerful fantasy of the American author, which does not come in touch with reality, wanders freely through the whole world and through all the centuries of history. His heroes take refuge in half-crumbled castles, they look at the reader from the top of craggy rocks, whither their love of solitude has led them; even death itself is not a repulsive skeleton, but rather a majestic form, full of grandiose mystery. Andreyev, on the other hand, but rarely breaks the bounds which unite him to reality. His heroes are living people, who act, and whose ba.n.a.l life ends with a ba.n.a.l death. This realism and this pa.s.sionate love of truth make the strength and the beauty of all his work.

A certain harmony between the imaginative and the real element is characteristic of the best of Andreyev's productions, especially his last stories: "The Red Laugh," "The Governor," "The Shadows," and "The Seven Who Were Hanged."

"The Red Laugh" is the symbol, the incarnation, of the b.l.o.o.d.y and implacable cynicism of war. The psychologist of the mysterious has, in these pages, recorded the terrifying aspects of the Manchurian campaign, which one could not have foreseen in all of its horror. He has shown in a lasting manner the poor human creature torn from his home, debased to the role of a piece of mechanism. Not knowing where he is being led to, he goes, making murderous gestures, the meaning of which he does not know, without even having the illusory consolation of possible personal bravery, being killed by the shots of an invisible enemy, or, what is worse, being killed by the shots of his own comrades--and all of this, automatically, stupidly. The feeling of terror, the somewhat mystical intuition of events which, at times, seem to be paradoxes in the other works of Andreyev, are perfectly adapted to this terribly real representation of the effects of war.

The inner drama which Andreyev a.n.a.lyzes in "The Governor" makes a bold contrast with the violent pages of "The Red Laugh," the savage powers of which attain the final limits of horror.

The governor has during his whole life been a loyal and strict servant of the Tsar. On the day of an uprising he mercilessly beat the enemies of his master; he blindly accomplished what he thought was his duty. But, since that b.l.o.o.d.y day, a new and unceasing voice speaks in his conscience. The irreparable act has forever isolated him from his fellow-creatures, and even from his friends who congratulate him upon his fine conduct. A stranger to all that is happening around him, he is left alone to fight with his conscience, which soon crushes him with all the weight of remorse. He knows that he has been condemned by a revolutionary tribunal. A young girl who is a stranger to him writes him a compa.s.sionate letter: "You are going to be killed," she says, "and that will be justice; but I have great pity for you." This discerning and youthful sympathy penetrates his heart, which finally opens--alas, too late,--to justice and pity.

This marks the beginning of a terrible agony. The governor makes no effort to escape from the fatal judgment. Always alone, he contemplates his terrible distress and awaits the coming of the judiciary. He feels that he has incurred universal blame, and at times he comes to wish for death, which surprises him suddenly as he is turning the corner of a street:

"The whole thing was short and simple, like a scene from a moving-picture play. At a cross-ways, close by a muddy spot, a hesitating voice called to the governor:

"'Your honor!'

"'What?'

"He stopped and turned his head: two men who had come from behind a wall were crossing the street, and were shuffling along in the mud towards him. One of them had in his left hand a piece of folded paper; his other hand was in his pocket.

"And immediately, the governor knew that death had come; and they knew that the governor knew.

"While keeping the paper in his left hand the unknown man took a revolver out of his pocket with difficulty.

"The governor glanced about him; he saw a dirty and deserted square, with bits of gra.s.s growing in the mud, and a wall. But what did it matter, it was too late! He gave a short but deep sigh, and stood erect again, fearless, but without defiance.... He fell, with three shots in his body."

This drama of conscience is set forth with admirable sureness of a.n.a.lysis, and the author has been able to represent with impressive intensity the mysterious fatality which demands the death of the guilty one.

It is this same fatality, under whose hand all men are equal, which makes the hero of "The Shadows," a young terrorist who has taken refuge in a house of ill-fame, obey the strange desire of his bed-companion.

"Stay with me!" cries the young girl, in whom is incarnated his destiny, at the moment that he is going to leave the establishment in order to escape from the spies who are following him. "You are an honest man! And I've been waiting five years to meet an honest man.... Stay with me, because you belong to me."

After a terrible internal combat the man yields to this unknown will which is oppressing him. A traitor to his party, he decides to become the companion of this painted girl, with whom he then gets drunk.

"As long as I am in the shadows," he murmurs with the sombre resignation of an Andreyev hero, "I might as well remain there."

At dawn, the police come to arrest him. And while his friend tries desperately to resist the agents of the force, he contemplates the brutal scene with an ironic smile.